My Long Weekend in the Philippines

I just got back from the Puerto Galera in the Philippines with about 20 other exchange students from my university... I left early Friday morning and came back late Monday night. It was SO much fun. We got really cheap tickets, so including the flight I only spent about US$175 on the whole weekend (gosh, I love Asia!). We thought we were going to stay at a really crappy place because we booked it at a hostel website, and it only cost us US$5 per person per night. But when we got there the place was great. Our room had a kitchen, its own bathroom, and really comfortable beds. We were pretty spoiled.

Basically we just hung out around town the whole weekend. It wasn't extremely touristy, so we got to get a good feel for the local people too. Puerto Galera is a very small beach town, and so the pace of life there is SOOOOO chill...the Americans on the trip had a hard time getting use to waiting an hour for eggs and toast!

During the days we did some pretty fun stuff. The first full day, about 10 of us rented a private boat that took us around to a bunch of the isolated beaches and took us snorkeling to see the clams and coral. The boat only cost each of us about US$7 for the whole day. The next day we went kayaking around the mountain islands. I think I enjoyed that the most since I love to kayak and I love beautiful scenery.

At night we went out in the town. We played lots of darts (which I am not that bad at...to my, and probably your, surprise). We also did a lot of karaoke. I sang to everything from Whitney Houston to Avril. We have all been inspired now to do lots of karaokeing while we are in Asia. So going out in the Philippines was quite an adventure (and there are way too many stories to tell here), but it was also pretty sketchy because there were so many prostitutes. It broke my heart to see these 16 year old girls being prostituted for money (and so little of it!). And it was even worse to watch these sleezy old white men take them home at night. I wanted to slap these guys back to their Mississippi trailer parks!
Anyway, the trip was an overall success...it made me want to travel around here even more!
Love From Hong Kong...