Boracay

Before I begin this post today, I'd like to state, once and for all, that for some time I have been living a Li Hi lie. You may have noticed this from my recent blogs that have featured flower arranging, cafes and GOLD lounges, but if you have been reading over the past few months and have been passing this off as a phase, whilst whispering, 'No, it's not true!  It can't be true!  I won't believe it! Remember Salkantay?  Remember Toubkal?  They can't all be lies.  We'll see the true Li Hi Shan soon enough!' then I'm afraid I'm going to have to break your hearts and remind you of Rinjani, the beginning of the end for me. Remember Rinjani, guys?  Now, here, look at these pictures and you tell me whether I'm still an intrepid explorer, or a  five star, highly strung, middle class brat with a princess delusion...

 

Not very intrepid, I'm sure you'll agree.  However, if you would still like to be my friend, even though I have retired from hard work and dirt, please read on.

So, having sat on a plane on a runway for an hour in the middle of a raging storm, I eventually managed to leave Hong Kong and had a turbulent flight that scared the life out of me. I even had a conversation with God about all the things I had achieved so far in my life and all the reasons why, I guess, death at this point wouldn't be such a terrible thing and if this was The Plan for me, then at least I'd experienced business class at least once in my life.  The pilots, however, managed to deliver me safely into the arms of my long lost friend, Saint Karin, who has also been living in the tropics for 18 months. Her Tagalog far out trumps my Vietnamese and she was pleased to see that I too spend my days inside and thus am also a shade I like to call 'pale milk' despite the consistent 30+ degree heat we live in.  

This brief stop was followed by another flight on a very small, propellor powered plane, which was also delayed by over an hour, seemingly because Philippine Airlines forgot that they had to provide planes that day. That was quite an exciting plane, though, and I didn't fear for my life, and got to descend a small set of stairs like a 1960s First Lady in order to get off in the tiny airport of Caticlan. I managed to get some photos on my way back, which was quite cool:

Other than beautiful views from hotel balconies, enforced relaxation and sunbathing on floating bamboo rafts in the middle of greeny-blue bays, the point of this trip was to do some scuba diving. I'd explained to my part time travel buddies, Slender Laurel and Captain Mathman that if they were for scuba then I was a pea, and wonderfully, they were for scuba!  Even better, they were even more for scuba than I was, and Slender Laurel, a girl after my own heart, had signed up to do learning with scuba to get a certificate. Who doesn't love a certificate?  

Her advanced skills came in handy to me when it became apparent that I could not remember how to dive and would probably have been a liability under water had she not been my dive buddy. Having been reprimanded, gently, by the dive master, Peter, for testing my mask in the wrong way, I decided to spend all my time on the boat watching Slender Laurel put her equipment together as she mouthed and demonstrated each step to me like a Blue Peter presenter on mute.  I think I got away with it: any casual observer would have thought that I was a qualified expert. 

I was feeling much more confident when my life jacket was inflated and air appeared to be coming out of the pipes attached to my breathy thing, until I realised that if Slender Laurel was my dive buddy, responsible for my underwater survival, then I too was her dive buddy, and thus, if she died or got lost in a web of seaweed or eaten by a shark or stung, fatally, by a jellyfish, it would be my fault. Considering later in this trip I managed to slice the top of my finger off when trying to change the direction of an electric fan, the task of looking after someone else seemed somewhat daunting but hoping for the best, we all unceremoniously fell over backwards into the water and floated around looking at fish. 

Luckily, everything was juuuuuuuuuust fine, and the fish were very pretty. Highlights included these guys:

Big triggerfish.

Enormous Napoleon fish. 

Red snapper, which don't actually go red until you kill them. Fun fact!  All of them were quite big and scary and I wondered if they would be able to eat us. 

There were also some of these sea cucumbers, which I thought I had invented, aged 8, because every time I told someone about them, they refused to agree that they existed. But look, they're real (and really ugly):

We also did a really cool deep dive to 31m, to see a wrecked Yak-40 that we were able  to swim through, living out our Tin Tin and Indiana Jones fantasies Doing Exploring and Looking for Sunken Treasure and stuff. Cool. 

Obviously, this was all interspersed with lots of ice cream, beer, sunbathing, reading of the depressingly epic Philippino, 'Noli Me Tangere' (will I ever finish it?!) and frolicking in the sea at sunset, which is decidedly un-Li Hi but as I said, cometh the era of no shame associated with spas, posh hotels, champagne and business class.

Also, never fly with Philippine Airlines. Every flight I have taken with them has been delayed by more than an hour. Thank goodness for airport coffee and wifi.