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With the Staff of the Hippocampus
I can't imagine ever being as happy as these girls constantly are.I arrived in Manila, the capital of The Philippines at 12:30 A.M. on July 2nd, after the soberest Canada Day I have had in a long time. Sean was due to arrive at 4:30 A.M. so I set my IPod alarm and settled in for a nap at a quiet airport. I got a good three hours of sleep and then met Sean as the airport began to wake up. Sean and I tried to switch our flight from Manila-Cebu to Manila-Boracay but because of cost issues we were unable to do this. We grabbed breakfast and tiredly shuffled on to our 8:00 A.M. flight to Cebu City (The second biggest city in The Philippines).
We had heard that Manila was a dump so we were happy to get out of there as soon as possible. Based purely on a guidebook, we decided to head toward Malapascua Island upon our arrival in Cebu City. This involved a four hour bus ride with about 100 stops, that brought us to the Northern tip of Cebu Island. From there we paid $10 each to charter a boat for the forty minute ride to Malapascua Island. Several locals got a free ride on
Bus on Cebu Island
Started out empty, but soon people were standing in the aisles on the four hour ride. our largess and after the forty minutes we arrived at what some Filipinos are calling, "The Next Boracay".
We quickly found a cheap spot to stay (Mosquito net beds and a rotating fan) and enjoyed a well earned beer with lunch. Our first impression of the island was a quiet place devoid of tourists but filled with sand flies. They swarmed us during that first meal and at first we were afraid that we had made a mistake. These worries were soon allayed by the wonderful tropical climate and the incredible friendliness of the Filipino people. Hands down, the Filipinos were the happiest and friendliest people that I met on my entire trip, if not in my entire life. The girls who worked at our resort did not stop laughing and having fun the whole five days that we were there. We went to the island disco with them on both Friday and Saturday night and had a great time both nights. The "Disco" was basically just speakers set up on the beach with some overhead disco lights strung on a rope between two palm trees. It was also all-ages which was kind of strange, although Sean gave several
Bill
That's Big Bill in the centre enjoying his dinner. Fully bald and just grew a silver ponytail a couple years ago. Did it to look more like his idol; Willy Nelson male Filipino teenagers a lecture on how to pick up girls at bars.
We stayed at our resort, The Hippocampus, for five nights and I can recommend it as strongly as any other place I stayed at during nearly five months in Asia. For a couple of the nights the only other guest was a seventy year old man named Bill. Bill was a former Dallas lawyer, and was both very Texan and very passionate about scuba diving, with over 1500 logged dives. Bill was a funny guy and I thought it was pretty cool that he was traveling independently in The Philippines, (Not the country with the easiest tourist infrastructure) at 70 years old! He drank and ate with us most nights and told us some amazing stories about diving and his life in general. The man is 70 years old and is still, "The closest of friends" with his high school football coach who is now 83. He has also had four bypasses and two open heart surgeries, and openly admits that his doctors do not think it is safe for him to still be diving.
Bill's passion helped inspire us to put some money down
Full Body Wetsuit
I am soooooooo ready to dive. and go on a dive ourselves. This dive was less interesting than the one I did in Thailand but it was another cool experience, especially since it was Sean's first dive ever. On another day we spent the equivalent of $4 each to go on a three hour snorkeling boat trip with a local captain. One of the sites was a Japanese shipwreck only 30 metres or so off the coast of the island. The ship had sank during World War 2, which seemed to us like an infinitely long time ago until we considered that Bill had been alive when this ship was still floating. In the ensuing seventy years it had split into several pieces on the ocean floor and its rotting wood had become home to several different types of creatures.
Outside of water sports, our biggest accomplishment on Malapascua Island was each drinking five beers in under five minutes. One restaurant on the island had this challenge and if you could successfully do it in under five minutes, you got your name on the wall and earned a point for your country. We ended up getting three points for Canada because the German guy who
Virgin Diver
Sean with the tank on after his first ever dive. managed the restaurant was a quasi-alcoholic and somehow messed up some very basic counting. We had prepared for the challenge with a lot of mental focus and had intentionally pushed dinner back to attempt the challenge on an empty stomach. I went first and using the tolerance I had built up over four months in Asia, threw down five in 2:42. Sean then stepped up and did it in 3:59 ensuring national success and t-shirts for both of us. Obviously, after the first fifteen minutes of feeling constantly on the verge of puking, we had a great night.
After five nights on Malapascua Island we had exhausted the possibilities of the place and were ready to leave. Malapascua is considered the next big destination in The Philippines and the amount of construction going on there right now is amazing. Our visit coincided with the start of rainy season, (Although the weather didn't reflect this) so for us the island was a quiet and relaxing destination. This will probably change in the next 5-10 years as word gets out and mass tourism begins to arrive. Like so many other places in Asia, I would say visit now, because these places
are changing rapidly and will be unrecognizable in as little as a decade. We left Malapascua on July 7th after saying goodbye to the friends we had made on the island. We boarded the boat to begin the long journey back to Manila with a couple of days in Cebu City also planned. Sean had a July 9th flight back to Shanghai and I had a July 10th flight back to Toronto. The next entry will be the final one and will describe the final 72 hours of my trip.
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Becca
non-member comment
the place was called the "Hippocampus"?!? amazing. I really hope that you know this is one of my favourite brain structures (responsible mainly for memory), and not some educational place for hippos.