Woke up early to try and catch the 9:20 ferry to Cebu, shared a minivan to the port with some others from the hostel. Arrived at the port and there were so many huge and slow queues that we missed that ferry and the next one was 11:40 so we napped in the waiting room.

Got the ferry, then walked an hour to the bus terminal, got some odd local food and then a bus up to Maya port (bus took almost 5 hours!) then got the night ferry (local style boat that gets punted through the shallows), because of the bad weather it took about half an hour to get out of the bay.

Then it was really rough and wet getting to the island, it was around 11pm when we moored up, all the men on the boat tried to pull us in further, but the boat was really quite large so wasn’t going to get any closer, so in thigh high waters we waded with our backpacks on to the shore. Then someone asked where we were trying to get to, we said “Villa Sandra”, a place that was recommended to me. He was the cousin of the guy that owned it so lead us there. The island is beautiful and tiny, it takes a couple of hours to walk the entire circumference of beautiful beaches and a couple of cliffs.

This Villa Sandra place is an amazingly chilled rasta hostel. Sooooo chilled! The owner is an amazingly nice little local chap with dreads and a chin bearded that spent most of his time playing a wooden flute and lived in a treehouse in the garden, surrounded by hammocks and a few tents, in case the rooms fill up. All the people that worked there are good mates and everyone was so nice, thoughtful and chilled. Thankfully they had space for the two of us for the night because of two no shows. I slept so well!

We woke up at around 4:30 in Coco farm to get our 6am tour start.

We managed to catch a bike in and get there just in time. We got a boat out to see the dolphins jumping about not long after sunrise, our boat was intensely loud! The dolphins were cool though, I’ve never seen dolphins before. There were quite a lot of them! We didn’t manage to get very close to them, but they were fun to watch nonetheless.

Then we sailed on to an island that contained a fish sanctuary. When we arrived we had to wait for about an hour to get a smaller boat from our boat to the shore, then when we did land we had to wait quite a while for another boat out to the sanctuary, but we didn’t really know what was going on, so we were just enjoying ourselves and chatting to the other people from our boat.

We then got out to the sanctuary and got snorkelling about there were sooooooo many fish, of all sorts of amazing colours, shapes and sizes, you often found yourselves swimming through a school of fish. Unfortunately a lot of the corals were destroyed by people walking on them, but the cliff edges were amazing!! And so beautiful to swim down to closer check out particularly interesting fish. I heard a local calling out something that I couldn’t quite understand to start off with until I worked out he was called out “Turtle!” To which I located Amy to inform her and we along with about 10 other paddlers swam out into the open water in that direction. And there it was! A beautiful turtle serenely gliding through the water! We all swam towards it staying at the surface, I saw one girl swim in closer to get a better look, but she couldn’t get very close, so I thought I’d have a go and I got down right next to it and swam right alongside it for a bit, oh my it was so lovely! I was so close that I could have stroked it. I chose not to and I popped back up before I started to run out of breath, but it really was such a special moment. Definitely a highlight of my entire trip. After some more snorkeling I noticed in the distance that everyone else was back on the boat, so I swam back and when I got on, everyone was quite shocked at the blood pouring down my face: i’d dived so deep and hadn’t released the pressure in my mask that the blood vessels in my nose had burst, so I had my first ever nose bleed! 😀

After snorkeling we went off to a serene little island and enjoyed the intense sun, followed by intense rain… followed by intense sun again.

We spent the rest of the daylight hours lazing on the beach, freshening up, and then I put up my hammock in a palm tree that was almost horizontal, napped for about an hour as Amy explored and did her updates.

In the evening we met back up with the couples we did the tour, we watched a great fire show, in which Amy was used as an assistant and had some chap doing fire poi tricks just inches from her face! Exciting! We then went off to dinner and I enjoyed an amazing sizzling seafood platter, while a musician was playing acoustic covers of great classic rock, punk and grunge tunes, just to my taste.

We then started to walk back to Coco farm, and about an hour into our walk we realised that it was actually far too far away! And persuaded by a large number of very loud dogs, we turned back to try and find someone who’d give us a lift to our hostel.

When I got back to my dorm I fell asleep as soon as I touched the bed, still fully clothed 😛

A great day!

We woke up early moved our luggage to our new hostel “Coco farm”, which was much much nicer, we each stayed in dorms, it had atomosphere and character. It was in a small wood and the buildings where all raised, thatched huts with wooden floors and weaved bamboo walls.

