So our Philippines adventure continues, today we have left Bohol and are doing the walk+ferry+taxi+bus+tricycle+ferry+walk to get to Malapasqua, for the last 4 nights in this lovely corner of the world.
In Bohol we went to Panglao and dived at Balicasag Is for a day, and then rented a couple of motorbikes for 3 more days to explore the main island of Bohol.
It’s always fun trying to work out what we should be paying for things, for example someone tried to charge us 500 pesos for a bus ride to Panglao that we later got for 50 pesos!
Jeepni travel, 25pesos a trip.
Sally making friends
So we shopped around to get a good deal on the bikes, which were eventually brought to our hotel in a strange slightly dodgy situation.
Three guys brought the bikes, with a used disclaimer/waiver, and went to great pains to point out what little damage was already on them. They also had three helmets thinking there must be another guy in our group, but we gave them one back saying one bike was for Sal… This initially confused them, but then they were super impressed that a foreign girl could ride a real motorbike. They were less impressed when I drew pictures of both the bikes on the agreement, showing all the existing damage 🙂
The impressed men was to be a bit of a theme for the next three days, with teenage boys often blowing kisses to Sal along the road, as you could imagine she hated the attention 😉
So we visited the Tarsier sanctuary, home to one of the oldest creatures on the planet, these little primates branched off from the primate evolutionary process something like 55 million years ago, and one variant has lived in isolation in Bohol ever since.
They’re tiny little things, that would fit in your palm, with huge eyes that don’t articulate, and a neck that rotates 360 deg instead. Of course they’re on the endangered list, loss of habitat and poaching… Very sad. Such little curious animals that have survived for so long, hopefully the Fillipino’s take better care of them than the orangutans in Indo.
Then we rode to the Chocolate mountains, which are a cluster of small hills that go brown in summer… Wow.
From there we rode about 300km around Bohol, stopping a night at a lovely little beach where a local band played mostly covers but with some cool Fillipino songs thrown in.
The bad news for us in this, is that Sal seems to have contracted dengue fever – red rash, a very high temperature, bad aches and pains and cold sweats. She’s soldiering on with paracetamol for the aches as there is no other treatment available, just stay hydrated and wait for it to pass.
Now we’re on the aforementioned bus going north in Cebu. It’s a strange vehicle, 3 seats each side of the aisle, fasten your seatbelt signs everywhere but no seatbelts, one driver who constantly sounds the air horns, one man who hangs out the centre door continuously shouting at people on the street to see if they need a ride, and one ticket collector who still hasn’t given me my 700 pesos change ($20).
Very slow going with all the starting and stopping, 6 hours to travel a bit more than 100km!
Hopefully we make the last ferry when we arrive!
…
We missed the ferry 🙁