Pangasinan Roadtrip - Hundred Islands and Bolinao Escapade

The itinerary for our Pangasinan weekend roadtrip is to go to Dagupan, Alaminos and Bolinao.

We left Manila by Friday night and arrived in Dagupan to get some rest in my friend’s place. Saturday morning, we traveled to Hundred Islands, Alaminos, Pangasinan.

Hundred Islands

I’ve read about Hundred Islands in my elementary textbooks, but I’ve never really had the chance to get there until last weekend. 

They said it was better to explore the islands during the morning since in the afternoon, there's already low tide and there are activities you won’t get to experience, like cliff diving. But we arrived around 11am so we really had no choice but to experience it during the afternoon under the scorching heat of the sun. If you’re arriving around the same time, it’s better to eat first (if you’re not bringing any food) since there’s really no food choices on these islands.

Arranging Your Hundred Islands Tour

To start your Hundred Islands tour, you would have to get to Lucap Wharf. If you’re traveling by car like we did, there’s a free parking lot. Once you’re there, go to the tourism office, talk to one of the officers, and you would need to fill out a form. You would be assisted by the officer.

Costs:

(1) Boat fee: It depends.

Determine how many you are and what kind of boat you need . There are small (1-5 persons), medium(6-10 persons) and large boats (11-15). Determine whether you’re renting the boat for a Day Tour, Overnight or you’re using it as a Service Boat. If you hire a Service Boat, your assigned tour guide will stay with you during your entire trip. Here are the rates:

Grabbed from keeping traces.blogspot.com

(2) 250 PhP per person for snorkeling

If you’re going snorkeling, you would have to pay 250 pesos for each person for the equipments.

(3) Insurance - 10 PhP per person

(4) Registraion/Envirnonmental Fee - 40 pesos per person

What to do in Hudred Islands

- There’s an activity in each of the major islands. In Governor’s Island, you can visit the PBB house and climb to the view deck to take a picture.

Among the other activities you can try are:

- Island Hopping
- Snorkeling
- Swimming
- Cliff Diving
- Zipline

Don’t worry. You can just ask your tour guides on what you can do in each of the island. You would have to pay additional fees for other activities like snorkeling and zipline. Cliff diving is for free, but make sure you have a vest. No vest, no cliff dive.

We didn’t get to experience the cliff diving since there was low tide, but we swam in the Imelda Cave which is the underground river -- also a bat cave -- where people do the cliff dive.


There are other islands/islets you can go to. In our case, after snorkeling, we just passed by these islands since we were already exhausted. We proceeded to Bolinao, Pangasinan.

Bolinao Pangasinan

We stayed in my friend’s cousin’s place in Bolinao. Ate Cute was the most gracious host anyone could ever ask for. She also accompanied us in Patar Beach and Bolinao Lighthouse. I like seeing lighthouses so that was really fun for me. 

In Patar Beach, cottages only cost 700 pesos.

To end our Pangasinan trip, we planned to go to Manaoag Church, but it was already late in the evening so we weren’t able to pass by.

Pangasinan is just a few hours from Manila. If you’re broke like us, you can definitely visit these places since for a small budget, there are plenty of activities you can do and plenty of places you can visit.