Round the World Trip: Tao Philippines

For the previous post, go here.

The next morning, Sunday, we took a tuk-tuk five minutes back along the road we’d driven into El Nido on to the main office of Tao Philippines. All 28 of assembled there for an overview from the two founders. It was an assorted bunch: two couples from Belgium, a German couple, a lone Filipino guy, a couple different groups of Brits, and a couple different small groups from Australia. Besides a woman from Canada and a guy living in Australia but born in the U.S., Sharon and I were the only North Americans.

Tao was founded by two guys about six years ago. Jack, a Brit from London, had met Eddie, a native Filipino while both were attending school in Scotland. After school they’d spent time on a small boat just cruising the Palawans, visiting empty or mostly empty islands and generally just enjoying life. After running out of money they began advertising in one of the larger towns in the islands, Coron, for a few people to hang out on the boat with them and cruise around. They got a lot of takers and enough money to stay on the boat a long time. Tao was born. They now have several custom bangkas of various sizes and offer private expeditions as well.

With Tao there’s no set itinerary. Based on the ocean currents and weather the expedition leader decides where to go. They’ve got simple base camps throughout the islands where the trips spend the night.

After giving us a background on Tao and what to expect we left the office, walked across the road and down to the beach, and climbed into kayaks for the short ride to the boat. We would be traveling on their largest bangka, custom designed by Jack, who was an architect by training. It had two main deck areas, which the second deck sitting above a small kitchen, bathroom, and the pilot house. The lower deck sat above the storage area for all our bags. Before departing they served us an amazing breakfast of eggs and fresh bread.

Jack and Eddie weren’t coming along but introduced us to our crew before they got back on kayaks for the return trip to the beach. Ollie was our expedition leader. Toto was our cook. Lito was our captain. Edrian, Wasay, Jun-Jun were the gofers – they’d raise and lower the anchor, handle supplies, and set up the base camps each night. Mike, who was Lito’s son and currently out of school, had come along as well. We were also joined by Tiger, Ollie’s dog, who had gotten used to boat life.

 


















We stayed near El Nido our first day, with a morning stop at a hidden lagoon. Nothing around El Nido is really hidden since all the day tours also visit these locations, but it was beautiful nonetheless. We then went to another spot with coral to snorkel while the crew prepared lunch. The coral went right up to the beach and the water was quite shallow in places, so Sharon and I both managed to kick it with our bare feet (Tao recommended bringing water shoes) and cutting ourselves.

Our base camp that night was nestled under a hill on an empty beach. It consisted of a few large bamboo huts and an outhouse. There was no running water. To shower you stood behind a bamboo wall and poured fresh water on yourself from a large plastic barrel. There was a smaller hut further up the hill, away from the others. This, we learning, was Jack’s private hut. I’ve never used the pickup line “Hey, do you want to go to my private beach?” but I’m sure it’s quite successful. Since Jack wasn’t here romancing anyone four British girls got assigned the hut.

Our bucket showers

The crew set up the bedding for us and made dinner while we all swam in the warm water, sat on the beach, or got free massages from one of the few masseuses Tao had hired from a nearby fishing village. We sat down in the dark to a meal of rice, vegetables, and freshly caught fish. A bonfire of dried palm fronds and coconut shells was set and burned brightly for ten minutes. After that, exhausted from a day of swimming, Sharon and I crashed in the hut we shared with two other couples.

I had initially been bummed that we had 28 people on our boat. We had heard a rumor earlier in the day before leavening that only 12 had booked and we were looking forward to more space. But as Jack explained prior to our departure, small groups weren’t always a good thing. Five days on a boat with 10 or 15 people gets boring, he explained. With a larger group you’ll have more jokers, storytellers, and other fun people. And he was right.

We quickly made friends with the people from Australia, who – no surprise – turned out to be the most fun.

