Goodbye Siargao

I just enjoyed my last day of surf here in Siargao. Jesse is out fishing now with his fishing partner Tung-Tung. I went out to Dako around 7:30 with one friend, and surfed clean, consistent, head high waves with only the two of us all morning. It was just beautiful. We came back in around 11:00 just as a boat full of some of our local friends showed up. What a beautiful way to start the day. To top it off, this is the first day in two weeks where it has not rained all morning...it was actually sunny.

About the rain, it has been relentless. Yesterday Jesse and I spent the day using the internet at a cafe in town, there were periods where it would pour down, then would stop then would start pouring again. When we first went in all was normal, when we came out there was water down the street! We were like, "hey, who diverted the river?" I was ankle deep in it and there were actually kids skim boarding in front of there homes.

Discouraged by the rain we decided to leave early to go to northern Luzon. So, today we will say goodbye to the island. We will say goodbye to the friends that we have made and the family that we have adopted. We will say goodbye to the food we have come to love and to eating rice with our fingers. I will miss taking the boats out to the picture perfect islands across clear blue water, and surfing without a wetsuit, where my fingers don't go numb.

Tomorrow Jess and I will fly back up to Luzon. We fly into Clark and then go by bus up to La Union aka San Fernando. We stay only two more weeks. Up there we hope to surf and do some diving. It will be a good way to finish off this trip.

Our good friends here have already decided to go home only to work enough to save to leave again and head back to Bali. They were saying that with 600 Euro you could live quite comfortably for eight months there eating well and living in a little apartment or room. This life doesn't sound so bad.....

Traveling you meet many interesting people living the most exciting kind of lives. Most of the French we have met work in the ski resorts back home for the winter and travel in the summer. This is very common even for many Americans.

Jess and I are ready to head back home now. We have gone through highs and lows of wanting to return or not. But now we miss our family, we miss the mountains in California. Happy Thanksgiving