Puerto Princesa - Nov. 26, 2010

 November 26, 2010

Senne's Summary: We arrived in Puerto Princesa and stayed at the tree house!

This morning our taxi picked us up from our hotel at 6 AM to take us back to the Manila airport. Our room had breakfast included but it didn’t start until 6…so no breakfast…besides…who eats before 6 AM. YUCK!

The Manilla airport was easy. We found reasonable food, water and even English magazines while we waited for our flight.

The flight was nice and then we arrived in PP. The luggage carousel was packed with people about six deep; but, being that Steve is a giant here he managed to get our bags out without much trouble. Our hotel sent a van to pick us up and we were on our way.

Our resort seems to be a little ways out of the main town, but they will often take you in with them in their van or you can call a taxi to town for about $2.

After we checked in we were taken to our treehouse room. I’ve been looking forward to this… who wouldn’t want to sleep in a tree house?!? 

The tree was gigantic… big enough to hold a good sized room and a bathroom. It was pretty authentic. The walls were a woven tree material…which meant holes for bugs to come in! I was pretty amazed though that it had running hot water, a flushable toilet, electricity, air conditioning and even a TV! Tree houses have come a long way!

We sat out on our verandah and enjoyed the view for a bit. They even brought us a welcome drink to enjoy while we settled in.

View from our treehouse

Enjoying our welcome drink on our balcony. 

Next we decided to head into town to start getting our money for El Nido. The problem is that El Nido has no bank or ATM (the nearest bank to El Nido is 5 hours away). You have to take in with you what you need. Since we are staying for two weeks we needed a fair bit. The bank machines will only dispense 10,000 PHP per transaction (about $230) and will only let you do a few transactions each day, so we took a bit of a hit on transaction fees.

After our many transactions in the bank we headed out for some lunch. Again we noticed the westernization… and enjoyed lunch in an American franchised restaurant (Shakey’s I think).

We got a tricycle taxi (the only kind here) and headed back to our resort. The tricycles are basically a motorbike with a metal sidecar (kind of like a golf cart structure). We took a picture so you can see.

Apparently, there are so many tricycles on the road that the mayor made a rule that only the white ones can work in the morning and the blue ones can work in the afternoon to ease traffic congestion.

The road down to our resort was under construction (translation; bumpy in parts). The parts that you weren’t supposed to drive on, weren’t marked by pylons, but rather, just by big rocks scattered all over that section... Seemed clever to me!

Back in our resort we just enjoyed a quiet evening (well except for the part where some other guests were doing some pretty sad karaoke).

Found the wifi! Chatting with some friends back home 💖