The Last Resort

 

Ever since I have been going to the Philippines, my wife has wanted to go to Palawan, which is a long skinny island among a chain of islands stretching southwest from the Philippines off into the China Sea West Philippine Sea as the locals like to call it. Unlike here though, they don't have any qualms about renaming bodies of water.

Palawan is known for their pristine white sand beaches and certain areas like El Nido, a city on the NE end of Palawan, are tourist attractions. Always before though, our trips were just too short to justify spending half of our time in the Philippines on Palawan and away from family. This time around however, we had a shade under four weeks in the country so had time on our hands.

Our original plan was just for my wife, two kids and I to go as the plane fair is quite expensive. (We nearly paid the same price for a round trip ticket from Clark to El Nido as we did our tickets from the U.S. to Manila!) In fact, we booked our tickets about a month in advance along with renting a villa at a resort in El Nido. But my BIL, who initially told us he would be working, informed us about a week before we left for the Philippines that he would have that week off and be working the following week when we returned from El Nido. Suddenly are nearly month long stay in the Philippines had what time my wife could spend with her brother cut in half.

Option B which took some convincing for my wife, was that we buck up and buy tickets for my BIL and his family to go with us to El Nido. My wife was going to get a fairly decent signing bonus when we returned that would be enough to cover the extra costs and so we purchased four more round trip airplane tickets along with renting a second villa at the same resort. Fortunately it was rainy season and they weren't fully booked.

In fact, we were the only two families in the entire resort due to it being the rainy season and other factors. The resort itself was about five minutes outside of El Nido which meant we had to rely on local transportation to get to the resort or into El Nido. Also, as we would come to learn, despite the resort being quite nice on the inside of it's fencing, on the other side of the fencing we were essentially in the middle of a suburb for lack of a better term. All around us were crude shacks of limited wood and tin tacked together with no electricity or probably indoor plumbing where families and livestock, mostly in the form of chickens, lived. I wouldn't call it unsafe, but it certainly was a poorer part of El Nido.

By the time we landed in El Nido, found our driver from the resort who had thoughtfully put my name onto an electronic tablet, arrived at the resort and got checked in, it was getting pretty late in the evening. For some reason, the check in process in the Philippines always takes about five times longer than it does to check into a standard motel room here in the states. 

Apparently to compensate for the lengthy check in process, we were all given freshly opened, and branded, coconuts to sip on. Later we would have the staff cut the coconuts open so we could scoop out the flesh and eat it. When we finally opened up the door to our villa, we found ourselves in sort of an open air private courtyard with a very tiny pool on one side flanked by two bean bag chairs. 

Beyond that was a small family area with a kitchenette and dining table. The rental (which came to about $100 U.S. per day) came with a breakfast every day (more on that later) but we were on our own for lunch and dinner. The first evening since it was late when we got there, we just ordered from room service but the rest of the time we took advantage of what we found in and around El Nido and the kitchenette.

Each villa came with two private rooms with a thin lumpy mattress on a cement pedestal. In America, I probably would complain but by Philippine standards, it was quite nice. Best of all though, the entire villa was air conditioned and each villa had their own separate air conditioner so we could set it as cold as we liked which was a nice respite from the oppressive heat and humidity.

After a good night's rest, our breakfast was delivered the next morning in a wicker basket that the carriers offered to float in our swimming pool. Being a family of four in such a small pool and trying to eat dishes like what we were served seemed like a nightmare in the making and so we declined and just had them sit it on our dining room table. Three of us ordered the Filipino breakfast which was a mound of red rice, an egg over easy, some pork meat that had been sauteed at high heat, some roasted tomatoes and a homemade tomato sauce that honestly was the star of the dish despite the other parts being tasty and well cooked.  My youngest ordered banana crepes where were also delicious, or so I was told.