Jared visits for Christmas

 Since Jared was so close, just 3 one hour flights away from us, he came to visit for Christmas. Of course, to get between those short hops took him almost 24 hours. We were so glad to have him.

It started raining before he got here. We were getting orange rain alerts and warnings of severe flooding. It had us changing plans often. Instead of going to the Sohotan Caves, we went to the weaver's caves, or Saob, meaning "come in" in Waray. You can see the rain pouring off the rocks.

Of course we took him to McArthur's Landing in Palo. 

We had wanted to take him snorkling but again the rains made it dangerous. Instead we ended up taking him to Hindang Caves where there are lots of monkeys. We didn't go into the bat cave, although we could see and hear them flying about. Too much guano on the ground. We found the monkeys over by the ziplines, of course. 

We got our pictures taken inside the lifesize ornaments and light display at the coca cola plant.

We sunk our canoe trying to go to Pinipisakin Falls and got stranded in the river for a while. Jack had made it to shore and could take a picture of our sunk boat and Jared and I on the rescue tree.

Saw some cool waterfalls anyways. This one is the blanca aurora falls. When the water isn't so high and running so swiftly, there are great swimming holes around it and you can walk across the top of the falls. Sadly, this was not that season.

Went caving to the Langun-Gobingob cave. It's one of the largest caves in Samar and took 3 hours to trek through. We saw an underground lake and river, blind fish and blind crabs that were snowy white. Learned that while I hate clay, I hate bat guano on top of clay even more. We got to belay down from a peak in the cave. The light at the top is the guide, the middle light is Jared partway down taken from a ways away. It was like being on a different planet, the landscape was so different. We had to swim out of the cave then hike back to our starting point in the rain. Our 6 hour tour ended up being 9 hours.

The whole vacation was sort of rained out. However, Jared got to try all kinds of Philippino food, ride all kinds of transportation, and experience life in a third world country. After his experiences, no one will probably visit us while we are here.