We Can't Believe This Is The Philippines Camotes Islands
Philippines is the fifth largest island nation in the world made up of around 7,640 Islands or so today we're in the middle of all of that welcome to Camotes Islands this is absolute Paradise just have a look and right now we're on a beach that is not frequented at all by the tourists that do visit these islands and we are on the island known as San Francisco which is a relatively interesting name San Francisco or Pacijan I've heard it go by those two names and it's uh the kotes islands are made up by I believe three islands correct me if I'm wrong there's porro San Francisco and Tang Di and I think it might be one more let us know down below we just arrived and today we're going to be exploring around the island known as San Fran Frisco and this will be the first video in a series of couple of videos we're going to be here on these islands for the next few days and this beach here is absolutely gorgeous like I said very local Beach full of amazing Fisher boats and the vibe in general here on Cotes is very very laidback super laidback I believe right now it's a little bit busier because it's a Luna New Year time so it's a very long weekend for everybody in the Philippines so I think it's a little bit busier but uh other than that super quiet very local actually uh I thought cotas Islands was going to be like uh taken over by tourists but it is not at all it's very very little tourist and uh the little amount of white people that you actually do see seem to be um immigrants experts whatsoever something like that and uh yeah super nice here we rented a scooter let's go and explore this island yep and right now to give you guys an idea on just where we are on the island we're on the sort of west side it's a called this beach here is called bakhaw Beach or b a k ha a w beach now there's a couple different areas on this island that are interesting for us one of them is Santiago and that's actually the area where we're staying we will be showing you that area a little bit later on in the video video it's actually one of the most beautiful parts of this island it's also the part that has mobile reception so keep that in mind there is a very sparse and sort of spread out uh connection throughout these islands it is quite remote it's not super developed here keep that in mind and there's a couple cell phone towers that are sort of scattered around and the main one or the one that seems to work the best is in Santiago and uh there's another one that's close by to here actually so we got very lucky with that there is signal where we are right now so we can use Google Maps to navigate but uh the other part that we want to check out is again on the Northern side and that is towards the island of Tang deot which is a totally remote island that we hopefully will be checking out in a video in the future soon and uh there's a couple beaches more around here but this part of the island as we said he very relaxed very local and just gorgeous if you want peace and quiet camotes is for you it's low tide right now that's why a lot of the rock and a lot of the beach is sort of exposed I believe the tide is like a normal height it would probably go all the way where the trees are so here kind of very true yeah it's a relatively early in the morning right now guys so it's low tide we just woke up and had a coffee at our Acom modation uh in Santiago and uh yeah man this is uh really is Paradise we also have a scooter with us so we have the freedom to go around and that's something that I'll highly recommend you guys straight off the bat if you're watching and you're coming to kotes make sure to get yourself a scooter because the islands are relatively small but also very big if you want to move around and you don't want to be stuck in the position where you have to uh rely on things like Jeep knes and stuff like that because there are some but not enough that you can rely on them so I would get a scooter yeah and from the looks of it as well uh as far as much experience as we have with this island so far which is very very little um there is seems to be one supermarket and that's in uh San Francisco the city of San Francisco San Francisco proper as they call it San Francisco proper there seems to be a supermarket and kind of a public market um there doesn't seem to be a whole lot else going on in terms of buying uh your groceries or anything like that so the majority of the island kind of looks something like this where you have like dirt roads and the beach Shoreline basically um not crazy amount of other development going on yet I'm sure that will change so at some stage in the future hopefully not but uh yeah that's what the island currently looks like maybe we should be getting our scooter to go down there you never know kind of like Jurassic Park you don't know what's around the corner here in Cotes so this is our little green machine or yellow machine whatever you want to say about that color but this is our little uh compact sportmatic beat and it's okay it's okay for what it is we are paying 500 pesos per day which we know is probably more than what we should be paying everything else that we've gotten so far in the Philippines has been around 350 to 400 per day this is a little bit more but that's kind of what you get sometimes when you're on um an island and you might not have a lot of options we literally arrived at the Port got off and the first person that had a bike we just said are you renting it he said yeah and