When School Gives You Breaks, Go Travel

Hello blog readers,

The last few weeks offered up a good number of long weekends and school breaks.  We first had a long weekend for the Mid-Autumn Festival and then during the following weekend, we had another long weekend for China's National Holiday.  Most recently, we had an entire week off for our school's Fall Break. 

For the long weekends, I got a chance to get out of Macau to check out some other familiar places nearby.  For the Mid-Autumn long weekend, I went to Ocean Park in Hong Kong and during the National Day break, I went across the border to Guangzhou.  There's not a whole lot of tell you about either of those trip, so you can just take a look at the pictures to have a sense of the things I saw during those 2 trips.

Red light casting an eerie glow on these jellyfish.  Blood jellyfish!

Fish swarm

Hong Kong Ocean Park Aquarium

The long gondola ride to the other half of the park

Sunset over the South China Sea

A wonderful afternoon in Dafushan park

Biking anyone?

Guangzhou

A lively nightlife area on Hong Kong Island called Soho.  It attracts a lot of expats from Hong Kong.

Fireworks in Macau during Mid-Autumn Festival

For the Fall break, a more substantial trip was in order.  The original plan was to go to Singapore for a part of the week.  However, after hearing of a wonderful trip idea to the Philippines from our school's newest PE teacher, who was traveling solo, I asked if I would be allowed to tag along for the trip.  Before I knew it, we were jetting off to a little town in the Philippines called El Nido.  El Nido is on the island province of Palawan, southwest of the capital of Manila.

The journey to El Nido is worthy of it's own blog entry.  After flying into Manila (in a typhoon) at 12:30am, we have a long layover before our next flight early the following morning to Puerto Princesa, the capital of Palawan.  It would have a waste to find a hotel room for a few short night, so just hunkered down and had a short, uncomfortable sleep on the floor of the airport terminal.  We we certainly not the only one, as many others also decided to rough it for their connecting overnight layovers.

When we did get into Puerto Princesa, we had to take a very bumpy 6 hour bus ride to El Nido.  Suffice it to say that I knew about this bumpy trip beforehand and decided to fork out a bit of extra money to fly out from El Nido to Manila on the return journey.  It wasn't the most brilliant weather when we got into El Nido, but we were thankful that the typhoon had moved on.

I had done very little research into El Nido before coming on the trip, so it was quite a neat experience to go to a new place where you learn about things as they come.  El Nido turned out to be a quiet seaside town at the northern end of Palawan.  El Nido is not the commercialized tourist beach hub like Boracay or Bali are, but definitely has a distinct and very enriching Filipino culture still lingering through the town.  There were many locals around and throughout the trip I found the locals to be very friendly and jovial.

So what do you do in a proverbial paradise like El Nido?  The first thing that comes to mind is simply just sit out under the sun and enjoying the beautiful scenery and just relaxing.  However, is not what comes to be if you're traveling with a PE teacher like I was.  Granted even all teachers, including PE teachers need the occasional massage or two, or a few hours lying in a hammock.  Outside of that, our time was allocated to exploring the town, finding our way to more secluded beaches, trekking through the bush to take a swim under a waterfall, and enjoying water sports such as kayaking and paddle-boarding. 

My personal highlights of the trip includes the must-do island hopping tours and getting back into scuba diving.  Apparently island hopping is THE thing to do in El Nido.  All around the coastline of the town are a series of small islands arranged in a geographic feature known as an archipelago.  Many local boat operators run daily island hopping trips to take tourists to check out the neat, hidden away areas of the islands.  We lucked out, the evening right before our planned island hopping date,  we found a restaurant owner that had a speed boat and could offer to combine the best features on 3 of the main island hopping tour circuits, served barbeque lunch on a secluded beach, and rented out snorkeling gear.  It was well worth the extra few buck to go with this tour.  Amongst the stops for snorkeling and a few beach stops, the most interesting location was a seemingly unremarkable rock face on one island that had a small gap that people could swim through into a small lagoon on the other side.  At the back of the lagoon, there was a small cave that we were allowed to swim into.  While there was nothing remarkable about the cave, it's not everyday you get to swim into one, so it was quite a thrilling experience.

