Early morning surf session

Christine and I got up early and made our way down to the beach break near the Harana Surf Resort. It had been raining on and off all night long. When we arrived at the break there were still a few fun ones around just like yesterday evening. Christine was a little wary having heard some thunder as we were hitting the beach. I paddled out and Christine, being the more sensible one, decided to stand on the beach and watch. 

I was having a great time catching a few fun waves when out of the ominous dark clouds that were overhead, so not really unexpected, came a massive clap of lightning not far out to sea. I am pretty sure that I felt the affects in the water. Either way, I decided that the beach was probably a lot safer than being the highest point out on the ocean, and play time was over. I caught the next wave in and stayed low to the board. Now let me explain how the entrance to the beach works at Harana, there is a small sandy gap of around 10 – 15 feet that allows you to walk out onto a flat surface area that runs up and down the beach from where you can surf, the rest of the way up and down the beach an endless wall of ancient corral spreads in both directions. You can surf up and down the beach provided you don’t get too close to the shore and that wall of corral. To exit and enter the surf area you must go through the gap or risk being speared by the wall of coral. Unfortunately I was a little off the mark and my smooth glide to the beach came to an abrupt stop when I hit a piece of coal that was jutting out from the wall, just below the surface of the water. The sudden stop put a nice little ding in the board and a scratch up my arm. There was a bloke on the beach, one of the surf instructors, who was yelling to me that I would need to go back out and around. 

Once I had navigated myself back to the beach and we were heading back to Siargao Residencies, we met up with Scotty who was going to take a look at Cloud 9 and see if anything was happening there. 

Board Repairs at Harana

We got ourselves sorted and then took our battered boards over to Harana to have them repaired. The bloke at the board shop laughed when he saw us and said ‘you were the bloke out these this morning’ I replied with ‘yep, I was indeed the one crazy person who dared to venture out this morning’ this was the same surf instructor who had been yelling advice to me from the beach. The Mike from the Harana surf shop quoted me 300php for each ding, 3 of mine and 1 that one of the boards had come with. I didn’t think I had done too badly having surfed pretty much every one of the 9 days on the spikiest reef break in the world.

Having dropped the boards, we hired the motorbike that Joel, the security guard from Siargao Residency, had sourced for us. By the time I had taken it for a test drive and arrived back it was once again bucketing down with rain. Scotty had returned from Cloud 9 saying that not much was happening over there. We ate some breakfast, it was still raining, we ate eggs on toast, it was still raining, I wrote in my journal, it was still raining. 

The Magpupungko Rock Pools

Finally the rain abated a little and we headed out on the bikes. We made it just down to Daper, just down the road from La luna, before the rain started again. It rained pretty much all the way to the Maasin River where we had been jumping off the tower. We stopped to eat some Banana cue, once we had eaten our fill we continued on to the rock pools. We knew we were getting close to the Magpupungko Rock Pools when we found a group of people under a tent charging 60php each to enter. We entered, and then were charged another 20php to park each of the motorcycles. Thankfully this was the last fee that we encountered. 

I will admit that at first the Magpupungko rock pools inspired an ‘is this all?’ type of reaction, and then we spied it, a group of people were jumping off a giant piece of ancient coral into the biggest, deepest rock pool I have ever seen. This made the 70php per person entry fee all better. We quickly joined the few people jumping off and caught some fun videos. Once we felt like we had had our money’s worth we took a look around the rest of the rock pool. Here is where I discovered that every single crevice had a mini sea urchin wedged in it. We took some photographs with the spectacular back drop of ancient corral boulders with plant life atop them that would turn into mini islands during the high tide. We then found a bloke who was pulling full sized sea urchins out of a large rock pool that was right on the waters edge, now by large I mean this bloke was swimming around in this rock pool, it was probably around the same size as a large spa bath. He would dive beneath the waters surface with a diving mask and a piece of hooked wire, he would use the hook to pry the sea urchins out, he would then toss them up onto the flat rock area where we were standing, where his son would gingerly pick them up and put them into a giant plastic bucket with all of the other urchins that had been collected. The sea urchins were absolutely massive. It was around this point that we noticed a set of dark clouds rolling in and decided it was time to start moving towards some shelter. Some of the local tourists stopped Byron and Scotty so that they could get a photograph with them. 

We reached the shelter just as the heavens opened up and the rain came pelting down. We chilled and ate some food that Christine had prepared while we waited for the rain to abate. There was a vendor selling enormous cassava chips that he would coat with a sweet sauce, he used the sweet sauce to write messages on each of the cassava chips. We decided that we should try them, and they were delicious. Scotty found himself a restaurant that served vegetarian curry and fresh coconuts. 

The General Luna Local Market (The Wet Markets)

Once the rain abated a bit we decided that it was time to head back to Siargao Residency. On the way back we stopped at the Maasin River to get some more banana cue, this time I tried the one that was wrapped in pastry and deep fried, it was also delicious. It started raining not long after we left the Maasin River and pretty much rained all the way back to the wet market. 

We collected some supplies from the  General Luna Local Market (wet markets) and then made our way back to the Siargao Residency to have a warm shower and a siesta. We went to sleep at around 5 and didn’t get up until 7. We cooked up chicken, vegetables and some rice for dinner. 

After dinner Christine and I went for a walk across to cloud 9. We walked out on the board walk, and apart from one other couple who left shortly after we arrived, we were the only ones out there. We danced some salsa under the full moon and took in the view of cloud 9 bathed in moonlight. We strolled back to Siargao Residency and flopped into bed exhausted after a long and productive fun filled day.