this is what we got so this is basically a new bike it's uh it's works but you don't really need anything else like you don't need a lot more than this because there's like as I said a lot of the roads here are dirt roads and if it's not a dirt road you're not going to drive fast on it anyway so this is really all you need in terms of scooter I feel like that's true but now guys we're going to take you towards believe it or not a freshwater lake on a saltwater Island it's called Uh Lake d now so we're going to go and see it we haven't seen any anything around here yet so let's go and check out a freshwater lake that's the ocean and we're going to fresh water bit bit weird whoop oops nearly fell over K is really good at basketball Michael Jordan got it oh go go go basket what do you say not go short whatever he hit it he hit it give you an idea of the roads there's always a church in the Philippines no matter where you go yep it could probably be walking through the remote most remote part of the one of these islands and you would still find a chapel or or church or something like that there's two things that you're always going to see in the Philippines and that's Street dogs and churches yeah no matter what oh we are approaching the lake right now and it looks like they have some really cool decoration here going on in between the trees this here is by the way what the uh majority of the main roads look like you have this um sort of cement plates going on and what is this adult 50 pesos okay you have to pay entry to see the lake while we're super excited thank you okay oh my [Music] God Luke is breaking the street here right directly here at the entry they have sort of the main things to see and like protected landscape and see Escape basically and uh this here actually looks very interesting sh like the PTO sh we are currently on this island here um and this island here is called PTO so we are currently sort of here at the lake and this entire Island here is PTO which we haven't seen yet but it looks like they have a protected um area as well and there's even here a marine Sanctuary which we weren't aware of either so maybe it would make sense for us to um go to the Marine sanctuary as well and then this is where we are staying we're basically in Santiago Beach uh at the white Beach and um that's also there is a protected area sort of in front of our accommodation there's like the square uh basically with boys um where you're not allowed to go fishing or anything like that so there is still a little bit of um life in the ocean going on um I do feel like a lot of these areas especially if you are directly at the shore um the areas seem to be kind of in recovery right now it looks like there has a lot of been a lot of over fishing before so but we are on the path of uh recovery on the pass back basically and now check this beautiful place out out you can uh it looks like there in the distance there is some sort of a restaurant going on so maybe you can even eat something here and this entire Lake here is fresh water in the middle of a island which is actually not too big the islands are not like uh crazily big or anything like that right oh you have lots of fish here freshwater fish how cool is that um I just think it's so crazy to see this here because uh it's as we said it's a quite small island it's not very big um you can basically uh drive around the island and see the entire Island in maybe like 30 minutes or something like that so it's really not big and then you have this huge fresh water reservoir uh Reserve in the middle of it which is not very common so if the apocalypse ever starts uh this is a good place to be because you do have salt water fish you can go fishing but you also have a freshwater lake wow so many people here seem to be a lot of tourists but the majority of them I think are H Filipino tourists that are just enjoying the long Luna New Year weekend here basically this island must be very uh fertile if it has fresh water this much fresh water it is absolutely massive I didn't realize just how large this is so this spans basically the entire Center of this island is uh just packed full of fresh water that's crazy I can't imagine what that is doing for the actual land itself uh in a positive way I'm sure that uh people can grow plenty of different things here the weather I've have no idea why but uh the last few days the last few weeks actually in the Philippines has been very patchy and cloudy unfortunately but yesterday was a beautiful day hopefully it will clear up for us for the rest of today as well they seem to have this net here that's full of fish I don't know if they're farming these fish or if they're just growing them or whatever but uh that's pretty cool and over here you have mangroves that seem to just the water just seems to flow in here and then you have a mangrove area and there's probably some pretty wild looking fish in this Lake um I'm sure they get up to some pretty crazy sizes especially if you have this much water and there's actually a boat way over there in the distance rent small boat here from the looks of it that's very true yeah you can actually rent a boats nice drive over the lake yourself yeah I don't know do you think there's like something like snakes or cuz the Philippines obviously wear on a on an island in Southeast Asia so they could be like snakes oriles or whatever you know uh but yeah these poats look cool and you also have a restaurant or two I think there's one or two uh restaurants to have food