The Philippines has the reputation of being one of the world's best places to scuba dive.  It wasn't even my intent to dive during this trip, but as Kaitlyn decide to brave the trip back to Puerto Princesa instead of flying out from the El Nido airport, I spent the last 24hrs in El Nido on my own and needed something to do.  On a whim the night before, I asked around about the price and feasibility of going on a dive trip.  Once again, I found one of the only places that had a speed boat and therefore could offer half-day dive trips.  Before long, I was on said speed boat, whizzing off for two dives on my last afternoon in El Nido.  The icing on the cake, was that because it was low season, and the dive shop was starved for customers.  I got to go on what turned out to essentially be a private speed boat for two consecutive dives for less than $25 Canadian!

Swimming through the coral reef "forest" was just as amazing an experience here in the Philippines as it was during my first time diving two years ago in the Perhentian islands in Malaysia.  It's incredible to comprehend that the wall of coral you're swimming along the side of is literally a wall made of living organisms, animals no less, that form the basis for hundreds of species of fish and marine invertebrates to form an ecosystem.  My second dive was especially rewarding as I saw a good number of hard to find aquatic species including a juvenile lionfish, a sea turtle, a school of probably 50 grouper fish in a very tight ball, a behemoth sized clam, and a few barracudas. 

Unfortunately, due to the incompatibility of water and photo-taking equipment, there aren't as many photos of the island hopping as I would have liked to have taken and none during scuba diving.  However, I do have a sampling of some of the terrific sights from El Nido.  Take a look at the pictures below:

Welcome to El Nido!

Mermegmeg beach outside of El Nido

Seafood Feast!

Anchor away!  Island hopping for the day.

Barracuda barbeque on the beach?  Yes please.

Dinner on the beach.  What a scene.

The El Nido archipelago islands

Hermit crab friend joining us on the beach for lunch

2am slurpees at the Manila airport.  What a great way to start off Fall Break.

A local school in El Nido, quite a bit different from any school I've been to.

Hammock time!

Our first trike ride in the Philippines

Standing at the edge of a cliff-face on one of the many islands of the El Nido archipelago.

Snorkeling in beautiful blue waters of the Philippines.

Glad to be here!

Sunset a beach.

The last sunset in El Nido.  It's hard to leave.

A water buffalo in the water.

Swimming under a waterfall.  Incredibly refreshing.

Thanksgiving lunch on a beach, in El Nido.  Awesome!

There was an abandoned church on one of the island during the island hopping tour.  Neat.

Since coming back, I've been bombarded with report card business and marking.  It makes enjoying such a vacation all the more important, when I come back realize that it'll be 9 straight weeks until the Christmas break.  In the three weeks since the Fall break, I've finalized my plans for the next break during Christmas.  I'll tell you in detail what I'm doing in the next post, but in the meantime I will say that there is definitely a LOT of traveling to be had in those 2 weeks for Christmas.  In the coming weeks, school presses on, as does the volleyball season.  During the first week back, our team was pressed into participating in tournament meant for high school teams.  While we only won a single game the whole weekend, it was the only one that mattered, as we beat our own senior girls team to steal away the 3rd place trophy at a tournament that wasn't even intended for us.  Honestly, however, if we actually played our best game, we probably could have won 2-3 more games and even played into the 1st place finals.  Since that tournament, we started our local Macau season.  We started the Macau season with the team of returning players (we also have a team of brand new players) playing a game each of the last 2 weeks.  Their first game was absolutely dreadful, arguably the worst they've ever played as even they will admit.  We were served up like turkeys against a team we once again, could have beaten with a better effort.  I give the girls credit as they regrouped well and dominated the 2nd game winning 25-6, 25-12.  Next week, the new girls start their campaign.  For them, this year is a learning experience and there will likely be only 1-2 of them that will legitimately challenge the 10 returning girls for a roster spot on the penultimate SCISAC team. 

Junior (middle school) girls win 3rd place in a high school tournament.  Not too shabby.  This team is looking good and honestly it has nothing to do with my coaching.  The girls love the game that much and pour everything into being better players.

That's all for now.  You'll hear from me again in a few weeks time.

Finishing up my first organized race, the Macau Run of Hope (5.6km).  Finished in 28mins:10secs, just over 4 minutes behind the first place winner, another teacher from the school.  Could have done even better if I actually did more than one training run.