caramoan adventure

Jordan flew in from Manila and after telling him we’d be spending the weekend at the Camsur Watersports Complex, we drove him to Sabang instead where we caught a boat out to the Caramoan peninsula for nice swimming and beaches. Unfortunately we didn’t know the boats would stop running in the afternoon, and that we’d have to hire a smaller boat to take us out there. The dusk fell during our supposed 2-hour boat ride that turned into a 3.5-hour boat ride–including rain, lightning, and our boat not having any lights. When Jordan asked our boat driver about the safety of not having lights in a boat on a stormy sea at night, he said that it would be OK because other boats would have lights. Anyway, the boat ride was really really fun. The hotel we reserved outsourced our room to an old lady in the town’s spare bedroom, which made our adventure even more exhilarating. We spent the next day trying to visit the beautiful beaches on Caramoan’s islands, but the best ones were all closed due to filming Survivor. Apparently after the success of Survivor: France they decided to do 6 more countries there and incidentally closed off all of the nice beaches to anyone.

So we went swimming at the second rate beautiful tropical beaches and decided to go back to Pili to visit CWC. We spent Sunday and getting sunburned and “understanding” wakeboard culture. It was awesome. I tried my Australian accent in front of a table of Australian wakeboard bros and they didnt think it was very good. Catherine is really good at wakeboarding. She got up the first time she tried and I think if we spent a few more hours there she’d be flipping all over the place. Conversely, Jordan was really not good at wakeboarding and Catherine took every opportunities telling him that he wasn’t. We’re in Manila now and we’ll be spending the next week with urban poor communities as part of our exposure program with Gabriela. Here are some pictures!