and there's venders as well so people are always will always try and sell stuff but in this area you will not be short for food there's plenty going on but yeah this lake is beautiful and I definitely think we're going to be taking a few pictures here for sure can really see here driving along the street just how undeveloped a lot of of this island is this island in particular I'm not too sure now about porro but there's basically one road this road and it circles the entire Island so keep that in mind guys and right now we're on the actual sort of nice road that kind of connects Santiago and Consuelo Port if you take it the other way it's pretty rough yeah we're both not too sure oh my helmet is criet we're both was not too sure um where this island is at actually in terms of development which is good and bad it obviously means that it's not uh flooded with tourists yet but I do believe that that might be the case in the future as Luke already said you have this main road which is the good road basically and then you have a lot of the side roads which are still sort of in the dirt road um stage of life and other than that um you do see quite a bit of of development happening you do see that um a lot of the Lots here a lot of the land is for sale so you do have some signs left and right which just says a lot for sale or something like that and other than that you have wa hello oh he's doing Leon sure you want to go back to get some Leon I don't know sure let's have a look do you have to buy the full lechon let's ask him let's ask the man some questions about his Leon they had literally they PE over the fire anyway what I was trying to say is that uh you can see a lot of the resorts being built right now so they're sort of in the starting stages hello hello you're full Leon you're selling Leon you sell or only for yourself can look I have a look we just saw the huge uh pigs sort of spinning from the distance here take the camera with you oh can I have a look yeah okay sorry hello wow they have lechan on the [Music] spit hello hello oh my God [Music] cool wow amazing you spin by hand all day spin spin spin yeah that looks incredible they're absolutely massive I wondered if they sell them because they have a sign that saysin I assume what you have to do is pre-order it and then get a full I don't think that you can get like little pieces Salam thank you Mas up thank you bye-bye wow okay very little uh English but they are literally yeah on the spit we saw it and we literally had to stop and have a and have a look but it looks absolutely 22 yeah if you want to come here Alvin and the lot is also for lease or rent yeah so I think what you have to do is actually contact call the number contact the number and then uh get yourself one of those bad boys and before we found the lichon I also wanted to still talk about our touch upon the topic of Wi-Fi on the island as well um a lot of the accommodations here don't really offer Wi-Fi or they have the you know the piece of Wi-Fi where you have to like uh pay with coins in order to get some Wi-Fi out of it um other than that I believe there's two or three accommodations that do offer starlink uh internet um which we can definitely put down into the description below um but they seem to be uh very well booked at all times so if you do want to have a good internet when you come here and maybe uh I don't know in case you are a digital NAD or something like that you need to work or you just want to watch some YouTube whatever you you want to do we need to go left here um we can link the accommodations with the starlink that we know of down in the description below also the one we're staying at as well we're going to show you guys there is one with the styling and we'll put that in a in a different video that bike was really loud but we will show you our accommodation in a different video and it has Starling so keep that in mind well guys a short scooter ride and we've arrived at what is known as Santiago white Beach and it is an absolutely gorgeous beach now currently the low tide is actually rushing in and this is something that we've seen and this is actually the second time I think we've seen this the beach here during the morning is completely dry and the tide is way out there so all the way back almost and you can see um algae and stuff like that and now the water as you can see is literally rushing in here from all sides and it's creating like these like little sort of Slots of water and this place here I'll tell you what guys the water is Crystal crystal clear unfortunately like I said the weather is just permanently taking a turn for the worst uh but yesterday I believe it was when we arrived the water is like unbelievable and I'm hoping before we leave the kotes islands we can really give you a sample as to what the water is like now this sand here as well is just so fine and absolutely gorgeous and very very soft it's really soft sand and it's actually raining now as well so it's not a not a perfect um situation to be in what we're going to do is we're going to walk along the beach and bring you with us and get some food because wow we are absolutely starving and as uh I have showed you before at the lake uh this entire area here as it says on the sign there's like uh boys out there and there's no fishing really and um apparently there are a lot of turtles roaming around there in this square of boys um obviously they can get out and in so they're not like stuck there or anything like that but it seems like uh because