The Day I Found Nemo (Apo Island)

If Dumaguete had an almost legendary reputation among the Filippinos we spoke to, the only place to challenge its fabled status was Apo Island, a tiny, rugged dot in the Bohol sea. We tagged along on a diving trip organized by the hostel and, after some confusion about who was going to take us from the dive site to the island, we found ourselves being rowed from the big boat to the beach in the “small boat” … which turned out to be very small indeed.

We had taken snorkelling gear almost by accident as a token gesture to participating in the diving trip, but fate was clearly smiling upon us when we took that decision, because while the island itself was beautiful, the best sights were definitely under the water around its shores.

After taking a little while to figure out how best to breathe through the mouthpiece and enter and exit the water in flippers (purse your lips as if you’re kissing and walk backwards where possible) we got the hang of it and spent a couple of hours splashing about in the not-very-deep water. The main marine reserve on the far side of the island was unfortunately another victim of typhoon Sendong and will probably take five years to recover but even on the non-reserve side we saw some amazing marine life. There was coral, some gently swaying in the waves, some lumpy like alien life forms. There were brightly coloured fish, including the little Nemo-fish I found hiding in a corner of the reef. There were hideous black sea slugs and cucumbers and strange black spiky things with what looked like shiny little eyes. And best of all there were the sea-turtles, giant and gentle, who paddled around with their wide flippers and nibbled at the sea bed, seemingly totally unconcerned at our presence.

I also had my first every experience of swimming in the sea in the rain, which is even more bizarre when you can see the raindrops splashing from underneath the surface of the water, but most of the time it was a gorgeous day and despite our best efforts to keep covered up (people in the Philippines tend to swim in shorts and t-shirts and we were slathered in factor 50 for most of the day), we all got varying degrees of redness on our skin afterwards.

The one tiny crisis occurred when my flip-flop broke walking along the beach. Setting off for four days with only one pair of cheap plastic shoes was never particularly intelligent, and wearing said shoes to scramble over boulders up a river was clearly (literally) a step or ten too far, but luckily flip-flops are practically the national footwear in the Philippines and as soon as we got back to Dumaguete I was able to limp to a shop selling hundreds of different kinds. Having bigger feet than the average Filippina limited my choice a bit but I left  the shop a few minutes later and only a couple of euros poorer with another pair to add to my collection and very appropriate souvenir of my trip.