Southeast Asia: Jan 17 - The Lovely El Nido!

We left Princesa and headed to El Nido by van. It took about 6 hours and it was an interesting road at the end! El nido is near the northern tip of Palawan island and one of the main tourist desitnations (for understandable reasons!) It is such a beautiful town! Small and nestled in between vast, grey, shaled rock and islands. While in el nido we sampled some slightly better cuisine (but as we had been told the Philippines has the least appealing food out of all south east asia - that warning was really to be taken seriously.) We stayed in Tay Miloy's Inn, a local family off the grid of the normal tourist Inn map. Rodrigo was the head of the house and a very nice and helpful guy he even took Mairi for a ride on his scooter to get some MUCH cheaper clean drinking water where the locals go!

El nido exploring!

Keith pondering life, seriously, at a beach about 20 mins walk away

so many dogs...

Mairis special crab dinner!

stoked to finally be in El nido!


Tay Miloys Inn

We didn't end up booking a tour (there are 4 a,b,c,d) but instead rented Kayaks for the entire day and headed out to do tour C on our own. We had made a chek friend the day before named Michael so Kaila had a kayaking buddy too! We also rented snorkels and Kaila and Mairi had their first ocean snorkel experiences! It was so amazing, so easy to stay in the water for a long time when you can breath and see all the neat little fishes, coral and other un-named critters! There were fishes of every colour, black silver + yellow fish that looked like two fish cut in half and stuck together, little blue darting fish, slow purple fish, lots of night black fish.
We kayak'd to the closest lagoon through a bit of a rain/wind storm but we made it ok! It was magnificent deep azure blue and so magical. There were little tiny jelly fish all over but we were told that the poinonous jellies are out in the summer months (april-julyish)