there's no fishing that there's a little bit more life going on and uh nature here is really recovering sort of from over fishing I believe of the last few uh decades hundreds of years however um but yeah this entire Beach is really really cool and as you can see the water is now coming in here and it's sort of at night time going all the way up to this wall so you do have quite high water higher than you would anticipate looking at it right now which is super interesting wow lots of families out here today as well over the weekend enjoying the Sunday with the family out super nice to see we are waiting for a little while um for the bad weather to pass basically it looks like over there on the left side there might be good weather coming and the bad weather is moving a little bit to the right but while we're waiting um we are going to have a meal here directly at at the beach literally the feet in the sand um at n's Grill we didn't try this place before but they have very affordable combo meals and Luke went with the fried chicken and I went with the fried fish so yeah let's just have a look if that's going to be a good menu because uh she also said that she is going to serve us pineapple juice or something fresh pineapple maybe fresh pineapple juice so uh hopefully it's going to be a good meal okay what do expect for 100 pesos eh we literally were like wow the combos are very uh well priced and now I see why it's basically a drumstick of fried chicken and then a nice little heap of rice we've got some soy sauce here your pineapple juice oh nice thank you so much thank you and we have H pineapple juice with it as well which is included in the combo so actually for the price it's not bad at all considering where we are on the beach uh but there's a guy basically aling his boat figuring out his boat yeah there seems to be an engine problem with the boat over there um I hope they can actually fix it cuz it seems to be sort of up on the beach maybe we'll go and check it out after we have our food but uh let's give this pineapple juice a [Music] try that's actually really good it's um definitely not Blended pineapple juice it's tastes like the one that you basically get from like a sachche mix it with some water throw some ice in there and then you have yourself a nice refreshment Naomi has H Fish and Rice no I have yeah I have a piece of fried fish and uh some rice here as well and we asked for hot sauce so I think I'm just going to dip the spoon basically into this and um give it a try oh the hot sauce is actually a little bit spicy you want you can dip in mine as well this is good though tastes like a very very fresh piece of fish now obviously we are directly at the water it would be weird if this fish wouldn't be very fresh that's why I went actually with the fish and not with the chicken the way it looked it because I thought it's more likely that you get a fresh fish here than you get a fresh chicken probably but for 100 P this is actually a nice big piece of fish and um I think it's like a half cup of rice maybe I don't think it's a full cup of rice maybe a half cup of rice and the juice 100 peses each so for two people where um eating for what like three 4 year something like that y for two people I think that's all right I'm going to try this Fried Chicken so I put some hot sauce here on the Fried Chicken we'll see if we can like compare it and uh to things like jollybee or KFC we'll see freshly fried that's very fresh wow that is hot incredibly juicy very very crispy and that hot sauce is genuinely spicy I can't believe the heat off that hot sauce well it's really nice it's something that we've been missing now for a while is uh spicy food and uh this mother's best mother's best hot sauce well my throat is kind of burning but it's a nice feeling though it's a good flavor off of it and uh yeah perfect location perfect price and we cannot wait to show you more of this beach because the weather is getting better the clouds are clearing and the light is back so let's have this food and then go and explore a little bit more very fantastic meal and very affordable we only paid the 200 p as we said and they were both sort of satiated but not so full that we want to go for a nap so it was just a perfect amount of food and uh what I wanted to show you it looks a little bit like during maybe the rainy season during monsoon season or something like that it looks like uh this entire area here might be flooded because there's like a bridge situation going on here so could actually be that in monsoon season rainy season however that this entire Beach probably I assume it this completely disappears uh because of the amount of water that is here and uh yeah it kind of looks like it's clearing up a little bit sorry I'm trying to speak louder than the girl is singing karaoke there in the back that's uh that's actually something I forgot to say I said the two things that you're going to find in the Philippines is Street dogs and churches Street dogs churches and karaoke karaoke is I think the real uh religion of the Philippines karaoke and jollybee if you don't have those two things you don't you're not in the Philippines that's for sure there's no jollybee on this island group by the way yeah we're actually on we were looking for it it it's not here yeah we by the way are big fans of Jollibee as well uh especially after having we've had it now Jesus multiple times but uh yeah we're big big fans but kot is there's no Jollibee it's all uh restaurants just like we were on here