JDelage
Contributor
I just came back from 2 weeks in the Philippines, adding up to 9 days of diving, and thought I'd share my experience here. Feel free to ask questions.
Inbound flight:
I flew Delta from Seattle to Seoul, had a 4hr layover, and then flew Korean Air from Seoul to Manila, to land in Terminal 1. I slept during part of the Seoul->MNL flight and we landed just before midnight on Tuesday Apr 2. I had booked a room at the Belmont hotel (close to Terminal 3), and I was in my room one hour after touch down, which I found incredibly efficient. The Belmont is cheap (by US standard) and very convenient, but I wouldn't chose to stay there for any other reason than proximity to the airport. The outlets couldn't hold the chargers and the shower stall had no curtain.
Travel to El Galleon:
I had arranged with El Galleon a car to take me to the Batangas ferry terminal, and that went very smoothly. We left the hotel just before 7am and got to Batangas around 8:40am, so we were lucky with traffic. I took a 9am "ferry" to Puerto Galera. The main ferry line (can't recall the name) didn't go to PG that day for whatever reason, so I took a smaller, earlier boat. Once arrived in PG, I took a tricycle to Sabang, where someone from El Galleon was there to take me to the hotel, which is a 10mn walk the tricycle drop off point. Sabang is mostly a fairly narrow strip of low rise buildings by the sea side. Most of those buildings are hotels, bars, and/or dive ops. The geography gets very hilly as you move away from the sea. There's no beach.
El Galleon:
The hotel is organized as a large dining room (which is covered and protected from the sun but otherwise open), then as you move further "inland" you hit the pool, around which are arranged the non-premium rooms, on two levels and on two sides of the pool. My room was the corner room on the second level. (The premium rooms are higher on the hill and I didn't see them. I heard good things about them from other divers, but they did complain about the stairs.)
The room was adequate. The bed was comfy, the air conditioning worked well and reasonably quietly, there's a small desk, a fridge, a small closet with a safe, and a large flat TV (which I never turned on). The wifi works well, but is not meant to upload or download large files. The rooms lighting is adequate, not great. The bathroom, again, is adequate. It proved impossible to take a shower without spraying some water in the bathroom (again, no curtain).
Room cleaning was good, and they have a very fast (same day) & cheap laundry service.
Breakfast starts at 6:30am, but I often was in the dining room earlier than that and had no problem getting coffee. Food is plentiful, cheap, and there are many options. Food quality is adequate. I ended up having breakfast and lunch at the hotel every day, but went "in town" for dinner most nights.
El Galleon's staff is wonderful, super helpful, smiling, lovely people.
Tap water is not drinkable, so the guests are always asking the staff for some water or to refill their water bottles. It's a good idea to pack a large Nalgene bottle and keep it in your fridge. IMHO, the hotel would benefit from some kind of self-serve water station. It makes no sense to constantly bug the staff for water.
Asia Divers:
The Asia Diver dive op is next door to the hotel and their dock is across the walkway. It couldn't be more convenient. The op has equipment to rent, but I had brought my own. I did lose my mask at some point and rented on of their's, and it was perfectly fine.
The diving dock includes the building where the tanks are filled and where the divers store their gear. Each diver has a hard plastic basket and a dedicated spot on the walls where to shelf it. There are also rods to hangs the wet suits & BCDs. During the day, 2 large wheeled "portents" are set up outside to hang suits & booties to drain. There are dedicated tanks to rinse cameras, mask/regs/computers, and fins/suits. They are equipped in regular and larger (15l) tanks, and they can fill tanks with regular air or 31% enriched air. They might have other options I don't know about.
The crew includes land based staff, boat pilots, and the divemasters. They're nearly all Filipinos, but 2 of the divemasters are westerners. They all were great. During my time, the entire dive staff was male except the dive shop's attendant, and one of the divemasters, Rhea. The divemasters were all very good in my opinion, giving good briefings, pointing out critters, etc.
The diving:
The diving mostly takes place within a 5-15mn boat ride from the dock. Sites vary from muck (Montani) to coral, boulders, rubbles and sand. Some sites are very vertical, others are gently slopping. Most sites have some current from time to time, but it's always manageable. I dived 9 full days and we had one dive where the water was choppy enough to make getting back on the boat challenging (but not dangerous). My previous experience warm water diving has been in Phuket, Cozumel, Bonaire, and a Red Sea live aboard, and in my opinion PG is better than all of those (but it doesn't have the large pelagic animals you can find in the RedSea). We saw turtles and sea snakes very regularly, and one dive group (but not mine) encountered a tresher shark, who came within a couple yards of them.
