Advertisement
Published: January 2nd 2009
So we arrived in the Philippines just in time for my birthday, so thought it would be a good idea to head straight to a beach with diving for Dom and a luxury resort for me! So we spent an interesting night in Manila and then hopped straight on a flight to Cebu city where we spent an entire day looking for accommodation. We are seriously about to throw our lonely planet away as it just sucks, in fact we're not sure the people who write the Philippines section have ever been here!
The bus from Cebu to Moalboal where we headed with Lisa and James was also good fun, there's no need to visit theme parks here just hop on a bus where they dive 100km an hour and overtake where ever the hell they like. As well as having Jon Bon Jovi on full blast the entire way there!
Moalboal was nothing like the book described, but was lovely. We found cheap accommodation for the first night and then headed for luxury for the rest of our stay, which was worth it just for the pool we had access to! The only problem with the town was
that the lonely planet had neglected to inform us that there was no cash machine there, only a few places take cards and the nearest atm is over an hour and a half away on the bus. So instead of splurging like crazy we watched every peso; which turned out to be extremely important as we only just had enough money to get to our new destination in Negros involving a bus, rickshaw, cargo boat and jeepney all in half a day!
Theres not much to do in Moalboal, but it was a nice place to spend a few days. The plan was to go canyoning but due to a typhoon coming in the weather wasn't good enough and the river levels too high. So horse riding it was instead, with a sack instead of a saddle and string as reins. Doms' legs almost touched the ground and my horse was crazy and 'we' chose to take a more scenic route rather than following the others!
Moalboal was a great place to spend new years eve, there were more fireworks then you can imagine, and even more tanduay (rum), and potent cocktails given out at midnight, this lead
to our midnight swim with people of all nationalities which lasted until 4am and gave us all colds... definitely worth it!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.127s; Tpl: 0.017s; cc: 14; qc: 23; dbt: 0.0938s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
Thor
non-member comment
Pictures and New Year swimming in the Phillipines
Hi Dom and Laura, We continue to enjoy your excellent blogs - you seem to find exciting things wherever you go! Your sunset pictures are excellent and I was particularly taken by your description of New Year festivities (a few hours before us!) - midnight swimming and rum and all! I hope you continue to have a great time and keep sending the blogs! Best wishes, Thor.