and this is the situation just so you guys are aware it's these basically four uh places that sell food on Santiago Beach and this here is Santiago Bay Resort it's called and they apparently have a very nice or they do have a very nice view over this entire Beach and that's something that uh we might check out at some stage but for now I think this is the view that we are happy with this uh Beach is absolutely gorgeous just for a little bit of a recommendation if you are sensitive when it comes to karaoke and music I will try and get something at that end of the bay not at the Santiago Resort end of the bay I don't know about this Resort maybe it's a nice place I we haven't been there I don't know I don't want to say anything I'm just saying the karaoke and the music is sort of here in this area and I'm in the other side of the area is sort of where we are staying and we cannot hear any music or karaoke at night time so yeah if you like sleeping in quiet that is the part of the beach that you want to be on but you're still sort of in walking distance to the karaoke if you want to participate hello right we are now on the street that all of the tricycle drivers are too scared to drive on with guest um this side of the island is basically a little bit more where we're we're in between Santiago Bay and San Francisco and you can either choose to take this road here which is in theory the shorter route but the majority of people choose to go the long way around uh through Consuelo and everything um because the road is a little bit like iffy let's say it like that you have a lot of pretty large holes and you're driving just basically through the thick jungle here and there's also a few signs saying that it's like a landslide prone area so yeah I do believe that that is why the majority of people decide to go through the long way around but I feel like this area is a little it's a little bit nicer here because it's like very quiet there's very little people and you really get to feel like what the very very rural site looks like the majority of the houses are sort of like this um a little bit like more like these Shacks like makeshift type of houses are where you have like different materials that are put together you have like a little bit of stone a little bit of concrete and then the walls are sort of made out of wood a lot of times um but overall a quite nice area if you ask me people here seem to be very friendly very Smiley hello hello I don't think there's a lot of white people coming through here no for sure I was going to say this is uh this is genuinely I think my favorite place so far in the island it's uh very very chill and the houses are spectacular I think some of them are very sort of traditional wooden style houses but a lot of them are just absolutely beautiful and yeah the community here seems to be very strong and very friendly and you have beautiful chapels everywhere small santonin hello small santonin Chapel I think they're getting ready for M he was holding the uh the Rope for the Bell yeah getting ready for Mass just now he was getting ready to ring the bell ding D that would be my favorite job if I was part of this community you would be the community bell ringer I would be the bell ringer 100% what is this bang guy here it just said bangai unidos onos yeah it's no onidas is the one that we just walked that we just drove through this here is now the next that I yeah yeah I'm not sure what this one is not sure what this one is we drove past the side we are driving really slow but it's uh it was still too fast for me to read the sign oh it looks like we're about to have a really nice view over the ocean up here oh let's turn to the right side maybe is there the ocean no there's a dip ah oh my God I think the ocean is just behind this uh here on the right just behind ah this is where they built a new resort isn't it yeah yeah what is it called homos hom H H Resort they're just building is here uh behind this hill from what the our host was saying and it looks like a very cool area there's like not uh not so much development here so I do think it would be a nice place uh if you have like a proper Resort all inclusive type of thing uh where you have to rent a scooter if you're going to say that wa Resort but um I think for this island gener for the generally the kutas island you do need a scooter to get around uh obviously you can take Jeep knes and stuff like that but I think they're not like uh coming very I don't know on the time or whatever they're just they're just going to come when they're going to come hello hello all of the kitties are out in the boat playing in the front front yard oh careful oh here comes the view all now is the view yeah I was right we we were close to the ocean close to the view but not quite there oh wow yeah yeah how cool is that there straight ahead super nice view and even though the weather is so so today you still like it's still looks so beautiful what's going on we now arrived in the next bang guy down and there's so many people I don't know what's going on I know if somebody's getting married or oh very interesting so many people they're coming from everywhere right now ohello hello or maybe they just ah I know what I think uh the mass is just over in this bangai they were probably all in the church you know more than likely yeah yeah very busy though something like there's so many people all of a sudden yeah they all came from here oh I think this is where the they were just having the mass wow yeah he you