A couple of days after Anne had left us for Manila, Kevin and I signed up for a big group tour through Art Cafe. This time, we embarked on Tour B. The food wasn’t as good with the Art Cafe tour as it had been with the Golden Monkeys Tour, but the content of the tour was similar, as it’s a standard experience.
I think we preferred our smaller tour with Anne and Loc, but being in a big group had its own advantages. For one, we got to check out how some other experienced travellers did things. Apparently everyone except us got the memo that it’s essential to have a waterproof travel bag to hold all your stuff on the boat. Kinda like this version from MEC. It’s not really essential, but it definitely would’ve been nice, and would’ve kept our stuff a bit drier/sand-free.
We had expected Tour B to have more beaches, but instead it was heavy on snorkelling. Kevin’s not really into snorkelling, so he worked on his tan from the boat, while I snorkeled around looking for cute fishes and what not. Our photos really don’t do justice to the reality of how beautiful El Nido is. The highlight for us was Snake Island, of which Google has lots of great shots.
The video does a pretty good job of showing what it was like to snorkel there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jreYq3hXjvU
Aside from the natural beauty, we were pretty infatuated with the #selfiestick. You can read more about this phenomenon here and here, but essentially it was something we’d only heard about until the tour. Then, as we arrived at our first stop for a bit of snorkelling, Kevin and I turned around and watched in awe as the 5 other couples on our tour pulled out their Selfie Stick/GoPro combo. What’s a Selfie Stick? It’s a stick, with a camera on the end of it, that you use to take photos of yourself or your travels. From what we can tell, it was invented by GoPro, which makes a lot of sense, because I’m sure it didn’t take long for them to saturate the Extreme Sports Athlete market, and there’s nothing people love more than taking photos of themselves. It’s a handy camera for making underwater videos, but we also saw it used to take all kinds of other photos, including selfies. After that day, we saw them everywhere – I’m sure it won’t be long before they’re everywhere in North America. I’m expecting there to be a serious uptick in selfie-related injuries in the coming years.
Check out our photos below, taken with the traditional human arm/hand combo:
the stories that I'm telling. 
Heatha! This looks like the most beautiful place eva!! I can’t get over your photos!
Ps- that is a great swim suit!! 😉
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