Forest Cove Beach House

A few months ago, I was searching for a nice resort around Batangas area for the whole family to stay in at least for a night when Forest Cove Beach House was given to me by the reliable Mr. Google. 🙂 I don’t know anything about it, I’ve never even heard of someone I know who’s been there already but with the help of social media, I instantly knew that it’ll be our destination. Well, it has a Facebook profile which seems legit with a lot of commendations from people who’ve actually been there. I must say that if not for the Facebook profile, I probably wouldn’t even bother looking thru it.

Another selling point of the beach house was the fact that it’s right beside Punta Fuego, a beach resort that we’ve been 2 years ago as a family as well. To rent the whole house with 3 bedrooms, a kitchen and wide veranda will cost Php16,000 for the dates of my travel for an overnight stay which isn’t that bad. They’re very strict with the capacity of 16 pax inside the house though and we were a total of 18 including children and infant at first. Anyway, for the final head count though, some members of the family backed out due to the dates of our stay being a weekday and they couldn’t take some days off so we were down to 15. I immediately made a booking with Forest Cove as soon as the final head count was confirmed. All of the correspondence I’ve had with Raphael (the owner) was thru facebook and then email. However, although the Facebook profile seems legit and a lot of people have booked the house without having much problems with it – I was still kind of having second thoughts on sending him the total amount of Php 16000 thru Western Union to finally confirm the booking so I asked my cousin to speak to him which didn’t go well the first few times as the owner failed to answer his phone or reply to SMS messages. He was however, in constant communication with me thru email and explained that he’s always on the road and will not be able to pick up all the calls so I persuaded my cousin to keep on trying as I really think he was legit. To cut the long story short, as soon as my cousin was finally able to speak to him and the money was deposited to Raphael’s bank account – an email confirmation was sent to me with a scanned copy of endorsement letter that we’ll have to show to the security guard’s office to enter the private area of Punta Fuego. Raphael, I must say is the kind of person that I’d like to deal with. No beating around the bush, short and simple transactions – it was just us who were being a pain in the ass. 🙂

Fast forward to the day of our stay – we arrived at around 2pm (which is the actual check-in time) after driving for 2 hours from our house. The caretakers of the house were already waiting for us at the parking lot and helped us with our bags and cooking supplies. We brought our own food which works well for me because I really want to eat an authentic, Filipino home-cooked meals during my short vacation. The house looks exactly like the photos posted on their Facebook page, although probably a bit smaller than the photo but nothing really worth complaining about. It was clean, pristine clean. Fresh and clean bed sheets, towels and comforters were ready for us to use. The caretakers were accommodating and goes in and out of the house without much fuss, giving you that sense of privacy. There were three bedrooms inside the house, all of it are air conditioned and 2 toilet and shower rooms. It’s perfect for families. The best part of it all was, they have free wifi. Tee hee! 🙂 The only downside is, the house is a few meters from the beach and since it was mentioned that it’s a beach house, I was expecting to be walking out of the front door of the house and the beach sand will instantly tickle my feet. However, there’s a vacant lot separating the house from the beach itself where there were a lot of campers putting up a tent for an overnight stay I suppose which may or may not be a security issue specially at night. It’s not really a big issue though as we never encountered anything scary for the whole duration of our stay.

For dinner, we brought pork belly and fish to grill and the caretakers offered to grill it for us. I do highly recommend it though as they do it very well. It was perfectly done, specially the pork belly. The caretakers will also clean up after you which we never realized that it was supposed to be like that until both of them started doing the dishes for us. Of course I do think it’s just rightful to give them a tip after our stay. I highly recommend this beach house for a short family getaway as it gives you that “home-y” atmosphere. If you want to have your own privacy and a not overcrowded beach (we went there on a weekday which probably explains the less number of people), then this place is right for you. For more information and photos, do visit their Facebook page.

And here are the photos that I took:

Forest Cove Beach House

The Master’s Bedroom with TV, DVD player and its own toilet and shower room.

Room # 2

The attic room with two double beds. They do have a lot of extra mattress and pillows good for 16 people.

My niece doing her stunts at the beach. 🙂

And of course my nephew will have his own stunts.