can see how how devoted the people in the Philippines are if it's the MKS going on in in the village everybody will be part of it right guys oh sorry we are now in San Francisco proper San Francisco town and the public market is just down there basically and we've been trying to use ATMs here back and forth we have been trying a lot of different ones and none of them actually worked for us not even the euronet worked for us so this was the only ATM that we could find here um that works with our foreign cards so in case you ever are in San Francisco in camotes DBP ATM is the way to go San Francisco Town proper so like literally the uh just ask for the main town and uh this is where you're going to find it and it is legit the only one that works if you are coming from Europe there's like six or seven different ATMs and we tried all six or seven of them yesterday to pay for our accommodation none of them worked but that one over there works very very well now we're going to head towards the uh the public market we are now basically in the city that connects the two islands with each other so from here I think if you're just going further that way you can go to PTO hello hello hi sorry sorry yes this is here is the public market and uh we're basically shopping around for some fruit today try and find some maybe mangoes Philippines has the best mangoes I keep saying it but we're going to check for some mangoes check for some watermelon and see if we can talk to a few people as well these are usually the absolute best places to come now this area I actually looks like it's going to be under construction and they seem to be building like a little bit of a square or something like this let's go and check the market out all right guys so we made our way like I just showed you this is the uh Market that we're interested in going this is a basically a gigantic shed full of fruit and people selling that fruit and uh some fresh fish and stuff like that we're going to show you that now in a second but hold on because this view is worth a million dollars right here this is beautiful so and the sun is out by the way finally and we have beautiful view here onto the water mangroves and this here in front of us is the second island that we were talking about earlier this is called porro now this looks unbelievable and we're not going to be covering it in this video but this is a reason why you need to subscribe because that's where we're headed tomorrow to make another video from Cotes and it looks like it's going to be a very interesting place very densely green and uh again very beautiful and wow I am very positively surprised overall by kotes I is currently being attacked by a I don't know what it flying ant or something I don't know but it looked like it wanted to buy to me so I started dancing but the water is so nice it's very calm there's a lot of uh mangroves here as well and like just judging we haven't been on phto yet but judging from this point of view you don't see any development like it doesn't it looks quite literally untouched and um you have a lot of mangroves here on the left and I do assume that when it's low tide maybe if you come here in the morning time I'm sure that all of this water will be completely out probably yeah uh looks like there's some people fishing as well I don't know looks like a really cool place incredible it would be interesting to see what it is but I'm sure there's no cell reception on that side 100% And what connects San Francisco island that we are on right now and poro is a tiny little yellow bridge over there so we're going to be Crossing that tomorrow but for now we're going to go and buy ourselves some of the amazing Filipino fresh fruit there's also some um other food vendors and stuff but we're not really in the mood for fried food because we just had some um as you guys saw so let's go and check out the fruit that they have on offer would also be interesting to to see what kind of fish they have because usually when you go to the local market you can sort of get an idea of uh what kind of fish there is in the ocean around you so yeah we're super excited right guys inside situation of the market is pretty much in the beginning on the left side oh no it looks like it's going to rain sorry I just saw the cloud coverage there so uh left side in the beginning you have all things fruit left side in the end you have all things vegetables from the looks of it and then here on the right side there's different types of meats and fish and crabs and anything that sort of lives in the ocean from the looks of it and then you have some more root vegetables there in the back but uh yeah really really cool market and it looks like oh what is that jackf fruit it's a giant jack fruit giant jack fruit like knee high jack fruit and um it looks like this Market sort of facilitates any needs that you might have in terms of produce um now it is sort of 1 1 p.m. or something like that right now so I do think that quite a few of the Market vendors probably already left the stage there's tons of stuff though there's so much produce I'm really Blown Away by how how much stuff they have this is like what I was saying earlier it's a fresh water the massive fresh water lake that they have at the center of kotes probably producing quite a lot of stuff and uh yeah it looks very very nice very vibrant very uh alive let's put it that way this ve these vegetables look healthier than anything I have uh had back in Ireland for twins oh yeah twins
2024-02-19 08:04
