A couple of days in Manila were more than enough (it's loud and packed with people, cars, tricycles and jeepneys) so after successfully locating an underwater housing for my camera, we flew into Legaspi and grabbed a van to Donsol. Donsol is known for its huge population of whale sharks and it did not disappoint. During our 3 hour boat rental, (everyone is alotted only 3 hours) we swam with 7 sharks! And these things are HUGE!!!!! The biggest one we saw was about the size of a bus (not exaggerating) and the smallest was maybe the size of a minivan. You would think it would scary, but they are so docile. You have to swim rather quickly to keep up with them, but only because they are so huge. So the shark is leisurely swimming along and you are on the surface booting it as fast as your fins will take you. Really amazing though and totaly worth the workout.
In a very sad twist, two nights later Kate and I were in a market buying dinner and picked out a fish dish. We were about half done our 'fish', when the lady comes by to ask us if we are enjoying our WHALE SHARK!!! We were both pretty horrified and said 'isn't it illegal to hunt whale shark?' to our taxi driver. He responded (100% serious) 'only if you get caught'. UGHH. So much for the informational video they made us watch about everyone helping in attempting to save the whale sharks.
Before moving on to Palawan, we fit in a dive to Mantabol, about 2 hrs away from Donsol by boat. This area is known as a cleaning station for huge Manta Rays so we were really excited it. Unfortunately, we were 6 divers to one dive master and 3 of those divers were...lets say... aquatically chanllenged. On the first dive one of them manage to slice a piece of coral clean in two because she was so preoccupied snapping pictures and not paying attention. Later, back on the surface, she informed me that she is an environmental educator. The irony was a bit much for me.
Anyway, we did get to see a one huge manta ray (the size of a small kitchen table), which was absolutely amazing. Unfortunately, we only got to see it for about 30 seconds before our dive master noticed that we were one diver short (apparently he had been missing for about 5 minutes!!!!!!) so we ended up missing the rest of the dive. The guy was fine, chilling out on the surfaced and smilling and waving as we swam up...apparently he just magically floated to the surface for no reason at all(ie. he messed up and hit the fill button on his BCD instead of empty)and when he finally got back down he couldn't find us. Oh well. C'est la vie!!!
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