Saturday 2 February 2013

STILL no whale sharks! *depressed face*

2nd February - Donsol

Alarms went off at 6.30am. I looked out the door at the weather - it was pissing it down, so we all just rolled over and went back to sleep, no whale shark spotting that morning.

Woke up later around 9am, packed and I went to claim my washing (I'd washed the entire contents of my backpack because it was starting to give off a funky smell). It was 595 pesos - bloody expensive but it had to be done. Got back to the room to start packing it, and realised it was all still damp! So much for the better luck and the non-funky smelling clothes, as now they were going to smell of and be damp until I next got around to getting them washed!

We then decided to go ask at the tourist centre if any had been spotted that day - 2 out of 16 boats that had gone out this morning had spotted one, so there wasn't much of a chance. Back in the room a guy approached us to ask if we wanted to share a taxi to Legazpi that day so we said yes. Then the lady at the front desk of our hotel came to ask us if we wanted to go on the boat that afternoon as two whale sharks had been spotted earlier in the area. We didn't fancy our chances but agreed to go anyway...then we found out there was 7 people who wanted to go (only 6 are allowed on one boat), as the two guys who'd asked us about a taxi didn't realise there were 3 of us.

So we took matters into our own hands, checked out and went quickly to the tourist centre to get our names on a boat, thinking we were super on the ball and bound to go. Turns out though that the 2 German guys had found replacements and had managed to fill a boat with an equal number of 6 people...leaving us to find another 3 people, and they headed out on the boat before us - there is a name for those people, I shalt not enter it here as my nan reads my blogs! lol

After waiting about half hour they eventually found another two people, a couple we had seen the morning before, Ali from Wales and her boyfriend from Bristol. So it meant we had to pay a little more than normal which sucked - damn German nincompoops! So we set out, the weather had gotten better, and there was one point when they thought they'd spotted one and so we'd gotten all our snorkel gear on ready but...nothing. Again, 1 hour turned into 2 hours, turned into 3 hours. It started raining again so I got some more underwater camera pictures of us idiots sat in our snorkel gear, on a boat, in the pelting cold rain. In the end the sun came out so at least we were able to sit in the sun for the last hour and chat to Ali and BF. They had just come from Vietnam so were giving me tips for my adventure there which was coming up.

We then returned to shore, all of us a little disheartened as we spent the money down here specifically to see the whale sharks but to no avail. We then had some dinner and saw the German guys again - they hadn't seen any either HA! Made us feel a little better hehehe. Then we ended up getting the taxi with them to Legazpi. Hadn't booked any acom surprise surprise so cue another hour of our lives spent searching for some. We went in two hotels which were overpriced, one had a cockroach on the floor and the other had a massive cockroach on the BED! And one hotel which the German guys settled on was literally the worst place I have EVER seen. So defo wasn't staying there. We checked out the Twilight Zone hotel, as it had a cool name...turned out it had that name for a reason!

Then we eventually settled on a hotel for 1150 pesos which was ok after the others we'd checked out, on the plus side it had aircon and wifi which our hotel in Donsol lacked. Was pretty basic compared to Donsol though but at 9pm, beggars can't be choosers! So we ended up just watching a film (Hanna) on the HBO Philippines network and a bit of Terminator 3 then slept.

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