The last leg of our holiday is an overnight stay with the family in Batangas – a province in the Southern Tagalog in the Philippines which is popular for people wanting to have a quick getaway from the city. It has been a popular destination for our family as well since our town is a mere 2 hours from it, depending of course which part of Batangas you’ll be going to. I haven’t been to Matabungkay though so it was a first time for me.
We drove straight from the airport to Matabungkay, the long travel hour was extremely tiring but seeing the very quaint and pretty resort of the Coral Beach Club Hotel will make your tiredness vanish. I don’t know about you but the sea always does wonders for me.
The resort was small with only a few rooms available, it has a small pool, a restaurant and a bar with a billiard table. Our room was clean and pretty basic, it has everything you need for an overnight stay so there really is nothing to complain about.
Our family spent most of their day on a water raft in the middle of the sea which they hired for the whole day. Once we’ve arrived, the owners of the raft picked us up from the beach of Coral Beach Club Hotel by a small paddle boat towards the raft. I suddenly felt envious that they get to spend a whole day there, it looks like a cool place to just be lazy on. The owners of the raft also served as our assistants, they were the ones who grilled the food for us and even went to buy some stuff from the market like ice, water and some fresh catch of the day.
The water from where we were was so clear that you could see the coral reef down below, I didn’t have my swimsuit on so I wasn’t able to swim with my cousins.
Just after sunset, the owners pulled the raft (yes, pulled!) towards the shore just so it will not be difficult for us to go back to our hotel in the evening. I think it was already midnight when we all decided to go back to the resort and continued on our drinking at the resort’s bar. The bar closed at 1am though so we had to go out and buy some more beer for our consumption, we asked the guard though if it’s allowed and we were advised that it is – as long as we’re going to hide it from the other guests who were at the bar with us. Little did we know that we will be charge a corkage fee per bottle the next day upon check-out which kind of pissed me off. It wasn’t about the money that we paid, the corkage fee wasn’t that much but I was upset more on the fact that the guard didn’t tell us that there would be a fee. If we knew about it, we wouldn’t have bought anything outside and just ordered everything from them in advance.
Apart from that little misunderstanding and the fact that we didn’t have water in our room in the evening (good thing that we were already able to take a shower before it happened) our stay in Coral Beach Club Hotel was actually quite pleasant. I definitely would consider going back there if given a chance.
