Katie’s solo trip to the Philippines

Hi there! Just Katie here! After our adventure in Indonesia, I could’ve flown back to Australia with James, but I decided to be my own strong, independent woman who can travel by herself and set off for the Philippines.

Things started off proving to me that the world crumbles and falls apart without James in it. Haha, just kidding, but the start was a bit rough, and there were some tears over FaceTime.

Let me set the scene for you: It's 6 PM, I’m sitting in a pretty crappy hotel/hostel/prison literally just off the runway of the Puerto Princesa airport. The walls are a violent neon green, and the view from my window is a half-finished cinderblock building that looks like it was abandoned 10 years ago. I’m in the same clothes that I put on at 3 AM to catch my flight from Bali to Manila, and I can’t change or brush my teeth because Cebu Pacific Airlines left my bag in Manila and dared to tell me it was my fault.

For the record, it was most definitely not my fault. When I checked in at 5 AM in Bali, I specifically asked the airline representative if I needed to pick up my bag in Manila, and she said no. “The airline will transfer it for you, just pick it up in Puerto Princesa, it’s checked through, enjoy your flights”. Fantastic. Until it wasn’t. They waited until AFTER I had taken off from Manila on the flight to Puerto Princesa to send me an email that said “hey, we noticed you didn’t pick up your bag in Manila… and we also noticed that you are already on board and won’t receive this until you’re on another island and literally can’t do anything about it... but come find one of our representatives and we’ll be super unhelpful”. (That might be paraphrasing a bit). But I found a representative, and they told me that I had to wait in Puerto Princesa until my bag arrived instead of hopping on my 5-hour bus to El Nido that I had booked. I asked when I could expect my bag to arrive, and they told me maybe tomorrow, maybe the next day, maybe next week. Lovely. So cut to crying to James on FaceTime in the sketchy airport hotel.

But all things considered, I got done what I could, told my hostel in El Nido that I wouldn’t be arriving and found somewhere "safe" to sleep in 1-hour intervals, continuously pestering the airline for updates. In the morning, they finally told me that my bag should be arriving at 11:30 AM! Yay! Getting out of my funk, I bought myself a package of 2-in-1 shampoo and conditioner and a toothbrush for a combined total of $0.72 CAD, got ready for the day, put back on my same clothes and went out to explore the city of Puerto Princesa.

The city wasn’t much to write home about. There was a nice path along the water with a market that seemed to have closed a couple of years ago, a very white church, banks occupying every other storefront, and a cafe that makes delicious blueberry pancakes. At 11 AM, I walked back to the airport, praying that my bag was actually on that plane.

Cebu Pacific did follow through this time, and through 3 spotty WhatsApp calls, they brought me my bag! It was shrink-wrapped so tightly that identifying it as mine was challenging, but all my belongings were accounted for, so I continued on as planned and hopped on the 5-hour bus to El Nido. Overall, I was just 19 hours and $50 behind my original schedule, so not too bad!

The 5-hour bus ride stretched into nearly 7 hours with stops to pick up and drop off random packages and locals. The long, bumpy road meant that I even hit my step goal while sitting still, and the driver was nice enough to deliver me right to my hostel. Once I finally got to El Nido, all I wanted to do was go straight to sleep.

My desire for sleep was abruptly disrupted by one of my hostel roommates, who apparently has night terrors! That was a fun surprise at 2 AM!

In the morning, I did what everyone comes to El Nido to do, and I joined the island-hopping Tour C. On the boat with about 20 of us, I met two other Canadians who introduced me to two more Canadians that they had run into at the airport. I spent most of the tour hanging out with Nicole and Gail, the 30-year-old Canadians.

Tour C was stunning and supposedly a lot less busy than Tour A. The first stop was Helicopter Island, named as it apparently looks like a helicopter… I don’t see it… But the snorkelling here was pretty nice with lots of reef fish, a couple of big coral heads, all just off the beautiful beach! I brought my underwater camera with me, but I haven’t quite mastered the underwater photography thing, so I have tons of photos of blue blur and overexposed blinding white light. The snorkelling was so nice that Nicole and I almost got left behind, as we were still in the water as the tour operators were getting ready to leave. Thankfully, Gail said something, but this is when we learned headcounts before leaving aren’t a thing, so we paid much closer attention at the next stops.

