Island stories – Jade & Gaz chat about the Philippines

Our first Philippines experience started a week before the desert island trip as we booked ourselves a few days holiday beforehand to get ourselves refreshed and on the right time zone. Some of our highlights were snorkelling with a dugong, exploring Busuanga Island, and escaping the chaos of Manila by visiting the historic Spanish part of the town, Intramuros. If you have the time available, it’s a beautiful part of the world to explore as an add-on to your trip.

Once the group arrived at the hotel, it was a jolt into the faster pace of expedition life with everybody brimming with questions, excitement and apprehension of the challenge to come.

We whisked them straight off for a boat trip to Coron Island and a visit to the beautiful Kayangan Lake for a swim in its crystal-clear waters.

A cocktail and a safety briefing later and everyone still fighting their jet lag we all hit the hay ready for an early departure to the island where they’d undertake their training and survival challenge.

The island is everything you imagine when you envisage paradise. The most vivid turquoise blue waters lapping white sand beaches. Rustling palms swaying in the breeze.

Don and Eddie did an incredible job of keeping the camp running in the background and the team well-fed with daily fresh catches. Not to mention Don serenading us with his Celine Dion impressions at any given moment.

The group shared countless laughs through the training phase and found plenty of reward in the teamwork they employed to overcome all the challenges thrown at them in preparation for their isolation phase. It was deeply satisfying to see the entire group successfully make fire by friction!

Encouraging them to take as little as possible on their challenge phase, we had talk of a rule that you could only take what you could fit in your coconut bowl… I’m not sure that anybody took it quite to that extreme, though.

After limited success fishing and a little tired of coconuts, they had the luck of a local fisherman stopping off at their beach on the final day and managed to trade one of their snorkel masks for a freshly caught octopus. There’s no cheating in survival, right? It was this that led to the team being christened ‘Octopussy’.

An exceptionally happy group returned to civilization for showers, massages and the traditional survivors’ banquet before parting ways and settling back into ‘reality’, hopefully with many new skills learnt and a deeper appreciation of themselves, the world and their place within it.

It’s always a pleasure working with Desert Island Survival, not least for the wonderful people it attracts and the incredible islands that we get to host them on.

Ready to join us on a desert island survival trip in the Philippines?