Dumaguete in Pictures

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.

Negros:Valencia

On our first day on Negros, we took a motorbike taxi up into the interior of the island, to the small town of Valencia. This was by far the most beautiful journey we had taken so far. Lush greenery was everywhere and tropical flowers in every colour cascaded down by the roadside. Arriving at the market place, as soon as the driver turned the engine off, I was struck by the total calm of the place, a silence that felt almost alien after the endless buzz of traffic in Cebu and Dumaguete.

Up until this point, I had perhaps believed that the tricycle taxis were an adventurous form of transport, but that was before I discovered the habal-habal, an elongated motorbike that takes its name from a description of copulating animals. Our drivers said we needed bike and driver each, but this was later disproved …

The reason for taking a habal-habal and not a tricycle taxi was that the road higher up was too rough and steep for the tricycles. So taking an even less stable form of transport, with no helmet of course, was the perfect solution. The ride up was bumpy and exhilarating but we all arrived at our destination in one piece, ready to walk down over 300 steps to the famous Casaroro falls. The guidebook made it sound like a walk in the park, so we were a little dismayed to get to the bottom of the steps and find a path that looked like this:

After about twenty minutes of scrambling over rocks in less-than-ideal footwear, we decided that we must have gone the wrong way and started to head back. On the way, we passed something that looked as though it could have been a dried up waterfall and assumed that was it. Disappointed, we made our way, hot and panting, back to the top of the steps.

Luckily for us, one of the drivers met us at the top and asked if we had found the falls. When we said we hadn’t, he confirmed that we had in fact been going the right way and offered to come with us and show us, so back down we trooped, back along the crumbling pathway, back over the rocks, waded through the river, rounded the corner ten metres from where we had stopped before, and saw this:

So in the end it was definitely worth it!

Our adventure was not over yet, however. When we got back to the top of the steps for the second time, the other two drivers hadn’t yet come back. The first driver beeped his horn a few times, but to no avail.

And so it was that we learned to ride the habal-habal Philippino style: if you've never shared a motorbike with 3 other people, you haven't lived.

And we were even more relieved to arrive back in Valencia safe and sound.

Cebu City Part 3: The Carbon Market

The Carbon Market in Cebu City has everything that makes the Philippines fascinating about it. It's a colourful, cramped maze of dirty alleyways and piles of strange and delicious looking food filled with exotic smells and the occasional stench. Children and livestock wander the narrow paths between the stalls and the vendors observe you as you pass but never stare, just shout the occasional "hello". It's an intensely foreign feeling and you know that you are thousands of miles from home but nobody makes you feel out of place. It feels like a place that could absorb you but as you come out the other side you realise that you have not been absorbed. For that, you would need more time, always more time.

It's a place where the pictures tell the story best, so here are some of the best pictures (with thanks to my friends, who actually remembered to take their camera!)

Cebu Part 2: Seeing the Sights

The first thing you need to know about the sights in Cebu city is that, officially, there aren’t many. The second thing you need to know is that this doesn’t matter in the slightest, because just by walking down the streets you will see sights far more interesting than any historical monument or tourist trap. Nevertheless, a couple of things are worth visiting.

We started our sightseeing trip with the cathedral. Apart from a few ugly statues, I quite liked the architechture and the interior because I'm a sucker for light airy buildings with lots of gold, but more interesting was the schedule of masses outside. Colonised by the Spanish from 1571 to 1898, the Philippines is overwhelmingly a Catholic country, and the evidence is everywhere.

Our local parish church in Cebu attracted up to 20 000 worshippers on a given Sunday, so the pressure on the cathedral must be immense. We had a little chuckle at the idea of weddings being carried out on a “first come, first served” basis but presumably this does mean when you book in advance!

The man in the picture is about to become only the second-ever saint from the Philippines and his beatification is clearly a very exciting event. I love the lack of cynicism revealed by "with more priests" being touted as a unique selling point.

After the cathedral, we went to Magellan’s cross. It was Magellan who brought Catholicism to the Philippines and he seems to have done an excellent job of implanting it in the culture before being killed by a tribal chief after he invaded Mactan island in 1521. The cross you can see in Cebu supposedly contains fragments of the original cross that Magellan planted when he arrived in the Philippines.

The final stop on our tour was the Basilica del Santo Niño. The Santo Niño is a statue of the boy Jesus dressed as a Spanish prince, and was presented by Magellan to Queen Juana, wife of the Rajah of Cebu after her conversion to Catholicism. While not officially the patron saint of Cebu because it represents Jesus himself, the locals are devoted to it and queue up to pass in front of it and touch the bullet proof glass that protects it from attack.

Then, having done our duty to official tourist, we headed back out into the streets to experience some more of the endlessly changing sights of everyday existence in Cebu.

Bohol: The Loboc River and the Tarsier Sanctuary

We were fairly lazy the afternoon of our arrival at Nuts Huts, but the following morning we rented kayaks and paddled our way up the river to a nearby waterfall. It wasn't very far, but gliding over the green water and admiring the coconut palms up above, you could imagine that you were an intrepid jungle explorer. My friend was even intrepid enough not only to jump in for a swim but also to get back successfully into her kayak afterwards.

We had to leave Nuts Huts that morning, but on our way back to Tagbilaran, we stopped off at the Philippine Tarsier Sanctuary. The Philippine Tarsier is a rare animal about the size of your hand that used to be thought to be the world's smallest monkey until its zoological classification was changed. The tarsiers generally sleep during the day, so the guides at the sanctuary go out and locate them in the morning, then take visitors to the correct spots to look at them during the day. One of the ones we saw was actually awake, so we were able to see that they really can leap three metres from branch to branch, as well as rotating their heads through 180 degrees.