♬ Bora Bora Bora Boracay ♬

Callum and Aly (our second pair of visitors) had decided that travelling from England to Korea wasn't enough. So we decided to take advantage of one of our longer term breaks at the end of April and go to The Philippines for five days.

This did not evolve to be the simple "hop" between Asian countries that I had hoped it would be; to get there we left the night before our 8am flight to stay at at Kiss and Fly hostel (would recommend) close to Incheon airport. Our travelling day started at at 5:30am with a nice fry-up, then a quick drive to the airport with everything going smoothly. The 4 hour flight was also fine, and we even gained an hour when we arrived. This crazy thing about this is that we probably arrived in the Philippines at around midday, but we didn't arrive at the hostel until after 7pm. This was a result of having to take almost every form of transportation imaginable to get to our hostel in Boracay. Firstly, 10 minute taxi between terminals, then a 2 hour wait for the 1 hour (turbulent) aeroplane from Manila to Kalibo, next came a bus for an hour and a half across an island, afterwards we took a 15 minute ferry across to Borocay, finally a death-ride in a struggling motorbike/sidecar/failed transformer which would have thrown me and my bag out had I not held onto everything.

Anyway, after getting lost in the dark for a while, after about 14 hours in total of travelling, we made it.

The hostel (Frendz) was amazing. We arrived at happy hour to San Miguel at 30 pesos each (50p). The hilarious staff noticed how happy happy hour was making us so extended it another 3 hours. We immediately made friends with most of the people around us, including a couple from Korea, well Korean girl and American guy. We proceeded to make her homesick by showing off our meagre Korean vocabulary. 

Despite our 14 hours of travelling (and pretty grim physical state), the first night turned out to be one of the craziest. At about midnight we ventured down the shore in flip-flops, shorts and a vest to see what the nightlife was like, we found the busiest club and rounded off our 24 hour day there.

We all woke up feeling pretty good the next day and got to the beach as quickly as possible to while away the afternoon.

We went for a little souvenir shopping in the afternoon, but other than that tried to keep things relaxing.

The sunset views were very nice, and with the tide out in the evening the beach became busier than in the day.

Dinner the second night did not turn out to be a success. We were recommended an authentic Filipino restaurant, then were even recommended dishes from the menu. My karu karu was a chunky slice of beef fat in a thick peanut sauce, and was inedible. And Callum's tuna panga was half a tuna head. Now I have not blacklisted Filipino food because of this experience, we are at fault for ordering the wrong things (we later found out that tuna panga translates as tuna jaw...) but hey we were still hungry. 

After dinner we met up with friends again and went to a beach bar with live reggae music for the rest of the evening.

I had been really excited to do some water sports as it's pretty cheap. But instead of jet-skiing off by myself we decided to get a crate and go sailing around the island for the afternoon.

Well we didn't actually do the sailing, we just enjoyed the view. We stopped off at a couple of places, the nicer one being Puka beach on the other side of the island.

Unfortunately we were whisked off this paradise beach after only 15 minutes, so we took the sunbathing back to our regular hangout for the rest of the afternoon.

The following day we had planned to leave the party island of Borocay to have a luxurious relax at a nearby mini-resort. We met the resort rep at 10am the next day and went by boat for half an hour to a nearby island. The four of us not only turned out to be the only guests at this relatively new hotel, but also the only four foreigners on the island. 

This suited us just fine.

The hotel was pretty luxurious, as was the pure ocean.

A side note about the hotel staff, they were lovely people, but were quite inexperienced. For example, the food was great but it took well over an hour from ordering to it arriving. This led to the strange routine of us leaving the beach, ordering dinner, then going for a shower and having a drink while it was being made.  

Unfortunately we had to leave after two nights to experience once again the arduous journey "home" to Korea. All-in-all a very exhausting taste of The Philippines where we most definitely made the most of every second of our term break (we missed a nights sleep, got back at 10:30am and started teaching at 2:30pm).