Each day consisted of getting up and enjoying breakfast while the crew packed up the camp and returned gear to the boat, cruising in the general direction of our final destination, stops for snorkeling or hanging out on a beach, lunch on the boat, more cruising, and finally arriving at our next base camp.

Lunch

Chilaxing

Our second night was our only break from seafood – we had an entire pig that had been spit roasting all day long waiting for us. It was the juiciest pork I ever ate. The pig’s buddies were still running around the camp, which reminded us all that our pig had been in the same situation that morning.

Relaxing before after dinner

Breakfast

On day three we ran out of ice. This was important not just to keep our beer cold, but also to keep the fish fresh until we cooked it. We would have to find more ice. Since most of the people in the area made their living from fishing there some ice plants in a couple towns so the people could ice pack their catch before shipping it off. We went to the first ice plant. It was closed – the ice maker was broken. We cruised another hour to a second ice plant, also closed. We sent crew into a small village to see if they had any ice. They didn’t.

That night a few people forced down warm beer with the very salty dried fish we’d picked up in some village, but most of us turned our attention to the rum on the boat. This was followed by karaoke – despite only a few residents, we learned that nearly every island has a karaoke machine. The crew joined in and we soon noticed a distinct difference in song choice between crew and passenger.

Drinks made by the crew

The westerners sang typical karaoke fare: high-energy rock songs and other classics – Bohemian Rhapsody, Don’t Stop Believin’, Livin’ on a Prayer, Gangster’s Paradise (ok, maybe not the last one). When the crew got up to sing, they sang love songs. 80s love songs mostly, with a few Filipino ballads mixed in. It’s not exactly party material. The lone Filipino “tourist” on the boat, Carlos, used to wake up in the morning, sit on the beach, and blast Whitney Houston and Michael Bolton from his portable speakers. It was always funny for a few songs but then the rest of us would tell him to change it.

On day 4 the hunt for ice continued. Ollie made a few phone calls, including one back to Jack in El Nido, to see if he could find a solution. I joked to our companions that we were actually on a five day hunt for ice with a few stops along the way. But it wasn’t so amusing anymore since this was time we should have spent in the water or exploring islands. If they knew they’d need to refill ice halfway through the trip, I thought, they probably should have identified which places actually had ice before departing.

Finally, late in the morning, Ollie spotted a speck on the horizon. We couldn’t see anything, but he said it was three commercial fishing boats tied up together. They would probably have ice since they stayed out on the ocean for months at a time and had to ice pack their catch until it could be shipped out from time to time. From the time he was about 10 years old Ollie had worked as a fisherman until he was plucked by Tao to be an expedition guide, so if anyone could recognize fishing boats it was him.

We cruised towards the three boats. A motley crew stared at us in bewilderment as we approached, but the captain helped secure our boat to one of theirs. Ollie walked to the tip of the prow and made the request. It was all in their native language so it was hard to determine what was being said, but we knew it was a done deal when one of our crew tossed a few bottles of rum over. They tossed a few giant fish over to us and then Ollie, a couple crew members, and a girl from our group jumped the gap between our boat and theirs to go retrieve ice.

While this was happening a number of people on our boat were taking pictures of the scene before them: rusting hulks piled high with nets and buoys; Filipino standing around or lounging where they could find comfort. After a few minutes we noticed a few of them were taking pictures of us. We were probably a very unusual site. And we had females on the boat. Females in bikinis. These guys probably hadn’t seen women in a long time. “You might want to cover up,” I told Sharon, “or you’ll definitely be spank material later.”

After ten minutes our crew returned carrying massive bags of ice. A couple passengers and I helped them wrangle it over to our boat. Ice mission accomplished. We were free to continue cruising northward.

Our final basecamp was a disappointment despite the fact that we once again had cold beer and fresh fish. The water leading up to the stony beach was covered in rocks and urchins, so we had to take kayaks up to the shore and couldn’t exactly swim around in the water. 

