Monday January 31, 2011

The Philippines 2007

In May of 2007 I was fortunate to be invited to be part of a FAM(1) trip to the Philippines.   FAM trips are operated by travel companies (usually wholesalers) to give travel agents and other people involved in selling travel the opportunity to see the destinations that they are encouraging their customers to go to for vacations and scuba diving.   When I was in the dive store travel business I  always adhered to the rule that I would never send my customers to some place that I either did not have personal knowledge of our that one of my staff had not visited.  I believe that this is the only way a travel agent can honestly represent a destination.  There are some travel agents who just look the destination up on the web (or in a catalogue) and say “this looks good” and book their clients.   As I have discovered time and again what it looks like on the web or in a flyer is not always reality.

There is nothing to compare to being there and seeing first-hand what the hotels look like, to experiencing the air lines and the airports and the land transfers and the boat transfers to be able to tell your clients what they can really expect when they plunk down their hard earned money for a vacation. 

We stayed at two different hotels and visited a third on our trip.   Our host hotels were Atlantis Dumaguete and Atlantis Puerto Galera.   They are owned by the same company and two of the owners – Gordon and Andy accompanied us for the entire trip.   Their third partner George made a brief appearance one day at Dumaguete..   Atlantis Resort at Dumaguete on the Island of Negros is a somewhat rustic sprawling complex of 37 rooms on the beach.  The rooms are very comfortable, but small and they could use better lighting but otherwise they were just fine.   The restaurant and the meals were great.   The most impressive part of this resort (and of the sister property at Puerto Galera on the island of Mindoro) is the dive operation.   The dive lockers are roomy and the rinsing facilities are quite good.   But the crew is outstanding.   The experience is as closed to live-aboard diving as you can get with a land-based operation.    Once you set up your dive gear you never handled it again.   The crew took care of everything.  

Diving at Dumaguete was either from shore (called the House Reef) or from traditional Philippine outrigger boats.   These boats called Bangka are basically very large long and narrow canoes with the outriggers providing amazing stability.   They are also very maneuverable.   Most of our dives were drift dives and the boat seemed to be able to track our groups and get to us quickly when we surfaced.   Because about 80 percent of the dive critters we were looking for are small and sometimes difficult to find the policy at both Dumaguete and at Puerto Galera is to divide dive groups in to small teams of between 4 and 6 divers with a dive guide.   The guides are awesome at finding stuff.

Our first dive at Dumaguete was a shore dive on the house reef.   When Marco our guide was briefing this dive he referred to “the tires” and my thoughts were “I came this far to dive a bunch of junk”.   Well I can honestly say that it was one of the most amazing dives I have made in years.   The “junk” has become habitat to an incredible array of critters both small and large.   We were told that there would be frog fish.  My experience with frog fish has been with the 4 inch high brightly colored ones I have encountered in Curacao, Bonaire and Dominica.   When Marco pointed to a blob on the side of a tire and wrote frog fish on his slate I stared and stared and suddenly I realized that I was looking for a “small frog fish” and instead the entire blob (about 2 feet wide) was the frog fish.   After that encounter I began to notice these monster frog fish on dive sites all over the area.   The same can be said for scorpion fish.   In the Atlantic and Caribbean I am used to seeing them about a foot long and fairly well defined.   At Dumaguete and again at Puerto Galera they were huge and found in the most unusual places.

In addition to my surprise with finding huge frog fish the little stuff was incredible.   It seemed that there was an endless stream of nudibrachs, flat worms, sea slugs and snails.   Everywhere we looked I was discovering something I had never seen before.   Included among this was a Sea Horse swimming along the bottom.  This whole area re-defines “muck diving”.   The big scenery is also very awesome but it is the little stuff that overwhelms you.  I came back from my first dive at Dumaguete and told Gordon (one of the hotel owners) that my friends were not going to believe me when I told them that I just had one of the best dives of my life in visibility where I frequently lost track of my buddies.   The house reef is right in front of the hotel and there is a bit of boat traffic and not much of a current so things are stirred up most of the time.

As I mentioned, Atlantis a Dumaguete is somewhat rustic.   There are 37 rooms all very similar laid out in a series of  two story building winding from the entrance past the swimming pool and leading to the hotel lobby, the dive shop and the sea-side restaurant.  All the rooms are quite comfortable but lack storage and adequate lighting.  At least in the opinion of someone who likes to read a bit before going to sleep.   Otherwise they are really very adequate.   The restaurant is awesome with lots of fresh choices in seafood as well as meat dishes and a good variety of choices.   As with the staff throughout the hotel the wait staff at the restaurant cannot do enough to help you.   In fact it is hard to carry your own stuff anywhere.   I was walking to my room with my SeaLife camera system and a staff member came up behind me and offered to carry it for me.

After five beautiful days at Dumaguete we took a flight back to Manila and were then transferred by both van and Bangka to the island of Mindoro where the other Atlantis Resort is situations.  Puerto Galera lies approximately 100 miles due south of Manila. The place is situated on the north tip of Mindoro Island across the Verdi island passage from Luzon (the main island where Manila is situated.)

The first impression of the resort at Puerto Galera is that it is much busier than at Dumaguete.   This is somewhat of an illusion created by the fact that the hotel is right in the middle of town (in reality the main street runs right through the hotel property).   There is also a lot of boat traffic in the area so there is no shore diving at Puerto Galera.   And the diving, for the most part is from small boats that accommodate 5 to 6 divers.   The hotel itself sort of climbs the mountain with the dive operation and restaurant at street level and the rooms on successively higher levels.   My dive buddy Leesa Wiesner and I lucked out and got one of the Flintstone Suites two levels above the dive shop and overlooking the harbor.   It was an awesome view and a great room.   This room and a companion suite on the same level can easily accommodate a family of 4 or a group of 3 to 4 dive buddies.   There is a king size bed and large roomy bunk beds as well as a mini bar and balcony with shower and gear hanging facilities.   It has a connecting door to the other suite so you could really accommodate a large family or group of 6 to 8 people in the two suites.    The other rooms at the hotel (a total of 40) were very nicely decorated and laid out.   There were 2 other suites similar to ours in size throughout the property as well as a honeymoon suite on a level of it’s own at the top of the hill.

Our dives at Puerto Galera were equally as memorable as those at Dumaguete.   Except at Puerto Galera we saw a lot more schools of fish and macro fish that seem to exist only in this area.   The outrageously colored mandarin fish which prefers junk as its habitat and the “impossible to find on your own” Pigmy Sea Horse which as an adult is no large than your smallest finger nail were found with ease by our able dive guides.

We had 4 days of diving at Puerto Galera and I can honestly say that they were all excellent (as were the dives at Dumaguete).   The only bad part of the trip was the long travel times getting back to Columbus.   Even with that down side I would highly recommend the Philippines and diving with Atlantis.  If you want to be pampered excessively (I forgot to mention that the spas at both resorts are top notch and a full hour long massage is only $14), have great food, and great diving too boot these are the places to find all of the above.   Many thanks to Trip N Tour Pacific, George, Gordon and Andy for the opportunity to participate in the trip.   I plan to come back.   - Carol

For some photos from this trip go to the Photo Gallery