Where we’re at: I’m recapping my summer of 2018, including my travelversary, which I celebrated in June. Looking back at my seventh year of travel in order to write this post, I felt this incredible sense of pride. It’s kind of a funny thing for me to say, because I very often fall back on self-deprecation, […]

 

Once upon a time, I wrote a Budget Breakdown post for my trip to Honduras — one I cobbled together from data diligently recorded on the back of an envelope containing my lempiras. I intended to do so frequently along my travels, but it didn’t really work out. Most of my trips just aren’t suited to […]

 

Since I left home for my Great Escape, I’ve been doing monthly roundups of my adventures filled with anecdotes, private little moments, and thoughts that are found nowhere else on this blog. As this site is not just a resource for other travelers but also my own personal travel diary, I like to take some time […]

 

Time was up. Heather and I had only days left in the Philippines. Being a bit of a lazy traveler myself, I was more than content to beach-bum away our remaining days on Malapascua. I’m also pretty easily influenced, however, and so Heather didn’t have much trouble convincing me to add just one more destination to […]

 

When it comes to diving-focused destinations like Koh Tao, or the Perhentian Islands, or Malapascua, I get a lot of questions about what there is to do for non scuba fans. Malapascua is still deliciously undeveloped, and so in this particular case, the answer might seem to be, well, not a lot. Unless of course you […]

 

Yesterday marked a very special anniversary for me: Two years of remote self-employment, two years blogging away here at Alex in Wanderland, and two years of living nomadically. It’s been a trip, in every sense of the word. From attempting drysuit diving in the frigid waters of Iceland to becoming a Divemaster in the warm seas […]

 

Idyllic Malapascua is just a teeny blip on the Philippine’s tourism radar in comparison to bigger stars like Boracay or Palawan — and that’s part of what makes it so alluring to those who do make the arduous journey to get there. Those that do are mainly in pursuit of diving experiences that are hard to […]

 

So technically, I’ve already declared paradise found at least twice on this blog. First, way back in 2009 when I landed on the Perhentian Islands in Malaysia and felt certain that I had indeed discovered Heaven on Earth. Then, in 2011, I found myself on Koh Rong in Cambodia, and my Eden-Meter went wild again. Over […]

 

So far, Donsol had been a bit of a bust. It had been a mission to get there, and thus far the fireflies and whale sharks had been a disappointment. But we had one more creature left on our list to see — manta rays. We had arrived in the middle of peak season for the […]

 

We had come to Donsol for one reason: to see the locally named butanding in the proudly named Whale Shark Capital of the World. Long before my plane first landed in the Philippines, when my trip was just daydreams and scrawled notes in the margins of a guidebook, this moment was what I looked forward to the […]