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Anchored Position 07° 59.56 N 117° 04.05 E
Clarendon Bay, Balabac Town

Today we made the long tedious passage of 8 miles from Dalawan bay to here in Clarendon bay and Balabac town. Now being here in a new country there are lots of things to deal with.

First we need to check in with officialdom, but that can only be done at a port of entry. That would be Puerto Princessa which is still 150 or so miles away. Now in some countries not leaving your boat and going directly to a port of entry is strictly adhered to, others allow you to make your way there even if it takes several weeks before officially entering the country. Thankfully the Philippines is on of the latter.

Next to consider is MONEY! Here we use the Philippine peso which has an exchange rate of about 40 to 1 US dollar. Lots of math to do when you go to the store and something costs several hundred peso's, though not as bad as when in Venezuela where it was like 1300 to 1. We did manage to exchange money before leaving Kudat in Malaysia. A good thing as there is no bank or ATM here. So once at anchor off Balabac town we were ready to go ashore and do some shopping. Our main concerns were bread, eggs and anything fresh.

In town, one long street with perhaps 100 stores that all have the same goods for sale, we found our essential food items. I even managed a couple of San Miguel lite beers.

Next to find in this modern world is a SIM card for our phone and perhaps find out how to connect up with the internet. Here, this was accomplished at the pharmacy. A phone SIM card was 50 pesos. We have an unlocked phone so you just plug in the new card and buy time. We then bought 950 P's worth of time. We have been told that the phone service here is expensive so we'll see how that works as we go. Our friends Jack and Sandy from "Zorana" had given us a "smart bro" dongle to use for the internet here. We were able to charge that too and now we are into the modern age. Cell phone and internet!!!

We greatly enjoyed wondering about this small town, it reminded us of the same friendly feelings of most Latin American countries. The people were smiling and appeared quite happy. Lots of the shop workers spoke English. Now it is we that need to learn a bit of the local Tagalog language.

Back on the boat we managed to get the internet working a challenge for us who are not very computer literate. The connection is slow but we can get the most important things weather reports, email and sports, well Kathy does also get her facebook.

Tomorrow we plan to continue on toward Puerto Princessa and our official check-in but we are truly looking forward to our stops in between.

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