After another TWO HOURS on the boat, we took a car from Tagbilaran to Alona Beach and finally arrive a little past 1:30am. Our taxi driver took us to a few different hotels trying to find vacancy without much luck. Then he looked us up and down and said, I know a place that probably has vacancy if you don't mind a place that's a little....different.
Before passing out, we had managed to book a snorkeling tour with a local named Ricky who pulled his boat up on the beach right next to where we were finishing our breakfast!
Mer doesn't like scuba diving (she has trouble equalizing the pressure in her ears) but she was excited to snorkel around the reef while we were diving.
We walked around Long Beach for thirty minutes or so, but Meredith was feeling really crummy (just in case you couldn't tell from the face she's making in this photo...hahaha) and it looked like it was about to start pouring soon. So rather than risk having to do the long walk back over slippery rocks in a downpour, we opted to hire a longtail boat to take us back to the beach near our part of the island.
The next day we were SO. HUNG. OVER. that we didn't really managed to get showered and out of the room until around 3pm! We decided to take it easy and hired a local guy to take us on a three hour longtail boat tour of the surrounding islands.
Madinat Jumeirah is ridiculous even by Dubai's standards. It's a resort that takes up an entire kilometer of the coast and the entire thing is connected by man-made waterways. Here's the "water taxi" that showed up to take us from the lobby to the restaurant.
Meredith and my mom showing off their flyswatters. Coastal NJ in the summer is plagued with greenhead flies. They bite during the day and it hurts like HELL.
