Daydreams on the Moon

Image by Thomas G. from Pixabay

It's been six years since my last adventure with mom, aside from the corona era happening, I also moved to another country right after, so this is me coming home on a month-long vacation planning to tick of three places off the travel bucketlist. It won't be easy this time around though as my mom has also been suffering with mobility issues that require her walking with a cane for long distances, hence why us getting back to our usual adventures after all these years has made me anxious on booking this week-long domestic trip. Fortunately, the airline I booked with had been very accommodating with assisting my mom between airport gate transfers and such:

Cheers to our airline for making it a wonderful roundtrip journey!

Now, I haven't really mentioned where we were going for this week-long adventure, so here's where we landed:

Touchdown to our first location!

So really I booked an 8-day journey through some of the well-known spots in the island of Palawan, starting with our first two days being at Puerto Princesa where we'll be staying overnight at this nice accommodation:

Located at a cul-de-sac part of the city, making it real quiet even at night!

The spacious lobby

This serves as their restobar with quick access to their poolside!

Spoiler: had a good night's swim here!

Lots of rooms but here's ours!

Really big room with a double deck too!

Sharing some pork adobo before our afternoon tour!

Firstly, I have to thank Trippy Travel and Tours for making this itinerary possible. I've been researching some go-to sights and packages usually done on trips to Palawan but the several tour groups I had inquired with before discovering Trippy fell short on communicating fast enough, just ghosting me (which is a red flag in itself), or just had gaps in how the transfers inbetween these locations would take place. Trippy, like I said, was heavensent - Ms. Irey would always follow up on us at the end of the day's tour how everything went and they were absolutely efficient and patient with any questions I had for the details of our trip. Also taking into consideration that I did notify them of my mom having mobility issues as well, all our lodgings and pickups were most definitely accessible for her. With that said, after our satisfying lunch, we finally started our afternoon tour of the city! A trip to the local jewelry shop was ironically the first stop featuring their southsea pearls, bought a pair as a birthday gift for myself but really, I most enjoyed what came after:

A scenic hilltop location named after a late statesman, Mitra's Ranch offered some fun outdoor activities that was at least exciting for me. And even though it had drizzled earlier in the day, fortunately it had eased up enough for me to try their Giant Rainbow Slide and Skywalk with Zipline activities!

Mom had to opt out for obvious reasons

Me spending time taking selfies as the person in front was suuuper slow..

After what I consider to be the highlight of this day's activities, Baker's Hill was more of a big garden you had to walk around in to just take photos in, albeit it looked fun for kids but really we should have headed out as fast as possible to the exits where we had to go thru the local bakery that sold their advertised "best egg tart in town". Of course, it was all sold out by the time me and mom got there, but oh well...

Entryway

What I tell ya, kids are gonna love those...

Found this on a mini viewpoint further in...

The next venue was the Butterfly Garden slash Crocodile Farm (though really it was only a small crocodile inside this aquarium), the garden was alright though - had these butterflies fluttering around while there were also mini exhibits of other insects like scorpions and millipedes. The main activity here was the Tribal Village where visitors were given an introduction of the remaining Palauan tribe and their people's way of living among a growing urbanized island - it was interesting and their were also photoshoots involved that you can have printed for a fee at the end of the tour:

We had a couple printed but this one's my favorite! XD

We ended the day with a last stop to a souvenir shop where mom and I bought our traditional t-shirts of a local place we'd visit along with a fridge magnet and some local snacks. We just drove by the remaining stuff on the itinerary list like the Baywalk and the Immaculate Concepcion Cathedral (the latter having loads of people seeing as it was a Sunday so...) After which, we were dropped off to each of our accommodation where mom and I just opted to share a pizza from the in-house resto, wherein I even had a late night swim at the adjacent poolside.

https://3speak.tv/watch?v=ilovewintergem/puerto-princesa---city-tour-374

Beer and pizza for a nightcap, pretty poofed after today...

Not too bad for the 1st day's activities, nothing too tiring but a great introduction to the city in itself, but the real highlight of Puerto Princesa is about what's to come on our 2nd day, so stayed tuned on the next post for our Underground River tour!