Philippines Day 6 - Bais

This was an AMAZING day! It didn't start out so great. John had been a little sick the day before and I woke up a little sick to my stomach this morning. We first got breakfast at Julies, a little bakery we often went to for breakfast, bottled water, and to break our bigger bills into change.

Then we headed over to the boat harbor where we had chartered a private boat to take us and some of our friends out to go dolphin watching. The earlier you go out, the better your chances of seeing the dolphins, so we met at 6am at the docks.

Homes on the beach

Our boat

We saw the dolphins from far away and I expected that by the time we got there they would be gone. But this pod of dolphins had hundreds of dolphins in it. Danny and I both agreed that we thought it could be up to a thousand of them. You could see them jumping out of the water in both directions for a couple of football fields.

I thought they would swim away from the boat but when they drove our boat into them they swam with the boat!
 

It was so temping to jump in and swim with them! Seriously one of the coolest things Ive ever done. If you listen in the video you can tell we were so close (and there were so many) that you can hear them.

Alma and Danny are on the left in this picture. They made sure after our dolphin adventure that we went to the sandbar.

It really is just a huge bar of sand that comes out from the shore. Its huge! When the tide is out you can walk and play volleyball on it. The tide was in when we were there and so the water was about 1 1/2 ft deep.  Crystal blue water and perfect white sand!

When we started looking around with our masks on we saw that we were surrounded by starfish and sand dollars! The little kiddos with us were so cute and kept running up to me and saying, "sister, sister" and would hand me more. I had to cut them off when I had about 20 starfish in my hands. They were everywhere!

Then our boat took us over to the shore to the corals to do some more snorkeling.

It was amazing once again! We also spent some time swimming. John and I got fried despite putting sunscreen on twice!

We docked around noon and we headed back to the hotel to shower and I was so sunburned! The combination of that and feeling queasy in the morning and I didn't dare head back up into the mountains with how hot it was. Especially since we would also be hitchhiking and driving on windy roads. So John took off and left me in the hotel to be bored for 6 hours :) It actually was nice to relax, write in my journal, and watch some TV. This is also when I heard about the Tsunami warning in Asia - umm yeah I freaked out for a minute or two!

Check this out - the hotel had curtains made from the same materials my old drapes were made from. How random is that!

John had a good time up with Elmer. I think it was good I wasn't there so they could talk missionary to missionary.  Elmer was nice enough to come back to the hotel to meet me though!