Island Hopping in the Wet and Cold
El Nido Tour A
The problem with using backpacking blogs as research material is that you always need to read between the lines to figure out what they’re not saying. I suppose this goes for most things, but in hindsight, we put a lot of faith in backpacking blogs for El Nido with titles like “El Nido Travel Guide” and “El Nido Backpacking 101”.
This turned out to be an uncomfortable pain. Some of these budget backpackers were sponsored, while others claim to have spent barely any money until you realize that they must have eaten bread and water everyday or that the discount they got wasn’t actually a discount at all — just twisted words that make it sound like they saved money when they didn’t.
One of the blunders we made was following several blogs’ advice to book an island hopping tour through the hotel. El Nido has four standard island hopping tours called A, B, C, and D. There are kiosks all over town that sell tours, and the listed tour prices are the same at every kiosk. All of the travel blogs indicate that these prices are fixed, so it is the most convenient to just book through your hotel.
We followed this advice to book Tour A, but we later found out that some operators are willing to sell the exact same tours at a lower price. We ended up booking our Tour C for 1,000 PHP/person instead of the listed 1,400 PHP/person.
Tours A and C are the most popular and well rated tours for locals and tourists alike. I’m not sure whether Tours B and D are not as great because I haven’t seen any blogger actually go on either one, and even the locals were pushing just Tours A and C.
It was our intention to do both Tours A and C, though we started to have our doubts because the weather was questionable. So we followed our hotel owner’s advice to do Tour A first since the island destinations are closer to El Nido and more sheltered. We booked through the hotel, which ended up shuttling us to a different budget hotel that manages tours. Having seen the hotel on an online booking website, we recognized it as a low-cost budget hotel with poor ratings.
Over an hour of waiting and collecting people later, we finally got underway. Not long after we jumped on the boat, it began raining. Since we were sitting at the front of the boat, we got the full force of the rain and stormy ocean water that splashed up onto the deck. It wasn’t comfortable, but we were trying to make the best of the poor weather.
We arrived at the first stop, Seven Commandos Beach, feeling cold and already wet. Not wanting to miss out on the underwater world, we went swimming and saw some clownfish and then took pictures with the boat.
The order of the tour destinations got mixed up because the next stop was full of boats and the third stop was closed at the time for filming of the South African version of “Survivor”, so we went to stop #4: the Secret Lagoon. This is a shallow lagoon completely surrounded by limestone walls, with only a small opening through the rocks to get in. At high tide, the opening is flooded. However, it was low-tide during our tour so it was easy to get into. We went in for photos but I couldn’t take any videos because I was shivering so much.
After the Secret Lagoon, we had lunch on a beach on Shimizu Island. This was probably good because we were both rather hungry. The sun came out momentarily while we were eating, but it disappeared just as quickly.
After lunch, we went to the Small Lagoon. Most of the people on our boat rented kayaks, but we chose to swim in. It was a long swim but we’re glad we did because we saw some underwater wildlife on the way in and out. The lagoon is almost like a maze and is pretty cool to explore. We found a small cave large enough to swim in, and I’m sure there was more to see if we’d had more time. Unfortunately we didn’t, and we had to head back to the boat before we knew it. I almost got run over twice by kayakers, but we made it out unscathed.
By the time we arrived at the Big Lagoon it was open four tours again, so the boat parked out front and we went in. The inlet to the lagoon is actually quite shallow and at the time it was less than waist-deep, so I was able to walk in while dragging a floating Yuki behind me. The lagoon is quite large and deep, but there isn’t anything to see other than the surrounding tall limestone walls. It was cool, but after a quick look we decided there wasn’t any point on swimming further into the lagoon. We were shivering.
Tour A is a mostly a sightseeing trip to see three different lagoons. We enjoyed seeing the three lagoons but found the tour both long in duration and short in time spent at the destinations. I suppose this is the problem with being on a tour and not being able to go at our own pace, which we’re more used to. We were cold most of the time, so we didn’t really enjoy it as much as we should have. Had it been warm and sunny, I’m sure our moods would have been much better.
For the cost of travel in the Philippines, these tours are quite expensive. We learned that there’s a benefit to shopping around for tour operators. Some tours will give you a snorkel and mask for free, while others will rent them to you. We brought our own gear so this didn’t matter to us. Our Tour A operator did rentals, but our Tour C operator, Aqua Company, let people borrow the gear for free. Aqua also gave us a straight-up discount without us asking, so we didn’t even pay the sticker price.
Here’s a video of our tour:
