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.
