mayhem!!

we took the ferry from boracay back to panay, then another ferry over to mindoro. we had planned to head off right away up to puerto galera, but we noticed a promising looking place from the boat, just on the water, and as it was already 5pm we decided to stay there for the night. and what a choice little random stop it was. a nice big white house with a large open balcony, and rocking chairs where you could just sit and watch the ships go in and out...much nicer than the place where we thought we'd have to spend the night on up north.

the next morning we took a minibus (so squashed!) and then a jeepney (so dusty!) up the winding roads to puerta galara. we knew this was also a bit of a tourist spot but quite quiet, so we got a bit of a shock to arrive on the beach to see about 500 people or so, loads of music playing and everyone generally going a bit mad! it was pretty good actually...we haven't seen anything like this in the philippines and we thought we'd found the new ibiza!

turned out to be a bank holiday weekend, so it was more crowded than normal, but still! how coul dthere be that many?! then we couldn't get a room anywhere... in the end our trusty tent came to the rescue and we got a lovely spot beside the beach- a much better spot than we could've possibly got even if there had been rooms i think. the night out turned out to be a little disappointing cos even tho there were lots of bars and they'd been playing fairly decent stuff during the day, it seemed at night they all just started playing that horrible bump'n'grind type stuff. rubbish! and it wans't that mad, just very loud- too many interfering sound systems!

we also discovered that there no banks in pg, and we hadn't enough cash to pay for anything. so the next day marc went off around 9am to the nearest town 1 1/2 hrs away...so i went for a walk to the next beach which was actually gorgeous-big green hills sweeping right down to the sea- and empty!, which made arrving back round at our beach a bit of a nightmare. just bright signs, hotels and thousands of people, and boats! spent the rest of the day trying desperately to find shade. there didnt appear to be any at all on the beach, and there was a large function at our place, so the tent thing wasn;t so good anymore. nowhere to go, nowhere to sit, nowhere to hide! no good at all!! decided i didnt much like puerta galera after all. marc finally arrived back at 4pm- was getting very worried, and very sunburned by this time. finally we got to go and eat, and everything was ok again!