February 26th 2015 Guimaras Island- Day 6 Raymen Beach Resort

This is the new hut I was transferred to this morning. It is a little better than the other one and no creatures in the attic!

Well I haven't done much since I last posted a few days ago. Just doing the beach thing. I have been at the beach so long that I am probably going to be "beached out" by the time I get to Boracay on March 4th. Sometimes I go for a swim at night as they keep a fog light on that lights up the whole beach at night.

I asked for brewed coffee the other day and I didn't see the waiter turn on the coffee machine so after 5-10 minutes of waiting I asked him if I could have my coffee now (as sometimes they wait until your breakfast is ready and serve it with your food). So I watch him from a distance and see him reach for the INSTANT COFFEE (a big NO NO with me) and gets a cup and hot water and brings it over to me and I tell him I asked for BREWED COFFEE and not INSTANT COFFEE and say there is a BIG DIFFERENCE between them with us western folks. He then informs me that they ran out of ground coffee and doesn't know when they will have new stock.

So since then they have been out of BREWED COFFEE for a couple days now. Very disappointing! Running out of stock is very common in the Philippines. Things runs very differently here. Filipinos don't seem to care and just accept this as normal.

Been having most of the resort to myself most of the week but now come the weekend it will be getting busy again. I will be checking out of the Raymen Beach Resort before 12 noon tomorrow and head back to iloilo city (Pronounced "EE LOW EE LOW") as I need to extend my visa as it is only good for 30 days upon entry into the Philippines (Feb 1st to March 3rd) and Michel from the Netherlands that I met on the bus from Cebu city to Dumaguete told me I should be able to get a 59 day extension for 3900 pesos ($105 cdn) at the Bureau of Immigration and that would take me to my departure date of April 28th.

I still kept hearing something moving around on my paper ceiling in the hut and thought it was too big to be a rat and more like a small dog up there. I went outside and stepped on something to look up into the attic but couldn't see much as it was a little too dark. I had to move out of my hut today as it got booked and moved over to the hut next door (The executive hut) and I asked the cleaners what is moving around up in my hut attic and they said it was probably a cat as there are a lot of stray cats around here. That completely made sense. I am feeling kind of bad that I gave it the big UPPER CUT punch through the paper ceiling.

Here is the website to Raymen Beach Resort where I am staying on Guimaras Island http://raymenresort.com/

And I did a google search for "cheap budget hotels iloilo" and found this one
http://www.ongbun.com/pensionhouse-iloilo/
The prices start as low as 150 pesos ($4 cdn) but I decided to SPLURGE and got the 350 peso ($10 cdn) room with A/C. It is amazing what you can find with google searches. Any business that doesn't have an internet presence is losing potential customers.
The Highway21 hotel in iloilo charged me 800 pesos ($21.50 cdn) per night and the air conditioning didn't even work and they charged 120 pesos ($3 cdn) for a little bit of laundry and I know laundry is normally cheap here. A little bit of a MARK UP going on there.

Well I emailed the ONG BUN hotel and they TOOK the reservation but lets see if they can KEEP the reservation as I show up at 2pm at check in time.