The Stringbeans!

Met up with Lucas and his new lovely wife sari in Naga City. After a long embrace we walked around town enjoying icecream and milk shakes. Every single guesthouse and hotel in town was full b/c of a student media conference there, so I called up Larry, the nice filipino man I had met before and he gave us a free place to stay! It was an extremely nice place too. It was Sari's birthday, so we went out for some rocky road icecream and then had some red horse and san miguel to finish off the night. The next day we went back to caramoan since it was so nice. At the port we had to wait for the boat, so we played some frisbee. the locals found it hilarious to watch us play and eventually lost their fear and joined us. We showed them how to throw, and they were soon having a grand time. Walked from caramoan up to the fishing village of paniman. As it was getting dark we went to the river and lucas and I swam up it until we got to the place where it came out of the cave. It was an awesome swim back...swimming in this gorgeous jungle river, looking up at the bright stars, seeing bats fly overhead, and loads of fireflies along the banks. Nothing like exploring a river with an awesome friend in the middle of the jungle at night. Of course that night we went back to visit Islaw and his family for dinner and then sang karaoke late into the night.

The next day we did a different island hopping tour. Went to a couple islands with beautiful white sand beaches. Went to a cool sandbar and just sat there in the warm water. Went to a beach called tayak, the one I had tried to go before, but was chased off by survivor israel guards. This time it was empty so we went on. A gorgeous beach with huge limestone cliffs all around. You can walk for about 3 minutes inland to a huge lagoon lake that is fed by the ocean, but the weird thing is that when it's high tide in the ocean it's low tide there and vice versa. The lagoon is awesome with cliffs and jungle all around. We also saw the survivor camp where the survivors will be staying. In a gorgeous location, but had even been fixed up to make it look nicer. After that we enjoyed a nice boat ride through lots of islands and mangroves and looking out for both flying fish and skipping skimmer fish. The power was out in the town that night so we had a tough time finding food, but we eventually did.

We arrived today in Donsol after a day of travelling by trike, then boat, then van, then bus, then jeepney (we got to ride ontop of the jeepney which was good fun and afforded good views of the awesome mt. mayaon volcano rising dramatically above the rice fields and palm trees near Legazpi. All the locals loved yelling at us and laughing in surprise to see us on top of the jeepney. And of course we did our fair share (especially lucas and his deep fried eggs) of buying goods from atop the jeepney at stops.