El Nido

El Nido was a pretty cool place, although certainly a lot more touristy than Port Barton.  It is set amongst steep limestone cliffs; quite beautiful really, so as usual there is increased tourism for good reason.  Below are the bungalows we stayed in at the base of one of the steep cliffs, just at the edge of town.  A place that proved to be one of our favorite places we stayed in the Philippines.

 The beach in El Nido town proper...

The beach just south of town proper where we'd leave to do all our island hopping.  Lots of nice sites to see...

 

  

Our boat we used to get around...

 

 

This is the end of day 1 island hopping.  To get a bit of scale with regards to  the islands cliffs, if you look at the bottom right you can see a small bungalow on beach.

 

We decided to rent a motorbike here for a day... we could have rented a scooter as we usually do, but the roads were rough, and dirt bikes were available so we used one.  We stopped at a beach along the way and were greated by a ton of little kids whom were more than happy to see us.  They had the day off school thanks to a national holiday, and I don't think there was much else going on in this little town.

Next we came to another beautiful white sand beach that must have been 3+ km long.  It was pretty flat to and I could help myself, and had to do speed laps on the motor bike!

The beach...

Nice view along the way on our bike ride...

Taking a break...

Pigs on another beach we stopped at!

In the middle of no where there was a cliff in this little bit of limestone jutting out of the earth.  There is a lot of histor here, and archeologists have apparently done lots of 'digs' here.  Rumour has it that many hundreds of years ago some Filipino family hid in here escaping persecution for 2-3 years before they were finally discovered and killed...

One of the many caves... apparently there are passages from the bottom that will take you all the way to the top of this little limestone mountain.

We ended our bike journey on a great beach for sunset...

 

What our balcony looked like most days... we ate A LOT of fruit here!  Mango's especially as we knew our time in the Philippines were coming to an end.

 

More island hopping... this is Snake Island.

 

  

 A cave while island hopping...

 

 

 

And that was it in El Nido.  We made many more friends here, and we spent nearly another week.  But our time was coming to an end in the Philippines and we still had some more diving to do.  We were off for an 8hr boat journey to Coron where we wanted to do some world class wreck diving.