Stop 2 was to Matinloc Shrine, where you can pay extra to go take a photo of a statue or you can snorkel in the crystal clear waters and see a really cool drop off/wall of coral. Needless to say, I jumped in the water. I practiced my underwater photography skills here, with a couple of nudibranchs models!!

Stop 3 was for lunch, where we enjoyed fish and rice, watermelon and more views of crystal clear blue water and islands coming out of the water looking like icebergs, or straight out of Avatar (either one, the blue people or the anime, you choose).

Stop 4 was to secret beach, not to be confused with Stop 5, which was hidden beach. Very different. To get to secret beach, you need to swim through a narrow rock passage with a low ceiling, the difficult part being not drowning when 20 tourists are all trying to get through the passage at the same time, plus trying to avoid the propellers of boats running 3 feet away from the entrance. It was chaos. After the treacherous passage, the beach was beautiful! You’re surrounded by stunning rock formations all around you, like a beautiful natural swimming pool with some hard corals on the bottom, a couple of fish and tons of colourful crabs!

The final stop was hidden beach, again, very different from the secret beach, but this one is supposedly where they film Survivor every February? That’s what our guide told us, but after having a conversation with the older Canadian woman who is a die-hard fan and has weekly gatherings to bet on contestants with her friends, we decided that can’t be true. Upon googling, I’ve figured out that the Swedish version of Survivor was filmed here once, and so were the Israeli and South African spin-offs. There’s also a rumour that a season of Survivor Canada was filmed here in 2025? Unconfirmed. So all in all, a Survivor franchise has used this beach before, but there's no evidence that the Jeff Probst has set foot on this beach.

The tour wrapped up, and I had a beer with Gail and Nicole, watching the sunset on the beach before having dinner and exploring the El Nido nightlife a little bit. These girls kept me very entertained. They had something to say about everything, and a silly story for any topic.

The next morning, I had a bit of time before my bus back to Puerto Princesa, so I went and did the Canopy Walk to see El Nido from above! This was an experience where I’ve realized I really appreciate North American safety standards… the view from the top was beautiful, but I have to say that getting there was a bit more nerve-racking than I anticipated. They try to make you feel good by putting you in a harness and let you clip yourself onto a cable to walk across this ridiculously swingy suspension bridge but the carabiner that is supposed to hold you would not hold more than 50lbs and the “safety” cable is attached to the same frame as the bridge so in a scenario where the bridge were to malfunction, the cable would too!!

Safely back at sea level, I hopped on my bus to Puerto Princesa, where I met two more Canadian girls who go to Dal (what a small world), an Australian dive instructor, a girl from Belgium (20 minutes away from my university there), and a couple from Arizona! It was a fun social ride back that passed by much quicker than the ride there!

While on the bus, I was making the most of the small patches of cell service. Cue more reckless spontaneous efficiency! I only had one full day in Puerto Princesa before the next adventure, and there was one thing I really wanted to see: The Puerto Princesa Underground River.

I was a bit nervous that I wouldn’t be able to get to the underground river within my short time frame, but I found my new pal Nestor, the owner of a rental car company, who you can also rent as a private driver. He was sooo helpful and got me to Sabang, got me around a permitting issue and back home so efficiently!! He is the best! He also has some crazy stories about previous clients, including some big Russian guys who drank for the entire 5-hour drive to El Nido, an 18-year-old Swedish girl that Nestor rescued and personally escorted through the airport, which her mother back in Sweden was very grateful for, and some crazy coicidences in his life including that his ex-wife and current wife have the same birthdays AND his two sons that he has with repsective wives ALSO have the same birthday, and Christan names.

