The day was mostly spent catching up on sleep and doing some wandering around town. The next morning, we packed up and caught the bus to Banaue. This ride was under 2 hours long, so not too bad. The views are stunning. There are rice terraces everywhere and we're high up in the mountains. Since we had the whole day, we found a hotel for the night and then went back up the hill to the look out for the terraces right next to the town. They are very neat. We've set up a 'tour' for tomorrow with a group of 4 people to help split the cost. We're going to see some other terraces, which includes an hour hike to a view, then another half hour to a waterfall. Hopefully it should be fun.
I don't have any of the photos uploaded to the computer yet. I'll get those posted once I can.
-Miranda
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The fireflies ended up being a lot of fun. We took a small boat up the river and right around when it was getting pretty dark, fireflies started appearing in the trees. They apparently live in the mangroves and synchronize their blinking with each other. It was very neat.
The next morning we got to the whale shark encounter place and headed right at 7:30. We were the first group out. Within 5 minutes, he told us to get ready! We were like, wha?? We all got our flippers and masks on then hopped in when our guide told us to. We swam along for a very short bit, then he told us to look down. All of a sudden the Whale Shark was came out of the murky water. So neat!! We ended up with about 5 encounters. It was either all with the same shark, or a couple different ones. The videos weren't great since it is huge and you can't see what your taping, but we still got some on video. This is from getting ready to go, jumping in, then seeing the shark.
Whale Shark (click to view)
-Miranda
Photos by Sandra (I'm getting lazy and not using my broken camera anymore. haha)
Rice patties.
Water Buffalo!
Moon over the river.
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We took an afternoon flight to Clark, which is about 85km north of Manila. We arrived and were going to hop on a bus to Manila. Joe went to the ATM to get cash and the card wouldn't work... Sandra tried her card and ended up with the same issue. She had Australian cash left over still, so we exchanged that and paid for the bus.
Once in Manila, we tried again and failed. Joe and Sandra ended up walking about 5 minutes to a money exchanger and changed some US cash for pesos. Manila is crazy though! People everywhere and drivers are nuts. No one works together, they're always fighting to get ahead of everyone else and they use their horn constantly. It's apparently used to tell someone you're passing them here. This ended up being even more annoying on the 10 hour bus ride down to Legaspi which was an overnight bus. Speaking of that, they keep the AC full blast, so you end up freezing. For the next bus ride we'll have to remember to grab our jacket and anything that can be used as a blanket. A nice girl from Missouri that's here with the Peace Corps was sitting in front of us and did lend us a blanket type thing to help us stay warm.
We arrived in Legaspi at around 6:30am where Joe bumped into a British couple that were basically in the same stage of planning as we were. They wanted to see the whale sharks but didn't have a place to stay for sure yet. The 5 of us hopped into a taxi for the hour or so ride to Donsol.
There are apparently a lot fireflies here at night, so we're doing a boat ride for that tonight. Hopefully that will be fun. We're going with the other couple tomorrow morning to hopefully see Whale Sharks. Two sharks were seen yesterday (don't know about today yet) so hopefully we're lucky even though it's the end of the season.
-Miranda
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We're currently in Kota Kinabalu but haven't been doing too much. We'll post a separate entry about that later.
Here's a video of clips of the elephants.
Elephants (click to view)
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We caught our ride to Nature Lodge Kinabatangan where we stayed for 2 nights and met up with Sandra again along the way. Not long after arriving, we headed out for an afternoon cruise on the river. They mentioned that the Borneon Pygmy Elephants were in the area, so we might be able to see them.
During our trip, we saw a Monitor Lizard and some Long Tailed Macaques, then the boat's motor died... In the end, half of our group went in one boat, Joe, Sandra, Lana (another German girl we met) and I went in a smaller boat. Our guide heard there was a sighting of the elephants, so we headed back down river to see them.
It was so fun! We got to get out of the boat and went up on a porch of a nearby building to watch the elephants. There were at least 20 or 30. They were everywhere!
The next morning, we woke up before 6am and went on a morning cruise. We ended up seeing 4 orangutans and a wild boar! We were scheduled to go on a walk in the afternoon, but because of the elephants, the guides decided it was too dangerous. They have babies, so they can be aggressive. Joe and I ended up kayaking up the river a little ways and went into a smaller creek to see if we could find anything fun. We found where the elephants crossed the stream. There were foot prints all over and poop floating. We even heard one trumpet, but it was a little ways away.
Before dinner, we did our second later afternoon river cruise. Unfortunately, we didn't get too far before it started pouring.... We did end up seeing a troop of Proboscis Monkeys, which was pretty neat. We kept going, hoping the rain would let up (most tropical rains are heavy, but short), but it didn't... We finally turned around and headed back, since we couldn't see anything anyway. We were totally and completely drenched. It was crazy. Unfortunately the rain also brought out the mosquitoes.
Tomorrow morning we have one more river cruise, then we'll be heading to Kota Kinabalu tomorrow.
-Miranda
Joe and I in front of the elephants.
Elephants!!
Baby elephants!!
Orangutan!!
Joe and I totally and completely drenched.
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