One option is to go on a longer (30mn) boat ride to a reef just off Verde Island, and there do 2 dives, with a surface interval spent on one of the Verde Island beach. I did that 3 times. This is the best diving in PG, with much better life density and visibility. There are also larger predatory fish there, and I saw one extremely large sea snake. There's more current in this spot, and sometimes the conditions can get somewhat challenging. I'm a healthy 52 yr old male and I never felt uncomfortable.
The dives are scheduled at 8am, 10:30am, 1:30pm, and 4pm. There are night dives when there's enough interest. The largest dive group (outside Montani) I was on was 5 people, most were 4, a few were 3. Montani is different because it's a muck location where you dive within a fairly small zone, to it's more amenable to larger groups splitting up in pairs.
The other divers were mostly westerners staying at El Galleon, but I also had a couple dives with a filipina, and a number of dives with a father + son team from Russia. When I was there, there was a large group of friends traveling together from Belgium and who stayed a full month. The divers were all more or less experienced and had good control. Some were better than others, but there wasn't anyone I'd try to avoid.
I did one night dive, which was great. We saw a number of animals we had not seen before (but no blue ring octopus...)
All and all, it was a blast. I dived 3-4 dives a day every day and I saw a number of things I had never seen before: sea snakes, swimming feather star, flamboyant cuttlefish, pipe fish, ghost pipe fish, snake eel, sea moths, tons of nudies, etc.
The trip back:
I had a Noon-ish flight back on the 14th so I decided to head back to Manila on the 13th. I arranged with El Galleon for a fast boat (they call it the Sly Dog, but the boat doesn't show that name so I'm not sure) leaving directly from Sabang at 12:30 and getting across the bay in 30mn, and then a car to take me to Manila, where I got around 3pm. I spent the night at the City Garden Grand Hotel, which was much nicer than the Belmont. I ate in the hotel's roof top restaurant, which has cool views (but mediocre food & service). I got into the airport 4hrs ahead of my flight, and waited over an hour for the Korean Air counter to open. The rest of the trip back went fine, but there's not much to say about it.
Would I go back?
Absolutely. I would go back to PG (Sabang, really), and I would happily dive again with Asia Divers. I would need to consider carefully the Galleon value proposition. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a bit more comfort, but the convenience of El Galleon is unbeatable.
Inbound flight:
I flew Delta from Seattle to Seoul, had a 4hr layover, and then flew Korean Air from Seoul to Manila, to land in Terminal 1. I slept during part of the Seoul->MNL flight and we landed just before midnight on Tuesday Apr 2. I had booked a room at the Belmont hotel (close to Terminal 3), and I was in my room one hour after touch down, which I found incredibly efficient. The Belmont is cheap (by US standard) and very convenient, but I wouldn't chose to stay there for any other reason than proximity to the airport. The outlets couldn't hold the chargers and the shower stall had no curtain.
Travel to El Galleon:
I had arranged with El Galleon a car to take me to the Batangas ferry terminal, and that went very smoothly. We left the hotel just before 7am and got to Batangas around 8:40am, so we were lucky with traffic. I took a 9am "ferry" to Puerto Galera. The main ferry line (can't recall the name) didn't go to PG that day for whatever reason, so I took a smaller, earlier boat. Once arrived in PG, I took a tricycle to Sabang, where someone from El Galleon was there to take me to the hotel, which is a 10mn walk the tricycle drop off point. Sabang is mostly a fairly narrow strip of low rise buildings by the sea side. Most of those buildings are hotels, bars, and/or dive ops. The geography gets very hilly as you move away from the sea. There's no beach.
El Galleon:
The hotel is organized as a large dining room (which is covered and protected from the sun but otherwise open), then as you move further "inland" you hit the pool, around which are arranged the non-premium rooms, on two levels and on two sides of the pool. My room was the corner room on the second level. (The premium rooms are higher on the hill and I didn't see them. I heard good things about them from other divers, but they did complain about the stairs.)
The room was adequate. The bed was comfy, the air conditioning worked well and reasonably quietly, there's a small desk, a fridge, a small closet with a safe, and a large flat TV (which I never turned on). The wifi works well, but is not meant to upload or download large files. The rooms lighting is adequate, not great. The bathroom, again, is adequate. It proved impossible to take a shower without spraying some water in the bathroom (again, no curtain).
Room cleaning was good, and they have a very fast (same day) & cheap laundry service.
