Surfin’ Siargao
Siargao. The surf capital of the Philippines.
We love surf towns. We don’t even surf but we love the vibe and culture of surf towns. Odds are you will find us living in a surf town at some point because it is where we feel most at home. Maybe eventually we will learn to surf, but for now we are content enjoying the laid back lifestyle.
Siargao is an outlier island. It sits on the far east end of the archipelago and directly faces the vast pacific ocean (probably what makes it so good for surfing). After a quick stop in Cebu to do some shopping for snorkeling gear, we took the 1 hr flight to Siargao. We had actually originally only planned for 5 days but upon further research extended our stay to 7, and were glad we did.
First thing we noticed when getting off the plane was how much it felt like Jurassic Park. The mountainous island is covered in coconut palms and lush greenery. This might have been the smallest airport we have been in, little more than 2 rooms, one for arrivals and one for departures. After landing we quickly boarded a packed shared shuttle to town.
We stayed in the General Luna area of the island (the main town area) and rented a motorbike to get around.
Some of our favorite highlights included Cloud Nine, Magpupungko Tide Pool and just scooting around the island, seeing what we could find, and enjoying the landscape. Boat tours that take you to several sites are popular too but we were dealing with some illness through this stop so ultimately passed on the boat day.
This was also our first experience with the well documented power challenges of the Philippines. The power infrastructure is certainly developing in some places and some more remote areas and smaller islands deal with regular brownouts or blackouts. Sometimes they are planned, and sometimes they are impromptu due to supply/demand (something as Texans we are no stranger to). We had an experience with an impromptu blackout that forced us to spend the day at the beach, darn... It was very “cool” (from a nerdy anthropological perspective) to see how the island persisted through this regular power occurrence.
Cloud Nine is a famous surf beach that holds surf competitions (in season) and is overall just a chill beach to relax and spend the afternoon. It was during our power outage day that we decided to pack up and head to this beach for the day. We did some snorkeling in the reef just off the surf break and laid by the water enjoying the day.
One day we took a 90 minute motorbike ride to the other side of the island to visit Magpupungko Tide Pool. While quite the ride on a bike, this was probably our top experience of the trip. We arrived just before low tide and got to experience the vibrancy of the tide pool and the vast rocky landscape where waves once were. There are a few main pools the closest walk from the beach, with kids swimming and people jumping off rocks. We opted to keep walking down the coast and found our own private paradise with shallow, crystal clear waters.
We also experienced our first earthquake. Before we even arrived in the Philippines Viv mentioned wanting to experience a small earthquake as it was one of few natural occurrences we have not encountered. Sure enough we were awoken at around 6:00am one morning by some light shaking. It was clear enough to know it was an earthquake, but not hard enough to knock anything off its axis. We later found out it was a magnitude 6.8 earthquake that hit off the coast of the main island of the Mindanao region.