The demand for electricity in El Nido is pretty steep. With this kind of hot weather, plenty of rooms are running on air-conditioning all at the same time.

Now, you shouldn’t be surprised if the lights in your room won’t turn on. Power outages in town is pretty common, it’s a sad fact of life.

And when the power is out, ATMs are down too. That’s a double whammy.

When the ATMs are online anyway, they run out of money pretty quickly.

With only a few establishments accepting credit cards, the only real safe way to go is to make transactions like how it was 10 years ago–by bills and coins.

To make things easier, it’s best to withdraw money from a major city like Manila, Cebu, or Puerto Princesa.

Here’s a list of all the banks and ATMs in El Nido.