Our last day we stopped to snorkel at two shipwreck sites. During World War II American forces sunk ten Japanese ships in the area and it was now very popular with divers. We couldn’t go very deep since we only had snorkels, but it was still eerie to get close to ships that were no doubt graveyards for a lot of people. We spent more time swimming and just generally relaxing.

Our Final Route

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our Group!

We arrived in Coron, our final port and the end of the trip, early in the evening. “One more day!” we started chanting. We’d been living in an information blackout for five days where the only worry was whether to take a nap on the boat or read, or whether to have a beer on the beach or in the warm turquoise water each evening. It was hard to say goodbye, but Sharon and I were only now 2 weeks into our 10 weeks of travel.  Next stop: Thailand!

Round the World Trip: Palawan Islands

Friday we flew to the Palawan Islands, a collection of over 1,700 islands an hour west of Manila. I hadn’t heard of the Palawans until late 2012 – initially, Bali was going to be our first stop on the trip. But the movie The Bourne Legacy ended with a panoramic shot of the main characters sailing among some beautiful islands in the Philippines and I had to find out where it was. Sharon and I decided we’d go there instead of Bali. I knew I wanted to also travel around the islands and a search turned up one company that offered such an experience: Tao Expeditions. We booked a five-day trip leaving from the town of El Nido, which is at the northernmost tip of the biggest island in the Palawans.

Our flight landed in Puerta Princessa, the capital of Palawan, and we climbed in a van for the five hour drive north to El Nido. Our van was a twelve seater. Three people who had also booked the van didn’t show up. We were grateful they missed it since it would have been extremely cramped for such a long drive. Counting ourselves lucky, the van pulled onto the road and the trip began.

But after no more than fifteen minutes we pulled to the side of the road and picked up a few people. One of the new passengers was a woman carrying a potted orchid and a bag of live goldfish. I jumped in the front seat next to the driver so I’d actually have room to stretch my legs a bit.

After a minute the driver, who was in his fifties, turned on dance music. Very loud dance music. I wasn’t going to be able to take it for the entire ride and put on my noise-canceling headphones, which reduced the volume to your standard college rave level. Fortunately, he skipped over some of the tracks on the CD and then turned it off.

The first time he passed traffic on a turn I clenched my jaw and pushed my foot into the floor of the van, looking for a brake pad that wasn’t there. Passing on turns turned out to be a regular feature of his driving. Despite this potentially fatal habit he would give a courtesy beep when approaching someone walking along the side of the road or passing a motorbike to let them know we were approaching. This began to get annoying since we passed people every few minutes. He’d also honk at people walking on the opposite side of the road walking towards us who had clearly seen our approaching van of mayhem. All of Palawan had ample notice that we were coming.

Nonetheless, we made progress. One hour ticked away. Then two hours. Then three. We stopped for snacks and a bathroom break. Four hours passed. We stopped by the side of the road and randomly picked up two more people, who squeezed their way into the van. I lost my monopoly on the front seat and was now sharing it with one of these people. More ear drum busting dance music was played, but the driver noticed me put on my headphones in response and turned the volume down.

As we neared El Nido the paved road ended and a gravel road began. We slowed our pace. This was adding insult to the injury of being crammed together. Then froad construction started. They were only building one lane at a time, so one side of the road would sport a new cement surface for a couple hundred meters, raised a good foot higher than the other side of the road which just had gravel and dirt.

At one point there was no ramp onto the new raised road, so the only option was to use the gravel lane – this essentially created a two-lane road on a single gravel lane that curved out of sight and had no flagmen working to manage traffic. We pushed forward. Sure enough a large bus lumbered into view, heading right for us. We pulled as much to the side of the road as possible and the bus eked by. The journey continued. Finally, around 7:00 we rolled into El Nido. We were unceremoniously dropped at a market at the edge of town. Sharon and I got our luggage and hopped into a tuk-tuk to continue on to our hotel.

