Stephenie Harrison

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Steph78

How Much It Costs to Travel in THE PHILIPPINES (& Other Handy Advice)

Looking back, it's hard to believe that when we first set off with our bags strapped to our backs to travel the world that the Philippines wasn't a place we ever really intended to visit. We flew in on a gamble, thinking we'd spend three weeks and wound up...
BudgetingPhilippinesTips & Tricks
Steph14

Chewing the Fat with Expat Edna!

This week we are so happy to welcome one of our favorite travelers to Chewing the Fat, the lovely and talented Expat Edna! Edna is a serial expat currently based in Paris. She first moved abroad at 18 and left the US for good after graduating college, spending...
Chewing the Fat
Steph25

Port Barton: The Town that Tourism Left Behind

The town of Port Barton (more of a village, really), is quietly nestled on the coast of Palawan and might be best described in terms of what it doesn't have rather than what it does. It doesn’t have any banks or ATMs, it doesn’t have any medical facilities, it...
Philippines
Steph12

Confessions of an Adventurous Eater & An Apology to the Pangolin

Are adventurous eaters the product of nature or nurture? My own childhood sheds little light on the issue as I grew up in a family with a fairly daring dinnertime table, although whether this was due to my parents having risky palates of their own or arose from sheer...
FoodPhilippines
Steph5

Chewing the Fat with World Flavor!

This week we welcome the wonderful couple behind World Flavor to Chewing the Fat! While in Koh Lanta, Thailand (we know, we know... the blog is horribly behind!), we actually had a chance run-in with these two when they spotted us scoping out snacks in the local 7-11! We...
Chewing the FatFood
Steph37

How To Spend $100 A Day In The Philippines

When we were still in the planning phases of our Big Trip, one of the things I researched most avidly was other travelers’ budgets and spending patterns.
AdventuresPhilippines
Steph18

Where (& What) to Eat in El Nido

While I won’t pretend that this guide is at all exhaustive (as you might expect, there are a lot of bars in El Nido, but being who we are, we went to not a single one of them!), if you ever find yourself in El Nido, we do have...
FoodPhilippines
Steph21

Palawan: The Philippines’ Final Frontier?

Open your Lonely Planet guidebook to the Philippines and flip to the chapter on Palawan. “This is the hidden Philippines”, it says. “The undiscovered Philippines. The untouched Philippines." The florid prose goes on and on as it waxes effusive about the pristine coral reefs, the untamed wilderness, the myriad...
Philippines
Steph13

Chewing the Fat with Never Ending Voyage!

This week we are extremely excited to be Chewing the Fat with a truly inspiring couple, the lovely duo behind Never Ending Voyage! Erin McNeaney and Simon Fairbairn are a digital nomad couple who sold everything they owned and left the UK in March 2010 to travel the world forever....
Chewing the FatFood
Steph13

Camiguin? More like CLAMiguin!

At the risk of potentially causing you, our beloved readers, to OD on stories and pictures of our underwater escapades while in the Philippines, I'm... going to share yet another aquatic adventure. It seems only right, since when you're on an island, there is only so much time you...
DivingPhilippines
Steph18

That Time I Almost Died in Cagayan De Oro

I am hesitant to paint with too broad a brush, but even based on our encounters with internationally-curious individuals, it seems like most people know very little about the Philippines. Instead, we scrounge the dusty corners of our brains, trying to find any morsel of information we may have...
FoodPhilippines
Steph9

Turtle Power!

Not much could top learning to dive as a trip highlight for Tony and me, but if you can believe it, the beautiful island where we first learned to breathe underwater had other delights in store for us of the aquatic variety, namely: turtles and lots of 'em!
DivingPhilippines
Steph43

The Hardest Part of Travel Blogging

Ironically, sometimes the hardest part about being a travel blogger is writing about the places you have visited. I’m not talking about the actual act of writing or the frustration of writer’s block—though that does indeed strike with exasperating regularity—but rather, sometimes you visit it a place and it...
MusingsPhilippines
Steph21

On Diving and Dreaming

All my life I have been a water baby, spending my summers up in northern Ontario, doing my level best to transform from girl into dolphin, or at the very least, a mermaid. Some girls spend their childhood in gymnastics or ballet lessons, but those hours I spent each...
DivingInspirationPhilippines
Steph15

When Three Weeks is Not Enough

Everyone thinks that the hardest part about planning a long-term trip is choosing the places you will visit. While honing in on just one slice of the world can certainly be challenging, harder still is figuring out how much time to spend in each place.
PhilippinesVisas