Underwater Images Anilao, Jan 09


Living, Food and Diving:
An inconvenient airline schedule turned out to be a good thing for us. We had planned a dive trip to Palau, and the return flight from Koror to HK had an overnight break in Manila. Since this meant getting a visa for philippines, we decided to use the visa and spend three days diving at Anilao, the other macro heaven . It's a three hour drive from NAIA Manila to Eagle Point Resort, where we stayed, a fairly nice resort, if you don't cringe at the poor eagle they have put in a large cage near the entrance. The rooms are comfortable enough. the hot water in the shower runs at a trickle, but it all works. For once, I wished they had better TV signals -- we were into the second week of Australian open. But the ocean view from the balcony makes up for a lot.

The food:
Not much to say about the food at the resort.. not as good as in, say Puerto Galera. But they have reasonable New world wines, which helps come dusk. We were ordering all food a la carte, but later realized a better way is to plan what you want, and special order with the chef the day before. At least for local ingredients, they are able and willing to deliver a fair fare.

The diving:
We were lucky to reach Eagle point just before the Chinese New Year crowds arrived. On the first day, we chatted up the dive shop manager and told him we only cared about macro. He assigned a quiet fellow called Rene as our DM. Rene was not much into dive briefs.. he'd mumble a few words before the dive.. words like flamboyant cuttlefish, ghostpipefish, harlequin shrimp, frogfish. When the bangka arrive at the spot, we'd back-roll in, and then he'd set off with Kitty and me in tow, and spot, one by one, the precise creatures he mentioned. Each time he spotted something, he'd hang around till I had enough shots, and then move on. Just perfect. The water was a cold 25C, so we only made two dives each day. But each dive lasted 75-90 mins. The sites were:

Day 1, Dive 1. Twin Rocks. [Part muck, part reef]
Day 1, Dive 2. Cathedral. [Site with a cross laid own between two large rocks; massive number of fish here since they feed bread to fish; saw a nice school of tuna]

Day 2, Dives 1, 2. Secret bay [Classic muck site -- dirt, sand, critter heaven]

Day 3, Dive 1. Beatrice Rock [Beautiful site, reef, soft and hard coral, pygmy seahorse]
Day 3, Dive 2. Kirby's Rock. [nice reef site, frogfish, some macro]

We were planning to head out to Lambeh this summer, but Anilao has taken away at least 3-4 reasons for making that trip.

About the photos:
Kitty's S80 housing was conked out, so all photos here are with my Canon G7 in its Canon WP-DC11 housing plus an Inon Z220s strobe on slave. The thumbnails below are linked to larger photos. Most of the photos are just cropped and reduced for the webpage, with minor editing in PSE 7.0. Each photo is max 1000pixel wide and/or 800pixel high.



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If you want the original of any of these, send me email.