Anyways, I’ve really stepped it up in terms of the largest navigable underground waterways. In the fall of 2024, while in Lausanne, Switzerland, with Kimmy, Kenny, Annette, Peter, and James, we visited the largest navigable underground river in Europe, but here, I got to visit the largest navigable underground river in the world! Not only does it have that feature, but it’s also one of the 7 Natural Wonders of the New World and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. And boy, this cave system lived up to its titles! It was absolutely massive!! The distinctions made it so that there was a high standard of sustainable tourism, and the national park has put in measures like audio guides to promote silence, no artificial light sources in the caves except for the headlamps that the boat paddlers use, and a limit on tourists. The audio guides taught me so much, including that the stalagmites and stalactites grow 0.13mm/year, about the thickness of a hair. And this slow growth has made massive formations, including some named ones like the Sharon Stone, Pegasus, the Virgin Mary, the face of Jesus Christ, 2 T-Rexs and all of the vegetables required to make a very elaborate salad.

^ in this last photo... can you see His face??

We explored the first ~2km of the river, but it goes on for over 8km with tons of different rooms and chambers. The tallest part has a ceiling over 60m high, and there’s one chamber that’s 360m wide (the Italian explorers called this room “the Italians' Chamber”). It’s also geologically super interesting, and there are multiple rare minerals, more than any other cave in the world, including recently discovered Serabrancaite.

Then it was time for the epitome of my solo travel to the Philippines, Tubbataha Reef, aboard M/Y Dolphin. A 6-night liveaboard to the UNESCO World Heritage reef and supposedly some of the best diving in the world. I was so excited!! The ship was way bigger than I expected, with 19 divers and 12 staff, meaning we were very well taken care of!!

Getting on board was a little chaotic and disorganized, but once we got moving, things were pretty smooth sailing! It turned out that two girls from Israel and I were accidentally allowed to join a group that was supposed to have a private charter; everyone seemed pretty cool with this arrangement except for maybe the group leader/travel agent who happened to be my new roomie… Imagine her reaction when I asked for the bottom bunk...

Anyways, the diving made up for any awkwardness tenfold!! Tubbataha is really in the middle of nowhere! It’s a 14-hour sail from the closest landmass, so it’s only accessible by liveaboard, and due to the weather, the season is really short too, meaning you can only dive from March-May.

The reef is known for housing “the big 4”: whale sharks, tiger sharks, hammerheads, and manta rays, then massive schools of fish, big and small. We got super close to seeing a whale shark, seeing its shadow, but it was too quick, so we didn’t get up close and personal with it. But we did get to see massive schools of jacks, reef fish, more than 19 turtles in just one dive, big schools of black tip reef sharks, grey reef sharks (including one pregnant mama), tinsy pygmy seahorses and a beautiful octopus. My underwater camera wasn’t rated for the depths of the dives we were doing, but I did mooch some beautiful photos from my dive group.

The diving was just spectacular. Absolutely some of the best reefs I’ve ever seen! From the first dive, it was just like being at an aquarium, so many colourful corals, fish of all sizes, and visibility of probably about 30m. The current can get moving pretty quickly, but if managed well, it makes for the easiest and most scenic dives! There was one dive where the current was so fast that the reef was just flying by, Subway Surfers style! It was amazing and sooo fun!!

The liveaboard life is also absolutely for me. The days consist of waking up, diving, eating, diving, eating, diving, eating, diving, eating, then being totally acceptable to go to bed at 8 PM. This is actually my dream! Not one person gave me a hard time about tucking in at 8. Then we wake up at 5 AM and get to do it all again the next morning!!

On our last night on the reef, we had a BBQ karaoke party. It was the silliest experience. I didn't mention it before, but most of the group were Filipino doctors, surgeons, and high-up business people, the very serious type, so seeing them get down to Justin Bieber karaoke while in the middle of nowhere with rave lights and a smoke machine was just an indescribable atmosphere.

Back in Puerto Princesa, after saying bye to the group, I headed back to the same hotel and proceeded to do nothing but relax before my journey back to Australia. I relaxed by the garden pool, got the best massage I've ever had, impulsively got my haircut, and drank so much cucumber lemonade.

After 22 hours of travel, I made it back to Cairns, back to James, and back to reality (well...not actually... but more on that in the next post!)