Botona Beach & Extreme Dahican Adventure

This is the summer destination I've been planning to go to and and finally, I'm coming over to see it! We started the trip early in the morning, we rented a Toyota Grandia van for only 5000 pesos including driver’s fee and fuel. Coming from Davao to Mati and back to Davao, I think the cost of the car rental was fair enough. Our group consist of ten people including 2 kids. I invited my friend along who was just as excited as me to see Mati for the first time.

From Panabo city, my place, the trip to Mati roughly took us 2-3 hours to reach. The zigzag road and the nerve wrecking cliffs makes me wanna jump off the van, plus our car was running like 120km/hr. As much as we’d love to stop by at Dinosaur Island and some beautiful spots to take some pictures, the driver seems to be in a hurry to reach Mati so we never really had the chance to take some pictures along the way. Below is the only picture we got along the way.

At about 6am, we reached Mati. We asked some locals for the wet market to buy some pork to grill for our brunch. My first impression about the city was like, it kinda look like an old village with not so many modern architectures around. After buying some stuffs, we hurried to Botona beach Resort.

The resort was fine, it has cottages for rent for an overnight stay but I didn’t mind asking for the rate at all, the good thing is that, you can park your car inside the resort. Along the beach were some wooden cottages painted in different colors. I loved how they chose the colors and the design of their cottages. The only problem was the beach, it was like fenced in rectangular shape. They used some plastic garbage packed and rolled in nets as a fence making it look like a swimming pool in high tide. As you can see in the picture below there were big and medium sized stones and some dead corals so it’s kinda hard to swim.

The boys started grilling the fish and pork so we walked along the beach. We found some locals hitting the waves with their surf boards and yeah, they were good at it! After reaching Dahican which is just few meters away from Botona Beach resort, we then pulled out from the latter and transferred to Dahican, which is a good decision since our ultimate goal is to skim board. The accomodation isn’t really great but the sand and the blue waters attracted us the most plus the big waves are amazing!

To be continued........