Days 8, 9 and 10 – Sharks, falls & eejits

Earliest start to the day so far, 5am! We were heading down south to hang out with some whale sharks, as you do. I had mixed emotions going into this experience and I'm sure once I've explained it you'll understand why. They put food out for the sharks from 7am to 11am which makes them swim nearer to shore in the morning and there are about ten people per boat with at least ten boats on the water at a time. So all of that makes it a bit unnatural and touristy. You get into the water with your snorkel for half an hour and the sharks are just hovering right on you. At some points you won’t have anybody else in your peripheral vision and you’ll be totally in the moment with a giant whale shark swimming about two feet from you, those are the best moments. You’re told not to touch them but they’re all over the place so you can’t always move out of the way quickly enough. I think everyone touched one accidentally at least once. In conclusion it was an amazing experience.

When we got back to the hostel my sunburn kicked in and I crashed hard. I wasn’t feeling very well at all so I stayed in bed for pretty much the rest of the day.

The next day we’d planned on renting some scooters and visiting some of the waterfalls which are scattered around the south part of the island. Dan had already ridden a bike earlier in the trip so he was totally up for it but I was very nervous about being in control of a motor vehicle for the first time. Obviously without even a full UK license it’s illegal so if anything goes wrong you’re not insured… but “everyone does it”. Eddie, the man who rents out the bikes, let me have a go on the slowest scooter but he wasn’t convinced by my ability to balance (I was blindly optimistic) so he recommended I got a driver for the day. In retrospect this was probably for the best and it didn’t cost too much more (PHP1000 for the day rather than PHP600 just for the bike)

We headed for the furthest waterfall (Inambakan Falls) with Mary on the back of Dan’s bike and me on the back of a bike ridden by a guy who I think said his name was “Dudes”. It took about 90 minutes to get there and obviously it started raining just as we set off. It was definitely worth the trip though, it was a beautiful waterfall with nobody else around. A Filipino boy walked us down to it and took photos for us while we spent a bit of time swimming and relaxing in the spray.



The roads hadn’t been too bad most of the way and I was thinking I could have managed it, although the dirt road from the main road to the waterfall was very bumpy. When we headed back it had stopped raining but the dirt road was very wet. Me and “Dudes” got to the main road and waited for Dan and Mary to catch up but they were nowhere to be seen. We headed back to check on them and found that they’d had a little accident. They’d been taking it really slowly but had hit a slippery patch and the wheel had come out from underneath them. Dan had taken the main brunt of the hit with cuts on his knee and elbow and actually protected the bike by the way he’d fallen. Mary had bailed off the back of the bike so only had a graze on her knee. We’d planned on visiting some more waterfalls but decided just to head back to the hostel so Dan could get cleaned up and recover.

After another 90 minutes in the rain and the dark we got back. I was up for a bit of a mad one but there was nobody drinking tonight. Last night it was drinking games and madness, tonight there was a couple playing Connect 4 at the bar. I went to bed.

Day ten was the day of the drunk Irish guy. When we went for breakfast he was already in the bar drinking. We played a few word games and he ended up inviting himself to join us. He wasn’t too bad at this point except we could probably only understand about 50% of what he was saying (not good for word games). When we went back to the room we just chilled with some episodes of Survivor. Drunk Irish guy came back to the room, wobbled a bit, then left. After dinner at about 10pm he came back to the room again and managed to climb to the top bunk (the one above me, so lucky). He talked to himself a bit, sneezed, coughed and probably slept. When we were all settling down to go to sleep he decided this was a good time to wake up. He started talking nonsense and tried sitting on my bed. I managed to usher him out of the room and he went downstairs. Mary and I voiced our concerns to the two staff members on duty and I suggested that at the very least that they didn’t serve him any more alcohol. The staff had been really great so far so we expected they’d also be good with this situation. He headed straight to the bar so I went up to our balcony to keep an eye on things. Unfortunately our faith in the staff was misplaced as they carried on serving him 6.9% beer. I stayed up there for about half an hour because I was expecting trouble when he came back to the room, luckily when he eventually came back he just went straight to sleep.