El Nido is a small beach town protected from wind and waves by giant karst towers that the area is famous for. It’s maybe half a mile wide and only a few blocks deep. The roads are dirt. Most of buildings serve the tourist trade in some way: hotels, restaurants, souvenir shops, and tourism agencies. The water just beyond the beach was crowded with bangkas – traditional Filipino fishing boats, many of which are now used to cart tourists around. We had dinner at a beachside restaurant where we could pick the fish we wanted and watch them grill it and then turned in for the night.

We only had one full day in El Nido before our trip on Tao so we booked a day trip. Everyone offered the same day tours, which were simply labeled A, B, C, or D. We went on tour A. The scenery was amazing as our bangka left El Nido and turned a corner out of the bay – pillars of black rock jutted out from turquoise water; white sand beaches peaked out from protected inlets.

We stopped in several different places throughout the day and spent most of our time in the ocean, swimming around in the warm water or snorkeling to see the coral. We had an amazing midday lunch on an empty beach. Our crew of three grilled pork, chicken, and fresh tuna and served this up along with salad and some fruit for dessert. It was a fantastic way to spend the day.

Back on shore we treated ourselves to pizza for dinner since we knew we’d be eating lots of fish for the duration of the Tao trip….

Round the World Trip: The Farm in the Philippines

Within the first 15 minutes of exiting Manila’s international airport in our taxi the Philippines met all my expectations and more for an Asian city: crumbling cinder block buildings next to shiny new apartment towers, chromed-out jitney buses, tuk-tuks precariously balancing entire families on a vehicle that realistically should only hold two. Stray dogs standing in the middle of the street. Murderous driving habits. Billboards hawking Coke and Pepsi and American Eagle. It was more action crammed in per square meter than in any western city.

But we’d have to wait to explore the city as our taxi quickly put these manic scenes behind us. We drove 90 minutes south to a place called The Farm at San Benito, which stood alone on a hill, hidden away behind a massive wooden gate manned by security guards. The nearest town, which provided employment to many of the employees for The Farm, was a couple kilometers away.

The Farm is the kind of place I’d never volunteer to go to, but it is a dream destination for Sharon, and since this trip is hers as much as mine I agreed to go. Friends from Pittsburgh might call it a New World Hippy kind of place. I explained it to people as a vegan yoga retreat. Sharon described it as heaven. It was only going to be for 3 days and I figured I could handle it. I considered smuggling in beef jerky or something but went with my old standby of pretzels instead. Some peanuts came along for the ride.

The Farm was beautiful – definitely the most beautiful place either of us had ever stayed at. A sprawling, garden-like campus was dotted with open pagoda-style buildings housing reception, the restaurant, the spa, and some places you don’t find at a typical resort, such as a colonic room. Small, thatched roof meditation pagodas sat off the walkways in private walled-in areas. They looked like great places for a book and a nap.

We’d booked the cheapest accommodation, but for some reason were upgraded to a suite. All the suites were totally private – you could walk around naked and no one would be able to see you. In fact, the shower was outside.

Because we’d taken a red-eye flight from Australia, we arrived at The Farm early in the morning and I was treated to my first vegan breakfast ever. I have to say, I was expecting something approximating sand and Styrofoam, but it was actually quite good. After breakfast we attended a gentle flow yoga class, which was basically an hour of stretching. All good for the soul. I had booked a couples massage as a surprise, so we then moved on to an hour of massage. Life was pretty good so far. This was followed by lunch. Sharon decided to do circuit training afterwards and I took a nap. This was vacation after all. (Sharon’s ideal vacation would probably consist of tofu, half a day of boot camp, and half a day of yoga.)

We met a British guy over from Hong Kong who’d already been at The Farm for a few days. He’d had enough vegan food and confessed he took a cab into the nearest town for some ribs the night before. We met another Brit, this one from Singapore, who decided he needed a week’s break from the debauchery that was his life and was on a strict cleansing regimen. This meant he wouldn’t even be getting vegan meals. He’d just be getting vegan shakes. He was upbeat about it, but then again we spoke to him on day 1 of his stay.

