Touch and go

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From Malapascua I decided to head down to Bohol Island, just east of Cebu Island. In the place I was staying at (Purple Snapper), I had met a French woman, Stephanie, also a dive instructor and she was also going to Bohol, so we decided to go together to share costs. She was good company, had a lot of stories, plus she was an excellent dive buddy to be traveling with.



We woke up really early in the morning and went to the beach to get a boat that would take us to Maya (town at the very north of Cebu Island). While we waited in the beach, we were constantly harrased by a pack of stray dogs, which was really annoying.

The boat ride takes about 30 minutes and from Maya we had to take a bus to get to Cebu. We had enough time to have a coffee and something to eat before starting the 5 hour bus ride.

As soon as we arrived in Cebu we took a taxi to the ferry harbour, payed a ticket and we still had about an hour or so before departure, so we went to have a light lunch nearby.

The ferry was quite comfortable and I had plenty of time to read on the way to Bohol.

In Bohol we asked a security guard who told us the normal prices to pay to get to Panglao, an island that's connected to Bohol by two bridges. A car cost 600 PHP and a tricycle, 300 PHP (that's what we took). We spent another 30 minutes in the tricycle before arriving in Panglao. This small island is known as a diving destination. It's full of resorts and budget accommodation places, as well as numerous dive shops. The most famous place there is Alona Beach.

We walked for a while, looking for places to stay and we ended up in a cheap hostel called Alona Citadel. It was a few hundred meters from the beach, but it was clean and well organized. We found a local dive shop (Mr. Diver) that was the cheapest one and it was a small dive shop. We organized to do 3 dives with them the next day.



Early the next morning we arrived in the dive shop. The gear they had was in good condition and we had a very friendly Divemaster called Alan. It was just the two of us and a Russian. All three dives we did near an island called Balicasag. The dives were mostly wall dives, pretty deep and with a lot of marine life. We saw a lot of turtles and the most impressive thing were the big schools of jackfish, which we encountered in two of the dives and we could dive right in the middle of the massive cloud of fish. The boat was well organized, the guides knowledgeable (even though we were just 3 customers, we had 2 guides) and we had a fantastic day there.



That evening we had dinner in a place near the hostel which had excellent food. I had a massive meat skewer with bread and a few beers. Pure joy.



The day after, we planned to do a tour around Bohol. We paid around 2000 PHP for a driver and told him to pick us up at 10am. We also booked another dive to do at 7am, just before going on the tour.



Stephanie's plan was to go from Bohol to a city called Dumaguete, in Negros Oriental Island. There's a place about 20km from Dumaguete in which it's possible to snorkel with whale sharks. I still haven't done that and I almost went there, but if I had, I would've had too little time in Coron and I would've had to rush between places. So I made a decision and decided to try and do the whale shark snorkeling from Panglao. The problem is that from Panglao it takes a long time to get to the whale sharks and not a lot of people do it and boats don't leave unless they have a minnimum of customers. But I decided to take my chances.



I also needed to book flights to go to my next destination, Coron (small Island in Palawan) and then book flights to get to Nepal. Between the booking of 5 different flights, with the internet crashing as I was about to pay, problems with the credit cards, etc., it took me several hours. And I ended messing up in the date to fly to Coron and booked it for the day after the one we were doing the tour around Bohol, so I missed out on the whale sharks.



Well, we did the dive in the morning (it was good, but no as good as the previous day) and then we had a small breakfast and went to do the tour.



There's a lot of things to see in Bohol and we picked out a few of them. The first stop was the Tarsier Sanctuary. Tarsiers are the smallest primates in the world (they're not monkeys; they're more primitive). They're nocturnal creatures and during the day they usually pick a spot and sleep. The usual wikipedia link I put in my posts: (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tarsier). We didn't spend too much time here. There are girls that act as tour guides and they have a set path in which you get to see abot 4 or 5 Tarsiers. Enough to look at them and take a few photos.

From that place we went to a hanging bridge. It's nice in general, but it's just that: a hanging bridge.

From there we stopped in another place, that I didn't find that interesting: the "Man made forest". It's a patch of planted mahogany trees on both sides of the road that extends for about 2km. I found a blog that describes it in more detail (http://turningboholano.blogspot.com/2012/04/bohols-man-made-forest.html). I wasn't very impressed.



From the forest we went to a butterfly farm. This was a good visit. They have a very complete collection of butterflies and caterpillars from the Philippines. We found out about their habits, different facts and life span. This was something different from things I've seen before.

We had lunch in that place and then we headed to our last stop: a hilltop where the famous "Chocolate Hills" can be seen. These hills are a rare geological formation and are all over the island (more than 1200). They're just small hills that resemble Hershey's Chocolates. These hills are covered in grass and in the dry season they turn brown, hence the name. This is really an impressive spectacle and worth the visit. The hill was full of tourists, specially Chinese and Japanese and there were cameras flashing all over the place.

That was the end of the tour. From there we went to the ferry terminal where Stephanie departed to Dumaguete. I went back to Panglao to spend the last night there. I had dinner at the same place as the previous night and had the exact same plate as well.



In the morning I had to go back to Cebu to catch the plane to Manila and from there to Coron. Luckily there was a Norwegian girl, Karin who was also going to Cebu at the same time (she was going to Malapascua), so I shared a tricycle ride with her and then we took the ferry to Cebu. Then she went to the bus terminal and I to the airport. Bad timing, I wouldn't have minded going to Malapascua again.

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