We then went straight from there back into town to on the back of a bike to catch our day tour of Bohol which included many different things:

1. The Coco hills: really unusual hill formations caused by coral formations eroding away.
2. Tarsier sanctuary: tiny little nocturnal monkeys with the largest eyes, but entirely around the size of my fist. They were really cute, but very very tired. Apparently if you touch them, they get so traumatised that they kill themselves O.o
3. We held a huuuuuuge white and orange Python, it had some record for being the biggest Python. It was really interesting to feel: it’s skill and bones were really quite separate and it was very strong as it moved about.
4. We went on a huuuuuge and amazing zip wire!! It was sooooo cool! I really enjoyed that! The views on it were amazing! It was also two zip wires, the first one was two together so I raced Amy down, although she had a very large headstart, I managed to overtake her by the end, and when you got to the end, it very much looked as if you were going to hit the wall as it decelerated very very suddenly and very last moment, but that part was rather exhilarating both times. That was fun 🙂
5. We had a really lovely river cruise buffet where we sat around, lazed down a really beautiful river eating loads of really nice local foods listening to the onboard band play some songs. After eating we went and stood on the bow of the boat and enjoyed the scenery going past. The river looked so nice to kayak down, unfortunately we later found out that there was nowhere to hire kayaks from and just explore, but oh well.
6. Saw some local monuments.
7. Walked across one of the beautiful rivers on a very suspect bamboo bridge and drank a fresh coconut on the other side.
8. We went to a butterfly reserve and saw and played with lots of really beautiful butterfly.

When we arrived back in Panglao we shared a lovely pizza on the beach as we listened to a local band play and the waves splashing in.

We then tried some of the local rum Tandau (it’s literally everywhere and it’s often the only liquor you can buy, it’s P50 for a 0.5L botal, it’s less than a class of a soft drink at a lot of places.

We then went and swam in the sea, partially overcoming a phobia of mine (swimming in the sea at night). It turns out that Amy severely overestimates her swimming and mushroom floating ability 😛

We woke up very early to catch the 8:20 plane to Bohol. We almost missed it as I popped off to go to the loo as everyone was queuing and the que wasn’t going anywhere, Amy was napping, I came back and the que was gone and Amy thought that we were the next flight, I went and checked and we were that flight, we then ran to catch the plane. When we got on we found out some of the joys of flying with Cebu Pacific Airways: the only flight company I have flown with that the cabin crew play games with the guests! They did some rounds of guess the song from the lyrics, where the first person to put their hand up and answer correctly won a Cebu Pecific Airways bag! You don’t get that sort of in flight entertainment with British Airways!

When we landed and got off we took a tricycle to Panglao. We paused and had some unusual fruit drinks (of which I can’t remember the names of the fruits, but they were most enjoyable) and decided what to do next (it was soooo hot!), we wondered to the beach to find somewhere to sta, the one I was recommended was full for the night, so we booked it for the next night and after much searching the only affordable option was a room in an interesting hostel: I had my camping mat so I slept on the floor and all was gravy; the place was pretty much falling apart, had no atmosphere or personality and we would have much preferred dorms, it wasn’t ideal, but it would suffice for one night.

We then went back to the tourist district and booked a couple of tour:

1. A night tour along a river to see some firefly.
2. A full day tour of lots of the main attractions of Bohol.

We then had a quick street food dinner of chicken on a stick and rice and then went on the firefly tour:

The firefly tour was actually really cool! We got a minivan out to the river on Bohol, then got into these big boats and sat around tables around the edge of this boat looking out at the lake and stars. When we got goingthe boats were really rather noisy, but the fireflys were amazing! There were a handful of hives of them in the trees dotted around the river, they pulsed with light and you could see the individual flys them all flying around as they pulsed, it was almost hypnotic, a few fireflys ventured into our boat and the stars were very clear and bright, it was a nice experience.

We then got back on the minivan, drove back to Bohol and walked along the beach back to our hostel, stopping for a brief moment to enjoy the stars and look out at the sea. The Philippines is a very beautiful place.

After the late night of Chinese New Year, we had a solid lie in until around 11am. Then we had some little rolls and peanut butter that counts as a “continental breakfast” here in the Philippines. Then we went out onto the balcony and organised the main structure for the time we shall share in the Philippines and bought some flight tickets.

Our plan:

1. Fly very early to Bohol
2. Stay in Pangloa for a few days, exploring the stuff that goes on there and around there and Bohol.
3. Take the ferry, coach and second ferry to Malapasqua in one day
4. Do our open water scuba diving qualification for 4-5 days
5. Fly back to Manila from Cebu
6. Take the night coach to northern Lazon
7. Do two days of tracking round the rice fields
8. Taking a night coach back to Manila
9. Fly our separate ways

We bought flight tickets and the like and then went off for a nice little meal at a recommended local Spanish place to kick off our travels, it was so lovely: we had shrimp, clamps, muscles and frogs legs, they were all delicious! It was the first time I’ve ever had clams or frogs legs, both I would definitely pick to have again. There was also a little mariachi band that played as we ate, it was a most enjoyable and relaxing meal.

We then went back to our dorms for an early night before the early flight tomorrow.