Honeymoon Monday: Adventure to the Philippines...

Today's Honeymoon Monday feature wasn't a honeymoon, it was a really awesome vacation, BUT it would make a super amazing honeymoon!!! Honeymoon Monday is all about shelling out honeymoon inspiration, and this adventure to the Philippines is overflowing with it!

Hilary from Lovely and Gracious traveled to the Philippines last year with her fiance to attend a wedding. They extended their trip by a week and did a bit of exploring. The result was an exotic vacation full of romance and adventure!

More from Hilary:

The island archipelago known as the Philippines was nowhere on my radar as far as a vacation destination until my fiance was asked to be a groomsman in a wedding there last March. We live in California and traveling halfway around the world just for a wedding seemed like a pretty huge commitment, so we decided to take an extra week and check out one of the other islands to get a different experience, and I'm so thrilled we did. The wedding took place on the white sand beach of Boracay, which I consider the Cabo of the Philippines. It was a beautiful location and a vacation destination, so there were lots of great excursions to be taken and shopping and dining to be done. We stayed at a gorgeous resort called Two Seasons where we drank San Miguel beer, played volleyball and took naps on floating rafts in the bathwater warm South China Sea.

The week was wonderful but paled in comparison to our second week, which we spent on the island of Palawan in a resort location called El Nido. I love to plan trips and did a lot of research before choosing this location which required a flight, a 5 hour bus ride and a harrowing 9 hour ride on a ten person boat up the coast to get to, but it was completely worth it. The archipelago is best known for it's snorkeling and scuba diving because of it's warm waters and plethora of marine life, and there are hundreds of small islands to visit with coral reefs and unique beaches to visit.

I am totally against the "sandals resort" mentality of staying in a huge hotel with a hundred other couples and chose a tiny spot a couple miles from El Nido town called Dolarog Beach Resort. It is owned by a very old Italian couple and their family and consists of around 10 cottages located right on a private beach. The cottages were good size and each one had a private patio that overlooked the water and had plenty of privacy. The resort has no power from midnight to 6 am. The cabins are air conditioned, but about a half hour after the AC turns off it gets mighty hot and stuffy inside. We didn't have any trouble with mosquitoes though, (possibly because of a regimen of B-complex vitamins that we took for a month or so before the trip) but we opened the slatted windows when the AC turned off and did get some winged visitors. There was a small open air restaurant that served a breakfast of fresh fruit, eggs and toast every morning, a fixed meal every night (usually a pasta dish, meat dish and seafood dish followed by fruit for dessert) and made a picnic lunch every day for us to take along on our adventures. The meals were included with the stay and were surprisingly good for as simple as they were, and the mango and pineapple tasted like heaven.

Each evening at dinner we would choose our excursion for the next day, a private boat ride to one of 10 or so favorite snorkeling locations around the archipelago. We would get up in the morning, relax on our balcony, take a dip in the ocean and possibly a walk around the grounds for some badminton before heading down to the doc where our guides had our small "bangka" boat loaded with lunch, water and towels for the day's excursion. We would take a brief ride to an island where we would snorkel off the boat or explore an incredible beach or a hidden island cave, have some lunch then snorkel some more, returning to our resort in mid afternoon for a nap in the hammock and a couple beers before sunset, which became an event for us, then dinner. We settled remarkably into this easy living pace and both decided we could do this forever, canceling the last leg of our trip and deciding to fly directly back to Manila and home to the US.

During our time at the resort we encountered maybe four other families, none of them Americans. We had some incredible seafood, drank lots of San Miguel beer, and were treated very well by the only girl that seemed to do any real work at the resort, a 20 year old girl named Alex that served us all our meals and organized our day trips. We swam through a hole in a rock wall to encounter a beautiful secret beach, scaled a 50 foot cave wall barefoot, sunned ourselves on too many beaches to count and sometimes felt like the only people on earth. If it wasn't so hard to get there we would go back in a minute.

I had never considered visiting the Philippines before, but after hearing about Hilary's amazing vacation, I am definitely tempted! So private, romantic and tropical- the recipe for a perfect honeymoon!!!

Don't forget to send in your honeymoon submissions! I'm always looking for new honeymoon stories and photos to feature on Honeymoon Monday. I'd love to hear all about your amazing trip whether it be across the world, or close to home! You can send submissions to theloveliestday at gmail dot com:)