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Published: October 6th 2007
We realise that we've been going on about our transport experiences over the last few of our blogs, but this is because travelling is all we've seemed to have done over the last couple of weeks.
To be brief, the non air-con bus got us to the port town of Maya on record time owing to another determined speed demon driver (see the videos)! If anyone is interested the buses leave from 5am onwards from Cebu's Northern bus terminal, not something that is easy to find out! You have to leave Cebu early so you reach Maya around 9-10am so you can join a shared boat to Malapascua island (30 minutes, 40 pesos and 10p for the paddle boat to take you to the big boat).
Malapascua is not a big island, you can probably walk around it in a couple of hours. We were told that there were no cars or motorbikes on the island, but within 5 minutes of us dumping our bags onto the beach a motorbike went whizzing past us...Lonely Planet wrong again! However, the island did immediately have a nice feel to it with many of the locals (in particular the children) waving and
stopping to say hello and of course the ubiquitous 'give me money' requests.
Moving away from the main resort centre to the east, and nicer, end of Bounty beach, Donna found us a good clean cottage with 24 hour electricity (something not even some of the expensive resorts had), fan, good bathroom and big balcony right on the beach next to the sea for 600 pesos (£6). Most places in Malapascua sadly seem to be catering to the diving crowd, who in our experience, have deeper pockets than your average traveller. Some places were charging a ridiculous 2,500 pesos (£25) for a fan room, so we did well to find a such good value cottage. Most of the other good value resorts i.e. White Sands and Logon Beach Resort seem to have been demolished or shut down in an apparent attempt to preserve the beach. This is an obvious lie as the bigger, more plush resorts right on the beach have been left standing. We suspect that some bribing/corruption may be taking place. It's very sad to walk along the beach and see resorts that have had so much put into them be earmarked for demolition by a big
different varieties of jeepney
we never knew they were so different, but all very colourful! It's one of the best forms of transport we have come across.red cross spray painted on them.
Despite it's nice beaches, Malapascua is best known to the diving community as having nearby dive sites where rare thresher sharks (with scythe like tails) can be seen. Neil was interested in going down to take a look, but we learned that only 3 had been spotted in a week, so maybe September isn't the best month to see them. Neil did comment that the only sharks we saw were the Western owners of the dive resorts who were obviously raking in the money. Saying all this though, Malapascua did have something about it that we liked. Just behind the resorts located on the beach you can find an abundance of local life and colour where whole families would come out and say hello to you as you walked past. Considering the amount of tourist development that Malapascua has experienced in recent years you would think that it's inhabitants would be quite well-off. This wasn't the case at all and while we were here we saw some of the poorest people we have encountered yet in the Philippines. Maybe the wealth isn't being spread evenly to the locals. After seeing the local life,
it made us feel a little better that we were staying in a cottage run and owned by local villagers. One village girl took a liking to Neil's hair by saying 'I like your hair, it is beautiful'. Neil said, 'it's like a rooster's' (which are so common here) and she replied 'yes, you look like a cock!'. Neil really hoped she meant cockerel!
Malapascua even has a 'centre' called Logon (the old name of the island) which was a joy to walk around and a good source of supplies (such as rum, coke and calamansi - a type of lime). The main beach was a long expanse of white sand called Bounty beach. It's an ok beach but on our visit there was a constant strong wind which whipped up the sea and brought lots of crap onto the beach (which the locals promptly dug holes for and buried!) as well as making us into sand monsters with the sand sticking to every part of our bodies!
One afternoon Neil even convinced Donna to go exploring the island on foot. 10 minutes into this adventure Donna was already giving up but we did make it up to
the north end of the island via villages which had people who were either washing naked or shit-squatting in their back yards! Again, however the villagers were very friendly and would stop in mid-shit to say and wave hello! Malapascua's other beaches would look glorious if it were not for them being used as dumping grounds for the island's waste. It's a shame that the beaches have been used in this way as all it would take is a couple of days of cleaning up to fix them. A task which Donna would happily have started if only she had a pair of pink rubber gloves!
Food options were yet again limited and of bad quality here. As an example, one day Neil opted for a chicken curry which came served as curry powdered gravy with only hairy rubbery chicken skin in it and in the evening he struck lucky when his sweet and sour chicken arrived neither sweet nor sour but laced with enough chilli to make him have to join the squatting villagers not 10 minutes later. Damn, by the end of this day it was pure pleasure to sip those rum and cokes on our balcony.
a sari-sari store
which sells everything you could ever need! We had no alternative but to drink on the balcony as all the bars and restaurants had shut up shop by 9pm (an overpriced, poor service and poor quality place called Cocobana's seemed to be the worst at this and one night it was shut at 7:30pm!). Nothing like the 'pumping 24 hour discos' that Lonely Planet describes. However, there was one Saturday night disco which pumped out extremely loud techno music until 4am behind the Exotic Dive resort and Daňo beach huts. All the locals were dressed to impress (the tourists were not amused being kept awake though!) but you had to pay 20 pesos to a large Filipina woman who was no stranger to pork adobo before she would let you onto the dancefloor!
Yet again, as with many places in the Philippines there was an obvious shortage of fruit. Considering Philippines is one of the largest exporters of bananas, pineapples and mangoes and we were on an island littered with banana, mango and coconut trees, not only could we not find any fruit to eat, the banana and mango shakes were triple Asia's normal prices (starting at 60p) and a simple fruit salad was a whopping
150 pesos (£1.50) for a very small plate.
After 7 blissful days of sunbathing, swimming, exploring and sipping home made rum and cokes it was at this stage of our travels that we realised we had almost been away for 1 year and we experienced a couple of restless nights and reflection (probably because we had drunk too many rum and cokes, the rum is so strong it makes you hallucinate!). Our original plan had been to return home in just over 1 week's time. Instead we had decided to extend our travels for an, as yet, undecided period of time. This brought us to a crossroads in our journey which was a little more unplanned and scarier than usual, but never the less we were ready to move onto yet more travelling to Leyte, taking us further east into the Visayas.
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Marco
non-member comment
Cock and Cockerel
Don't worry, the girl meant cockerel. Or a rooster.