El Nido - translation - I'll Needo dunny! 26/02/2026.

Some days, the bus is empty and the open road sets you free.

Some days, the bus is packed and you suffocate.

Some days (and nights) you’re chained to the porcelain bus… (B.J.S. 2026)

Mabuhay from El Nido,

After leaving our wonderful hosts in Port Barton, we got the obligatory trike to the bus stop, ready for our 3 - 4 hour journey to El Nido. Now, Jen-Jen has booked mostly everything on this trip, but I stepped up and booked the bus to El Nido.

No worries, except that it wasn’t a coach, but it was a mini-van that could comfortably seat 12 Filipinos, but they had booked 12 large Anglos on board. Jen sat on the bus for 10 minutes while they filled it and said - no way am I riding in this sardine-can death trap.

So, we got our luggage off the roof and hired a private van for 6K!!!

Needless to say, this bloke has been relegated again to pack mule and muscle… Oh well, a short-lived shot at tour leader, albeit unsuccessfully…

Old mate driver was stoked with the coin, and broke the Filipino land speed record for mountainous corners and highways as we made it to the Islandfront Cottages in El Nido in under 3 hours. He also rang a few of his mates on the way, laughing and bragging about his fare. Good luck to him, I say. It’s the little wins in life.

Shaken nerves aside, our room was beachfront, and the baking sunset greeted us as we relaxed with a lime cordial and a cucumber shake! (Delicious - cucumber, water and ice in the blender. So refreshing!) The pics below are ones that we took on this first night.

What a place, we thought. Can’t wait to snorkel in this pristine ocean. El Nido and Coron are considered the best snorkelling spots in the Philippines. 

Dinner that night (or the next, the days are blurry) saw us eating at a posh beachside joint, where Jen-Jen went for the mussels, but I opted for chicken satay.

I won’t dwell too much on the rest of our stay here, but Jen ended up in the hospital with food poisoning, and we spent the night in a room as she was put on a drip. They sent us home with a bag full of medication and strict instructions to rest.

We then changed hotels and stayed at the beautiful El Nido Garden Resort. This place was the schmick, but then this guy got food poisoning and drove the porcelain bus for a few days.

I ended up back at the doctor's too, as I had an ear infection from all of the trapped water. The doctor flushed my ear and sent ME off with a bag of medication.

So there we were. Two sick kids, stuck in a hotel room with a cornucopia of medication on our bedside table, while outside the window, the best snorkelling in all of SE Asia went begging...

It wasn’t all doom and gloom, though; we managed to recover enough to do an organised snorkelling trip. We had actually booked it the first night that we checked into Islandfront, but had to keep pushing it back due to nearly dying…

Anyway, we got picked up from our resort at 8.30 am to do the famous El Nido Tour C.

The itinerary was pretty standard. About 20 people on the boat with 5 stops:

• Secret Beach - where we kayaked in the most beautiful water

• Hidden Beach - where we swam between two cliffs to emerge into an actual hidden beach. 

• Snorkelling site - some cool coral

• Talisay Beach - lunch - not quite as good as the last one

• Helicopter Island - beautiful white sand and shady coconut palms.

It was a pretty epic day - as seen from the Google pics below -  but the old snorkelling with life jackets rig was painful, as was my still water-logged ear!

But as they say, a bad day on the water is better than a good back at work, and this wasn’t even a bad day.

All up, we spent a week here, and we were sick for about 5 days. Not the best time ever, but we’re still standing, and thankfully no longer crying on the toilet floor…

We also had one more accommodation change and stayed at the “young person’s” place called Frendz Hostel. They had a DJ pumping choons until the ungodly hour of 11 pm, and then, they ferried all of the kids to somewhere else in town, and the hostel was a ghost town. Pretty cool organisation, and a great place to stay if you're in the party zone, rather than the recovery zone! P.S. - this is what El Nido trikes look like... pretty epic!

To finish our El Nido stay, I tentatively booked a high-speed ferry to Coron for our next stay.

Stay tuned, dear readers, to see if The Dude redeemed himself or if he’s destined to just carry heavy bags for the rest of the trip…

‘Til next time.