Philippines, Part 1

Since we left Perth in the late afternoon, we had to spend a night in Kuala Lumpur (KL). Our flight to Cebu City, Philippines, would leave the next morning so we decided to sleep at the airport. Earlier we were thinking of leaving our workout-mats and sleeping bags in Australia – good that we didn’t do that; they turned out to be rather handy still!
After a disturbed and sleepless night, we made our way to the Check-In counter, where all the trouble of the next 12 hours started…

On purpose we did not book our return ticket back to KL yet to stay flexible. We had no idea of where to go exactly (apart from some dive spots) and definitely no clue of when to leave the Philippines again. Unfortunately, officially you are not allowed to enter the country without a return ticket. Therefore, we were obliged to book that ticket at that moment. After some discussing and reviewing our remaining travel plans, we came to the conclusion to skip on Myanmar (Burma) and spend 3,5 weeks in the Philippines. By the way – this turned out to be a very good decision!

The flight with Air Asia to Cebu City was OK. The idea was to get a nice hotel with a swimming pool and good WIFI to sort everything out there. While we were waiting at the belt for our luggage, coincidently Pam thought once again about “What if one of our bags is not going to arrive.. we STILL haven’t switched a bunch of T-Shirts and underwear to the other bag!” And there we were: Sven’s backpack did not arrive – traveling for 11 months and never any issue with the bags – it had to happen at some point. Sven filled out a report and the people from the airport would let us know as soon they would find it back and transport it to our hotel.
We took a cab and went to the Grand Hotel. While checking in, Sven could not find his passport. THAT seriously was the icing on the top! We did know though it could only still be in the cab. Luckily, the hotel staff was very friendly and tried to ring the taxi-company. In the meantime, we went to buy some sweet snacks and cheap boos to relax again in our air-conditioned room (the humidity was something to get used to again!), beating Murphy’s Law. About 30 minutes later, the driver returned and brought the passport back. A real relief!! The next days were spent with relaxing at the pool, massages, pedicure, shopping and waiting for the bag, which was returned in one piece two days later.

From Cebu City we took the local bus to the north. The trip in the rather uncomfortable and hot bus took about 5-6 hours; Direction Malapascua. This island is known for great diving with thresher sharks and was recommended by Xandi. The bus brought us to Maya, from where we had to take a boat to the island. We left a bit later, because the boat driver wanted us to pay double the actual price and we refused. After a bit of negotiation we hopped on the boat for nearly the usual price: By now we know how the tourist branch in these countries work. The boat ride only took about 30 minutes but we could already get the flair of the atmosphere. We booked a little guesthouse (BB’s Lodging House; Xandi’s recommendation) the day before. It was very basic but we had our own little bungalow.

The same day we went to check out almost every single dive shop at the beach. Very spontaneously we had decided to go here for our Advanced diving certificate. We found a cool Filipino dive master who offered us a great deal, and we would start the next morning at 11. However, when we showed up the next morning, there was nobody, and for the next 3 hours our guy was not showing up. Basically we wasted a day now in our already tight schedule, so we went directly for our second choice dive school. The rest of the afternoon we took it easy, had a nice cocktail at the beach and chilled.

The course included 5 dives: perfect buoyancy, navigation, night dive, deep dive and nitrox. With our deep dive, we went down to 29 meters, where a cleaning station for thresher sharks was located. We were very lucky and spotted around 10-15 sharks, of which some came by very close.

In Malapascua we also got an assignment from Xandi. He had met a family there a few years ago who had lost everything after the typhoon Yolanda. He helped them out financially and asked us to check how they were doing. After a bit of hassle, we did find Isidra and Pedro and their 8 kids! It was a lovely family and we went back that evening to have dinner with them too. That was a very unique experience in between all our touristy plans.

From Malapascua, we went back to Cebu, to continue the following morning to Oslob and Bohol. Oslob is a small town south of Cebu City and known for their whale sharks. We had one night there in a very luxury hotel-room. We were warned that it could get busy and therefore we left early in the morning to the spot where you could swim with world’s biggest sharks.  However, when we arrived at 06:00am it was packed already with tourists and with about 30 boats in a rather small area. Although this took the charm away a little bit, once we were in the water it was still very impressive to be so near to those giant animals.

From Oslob we took a small boat to Bohol Island, another great location for diving. The first day we rented a moped and went for a drive around the island. On the way we visited a Tarsier-sanctuary (tiny monkey-like animals with huge eyes) and went to the “Chocolate Hills”: an area with many characteristic small hills popping out of the ground. We had the cheapest lunch at a local café and had a chill ride back. Our legs and butts were sorrow from the 5 hour ride so we were happy to get back. The second day we went for two dives around Balicasag Island where we spotted more than 10 giant turtles! and furthermore a lot of beautiful coral life again. We had a cool group on the boat, with which we had lunch afterwards, and we were sad that we had to leave again that same day with the ferry back to Cebu city (from where we had a flight to Palawan the next day).