Breakfast starts at 6:30am, but I often was in the dining room earlier than that and had no problem getting coffee. Food is plentiful, cheap, and there are many options. Food quality is adequate. I ended up having breakfast and lunch at the hotel every day, but went "in town" for dinner most nights.
El Galleon's staff is wonderful, super helpful, smiling, lovely people.
Tap water is not drinkable, so the guests are always asking the staff for some water or to refill their water bottles. It's a good idea to pack a large Nalgene bottle and keep it in your fridge. IMHO, the hotel would benefit from some kind of self-serve water station. It makes no sense to constantly bug the staff for water.
Asia Divers:
The Asia Diver dive op is next door to the hotel and their dock is across the walkway. It couldn't be more convenient. The op has equipment to rent, but I had brought my own. I did lose my mask at some point and rented on of their's, and it was perfectly fine.
The diving dock includes the building where the tanks are filled and where the divers store their gear. Each diver has a hard plastic basket and a dedicated spot on the walls where to shelf it. There are also rods to hangs the wet suits & BCDs. During the day, 2 large wheeled "portents" are set up outside to hang suits & booties to drain. There are dedicated tanks to rinse cameras, mask/regs/computers, and fins/suits. They are equipped in regular and larger (15l) tanks, and they can fill tanks with regular air or 31% enriched air. They might have other options I don't know about.
The crew includes land based staff, boat pilots, and the divemasters. They're nearly all Filipinos, but 2 of the divemasters are westerners. They all were great. During my time, the entire dive staff was male except the dive shop's attendant, and one of the divemasters, Rhea. The divemasters were all very good in my opinion, giving good briefings, pointing out critters, etc.
The diving:
The diving mostly takes place within a 5-15mn boat ride from the dock. Sites vary from muck (Montani) to coral, boulders, rubbles and sand. Some sites are very vertical, others are gently slopping. Most sites have some current from time to time, but it's always manageable. I dived 9 full days and we had one dive where the water was choppy enough to make getting back on the boat challenging (but not dangerous). My previous experience warm water diving has been in Phuket, Cozumel, Bonaire, and a Red Sea live aboard, and in my opinion PG is better than all of those (but it doesn't have the large pelagic animals you can find in the RedSea). We saw turtles and sea snakes very regularly, and one dive group (but not mine) encountered a tresher shark, who came within a couple yards of them.
One option is to go on a longer (30mn) boat ride to a reef just off Verde Island, and there do 2 dives, with a surface interval spent on one of the Verde Island beach. I did that 3 times. This is the best diving in PG, with much better life density and visibility. There are also larger predatory fish there, and I saw one extremely large sea snake. There's more current in this spot, and sometimes the conditions can get somewhat challenging. I'm a healthy 52 yr old male and I never felt uncomfortable.
The dives are scheduled at 8am, 10:30am, 1:30pm, and 4pm. There are night dives when there's enough interest. The largest dive group (outside Montani) I was on was 5 people, most were 4, a few were 3. Montani is different because it's a muck location where you dive within a fairly small zone, to it's more amenable to larger groups splitting up in pairs.
The other divers were mostly westerners staying at El Galleon, but I also had a couple dives with a filipina, and a number of dives with a father + son team from Russia. When I was there, there was a large group of friends traveling together from Belgium and who stayed a full month. The divers were all more or less experienced and had good control. Some were better than others, but there wasn't anyone I'd try to avoid.
I did one night dive, which was great. We saw a number of animals we had not seen before (but no blue ring octopus...)
All and all, it was a blast. I dived 3-4 dives a day every day and I saw a number of things I had never seen before: sea snakes, swimming feather star, flamboyant cuttlefish, pipe fish, ghost pipe fish, snake eel, sea moths, tons of nudies, etc.
The trip back:
I had a Noon-ish flight back on the 14th so I decided to head back to Manila on the 13th. I arranged with El Galleon for a fast boat (they call it the Sly Dog, but the boat doesn't show that name so I'm not sure) leaving directly from Sabang at 12:30 and getting across the bay in 30mn, and then a car to take me to Manila, where I got around 3pm. I spent the night at the City Garden Grand Hotel, which was much nicer than the Belmont. I ate in the hotel's roof top restaurant, which has cool views (but mediocre food & service). I got into the airport 4hrs ahead of my flight, and waited over an hour for the Korean Air counter to open. The rest of the trip back went fine, but there's not much to say about it.
Would I go back?
Absolutely. I would go back to PG (Sabang, really), and I would happily dive again with Asia Divers. I would need to consider carefully the Galleon value proposition. I'd be willing to pay a bit more for a bit more comfort, but the convenience of El Galleon is unbeatable.
