south-east asia → philippines → pangasinan → alaminos city
distance: ~300 kilometers from home
max speed: 155 kilometers per hour (NLEX)
this is, at the moment, the longest continuous drive i’ve ever done. ‘got back this morning around 2am from alaminos, pangasinan, famous for its unique land/isle formations called ‘hundred islands’. i’ve been to this place with jun and don about a year ago, and i can say that is has changed a lot! there were much more establishments now, and a lot lot more rooms for rent, cottages, and even a public pay bathroom! we were actually joking of just sleeping in the car because we can have a bath for 10 pesos anyway, haha. but eventually after looking for several places, we ended up with a large fan room (fit enough for 5 of us), with a bathroom for only 700 pesos a night (really cheap), though it was really hot at the beginning, i think we hardly notice it after playing rounds of ‘in between’, where i lose as much as 200 pesos i guess..and jp was the grand champion of more than 600 pesos!
we shared grilled bangus, grilled longganisa, and java rice for dinner.. and look for ate helen (i knew her from previous trip) to arrange some food for tomorrow’s island escapade. we also arranged for a boatman, and he’ll pick us up the next day, sunday, at 6am, but for some reasons, he was late and we were just leaving the wharf? at about 8am already! we head to governors island first, where we climb several hundred steps up (116 steps according to len) to have a panoramic view of the islands! amazing. after that, we went pass children’s islands, and then on to the side of quezon island where we snorkle and swam up to coral island. these areas are protected and boats are not allowed so we have to do some swimming to go around (which is a good exercise anyway). unfortunately, some of the snorkling equipments they lent us are broken so several of us had some struggling looking for fishes, corals, and giant oysters. they were cultivating and growing corals so you can spot some cages underwater, though some of the corals are badly damaged, it might be because they only protected the area recently.
after 2 hours or so, we had to go back to our boat, again, by manual swim. a bit tired and obviously starving, we head to nearby quezon island, and had lunch. grilled bangus (but this time stuffed), some grilled eggplants, and a lot of rice. after eating up to stomach’s content, we went to marcos island. this is one of my favorite islands because it features a unique elevated cave (with bats hanging in the ceiling) and you can plunge down below (around 20 feet high) for a splash with the open sea view on the right side. the water is crystal clear (as in most of the islands), and you’ll do some rock climbing to go back again and jump another time. 
apparently, we are all a bit tired, so next stop is this island (’don’t know the name) and had it by ourselves, literally, for a couple of hours. just rest, lay under the sun, even dozed off, some more pictures, and before we knew, it’s almost time to go back.
one last stop is this island/cave (across the unnamed island), we stop for some view, until my battery died.
‘got back in our room around 6ish, and we have to check-out at 7pm, so we alloted 10-min bath for each of us. then, drove off back to the central area and had dinner in a carinderia, where we met and shared dinner with a local friend, Regi. Then off to start the enormous travel back to south. ‘was trying to beat our previous absolutely slow travel time of 8 hours (i drove all the time, including stopovers nearly in every town to ask for directions) from binan to alaminos. succesfully, we made it at 5 hours or less going back. amazing 3 hours saved due to less stop overs, and i think we went a different way going back (passed by san fernando, pampanga, instead of conception?) and len drove the NLEX to C-5 route.
more of the pictures are here.
