After our adventures in El Nido we were heading to the northernmost tip of the island. Well, that’s where thought we were heading as we got in to the van that was stopping at the airport before taking us north. We were going to El Nido airport to pick up our grandma and the bus driver knew that we wanted to go to the airport, just not the El Nido one. We realised about an hour into the trip that we were going the wrong way. So, we got a ride on another van back to El Nido. At one of the places the van stopped, Dad looked out the window and pointed to a land rover/van thing with the words ‘Fisherman’s Cottage’ on the side and said, “I thought we’d be riding in something more like that” ... Then Mum said, “Moonbeach Villas (our accom) is run by the same people that run Fisherman’s cottage” just as she said that (by the way I would just like to say sorry for this extremely long paragraph) a lady stepped out of the land rover and walked over to our van (since Mum had told her where we were).
After getting sorted with the right transfer, we completed some shopping with our new hosts. The market was an interesting adventure. I followed Dad and Rachelle (our host) through the meat and then through the produce section, “Six pineapples!” Rachelle stared at us bewildered. (I’ve already told you how good the pineapples here are, plus we had to cater for 5 people for 6 nights). After getting over this, we finished our shopping, picked up Nan from the El Nido airport and headed to our accommodation.
The villa was a fully equipped house, Rachelle cooked all our meals here. The beds were nice and comfy and outside the accom there was a nice beach. Just down the beach was a village where Emily and I made friends with all the local kids. We also went for a few paddles on the kayaks, thankfully none 4 kilometres long.
Our first snorkelling trip here was all day and we felt pretty tired after. The first stop was a beautiful coral garden with so many fish. At one of the stops there was a very strong current and one of the boatmen got the kayak so me and Em could hold onto the back and snorkel. At our second stop we saw a lionfish, sadly we didn’t get any photos. ☹
The second boat trip was only six hours. The first stop was… a shipwreck, it was quite shallow but there was still lots of coral and fish. At our stop it was quite choppy but the highlight of this stop was when some tiny, baby fish decided Mum was their home and just kept swimming around her. On our way to the lunch stop it was very choppy and we were all worried the boat might flip over, luckily the boat had an outrigger to keep it balanced. The ladder on this boat was just a plank of wood with little pieces of wood nailed on, not very user-friendly.
We had more adventures leaving Moonbeach but I’ll tell you about them in the next post.
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