Barocay

Wow, it has been too long since I posted. Since my last post, we went to Barocay, which is an awesome island that has some of the best beaches I have ever seen. We woke up on Saturday morning, figured it would be fun to go, so we rushed to the airport and bought our tickets on Sea Air – on a prop airplane.

While going to the Airport (the airport terminals are spread apart in separate buildings on different properties) we noticed a bunch of emergency vehicles on a runway. We asked the taxi driver what was going on, and he informed us that a Victoria Airlines flight crashed, and some people didn’t make it – scary! Fast forward about an hour and a half later, we’re landing into Barocay. The pilot takes his initial approach, and aborts his landing at the last second. We fly around, and circle back for the second approach… same thing, he aborts at the last second. At this point, I’m wondering if this guy knows how to land a plane. The runway is right off the beach, and is incredibly short. If you don’t hit it just right, you crash. The pilot comes around on his third attempt, hits the edge of the runway and slams on the brakes… we barely stop at the edge of the runway. Interesting that he has to do that a couple of times a day.

Barocay was awesome and relaxing. We hunted for a while to find a hotel (since we had no reservations), and finally settled on some place called Nigi Nigi Noo Noos or something like that. We chose the place based on the fact that they had two awesome dogs outside, and their bar was populated with decent looking people and played awesome music. My roommate has this thing where he will never eat at empty restaurants, etc – his theory is that crowds make smarter decisions (not always true).

Anyway, Barocay was chill, we spent time just sitting on the beach. We also got to do some snorkeling at what is for sure some of the best reefs in the world. Philippines has world class diving as well. When I get around to posting pictures, you’ll get a sense of what I am talking about.

The music scene in Barocay is awesome too, and as usual we ended up partying with one of the rock bands. Though it was a relaxing weekend, it wasn’t fee of our client panicking and calling us to do some work. We had no internet connection, and explained to her that we were at the beach (she didn’t think that we were off the island entirely). We also booked our flight to leave Barocay at 6am on Monday morning, and we figured we’d make it into the office by 9am…the client assumed we were local and come Sunday she starts making requests for us to send her additional slides for a presentation we had on Wednesday. In the end, it wasn’t that important, and she understood.

Taking off from the runway was less eventful. The pilot applied the brakes, spooled up the engines and let the brakes go and away we went. Prop planes can be fun…