There was a large group at The Farm and one of the members was the kind of person who walked around with a huge camera taking a hundred snapshots of everything. He was never in the moment, just documenting it. 100 times. I told Sharon it was a good thing she wasn’t like that or we couldn’t be together because I found it extremely obnoxious. She agreed and told me if the situation was reversed she’d slap the camera out of my hand.

At the end of our first day we took a walk into the nearby village with one of the employees. We passed a farm that was raising roosters for cock fights, which were legal and a big attraction. He also told us about balut, a delicacy in the Philippines best consumed after several pints of alcohol. Balut is a partially formed chicken embryo, so it’s part egg, part chick. The hedonist Brit from Singapore admitted he’d tried it on a previous trip to the Philippines and recalled getting a bit of feather and beak. (Do a Google image search of it and try not to gag thinking about eating it). Our guide told us in other parts of the country Filipinos ate giant rats, snakes, and monitor lizards. It’s no wonder you never see Filipino restaurants in the U.S. One other well known treat is the Halo Halo. Our first and very tasty.

Day 2 at The Farm consisted of calisthenics in the morning followed by Equipoise. Calisthenics wore me out so I could barely stand afterwards. We had a late lunch and hung by the pool in the afternoon.

Day 3, Wednesday, was our final day at The Farm. Sharon took a morning class of yoga while I took a nap in one of the meditation pagodas. We had a final lunch and then whisked off to Manila.

Manila is, to put it nicely, a shithole. The excitement I first saw from the safety of a semi-air-conditioned cab evaporated as we spent the next 36 hours in the city. We stayed in a modern hotel in Makati City, which is within Manila but technically separate as it has its own mayor. Makati is pretty much owned by a single family, the Ayalas, who built it up from the ruins of World War II. Makati, being newish, is full of giant steel and glass skyscrapers and mega-malls. Were it not for the Filipinos, it could have been anywhere in the world.

Makati was also home to more fast food restaurants than we’d ever seen. McDonald’s. KFC. Burger King. Jollibee’s. Shakey’s. All next to each other. We didn’t get the feeling it was a healthy culture. And every single business had a security guard, most carrying shotguns. I wasn’t sure if this was some legal requirement to boost employment (because seriously, how many people are going to knock off a KFC) or if crime really was that bad.

And even in Makati the stench of the city got to you. While sewage didn’t run in the streets, it ran just below them and the odor snuck out of various sewer grates. The first night we ventured out for dinner and between the traffic, smog, and smell we couldn’t wait to get back to the calm of our hotel.

There aren’t many tourist attractions in Manila – it’s definitely not a tourist city – but Thursday morning we took a taxi through impressive gridlock to Intramuros, which is he old city the where the Spanish put their fort. We hired a bicycle cab to take us around after the driver followed us around persistently asking us to use his services. His fortitude won out and, I told Sharon, we had just reinforced his behavior by hiring him. It was worth it though as we didn’t have a map of Intramuros to know what the sites were.

Yes, he is flashing a gun sign

Transportation

There was an old fort that looked over the very dirty river, some colonial government houses, old city walls, some ruins from the Battle of Manila during World War II (which I had never heard of), and that was about it. We were grateful to have killed a few hours at least.

Afterwards we stopped in the nearest café for lunch. It was a pope/bishop themed café, with pictures of high-powered Catholic officials and papal accouterments on the walls. All the menu items were named for various cardinals and bishops in the Philippines. It was pretty weird. The country is seriously Catholic and I wondered how they reacted to all the scandals the church has been dealing with over the past decade.

We got back to the hotel in mid-afternoon and literally kept ourselves sequestered there, in air conditioned harmony, until dinner. We were very excited to leave the city the next morning and continue to what was, in my mind, the main attraction of the Philippines: island hopping in the Palawan Islands.