The Philippines 🇵🇭

Due to the Coronavirus, I learned that I was able to extend my Chinese New Year; and I’m gonna be honest, I didn’t want to be stuck in my apartment longer than needed. Navika and I cancelled our trip to Hong Kong (since Disney was going to be closed) and decided to check flights to near by islands. We found round trip flights to Cebu City, Philippines for roughly $300 (usd). It might have been a bit cheaper. And we were able to stay at a hostel for $13 a night.

Let me preface this with this by saying… Navika and I aren’t known for our spontaneity and it shows…

We packed for a flight the next day. Our first flight was at 22:30 from Guangzhou. We got there with plenty of time to withdraw some cash and exchange it for Philippine Pesos. We grabbed a quick dinner and enjoyed the massage chairs. We went through security with about 90 minutes before our flight (quick note: US TSA- we need to have y’all observe of how efficient other countries are). We got to the gate 2 minutes before boarding was supposed to begin, and found out that they were already doing final call… YIKES! We made it just in time. It was the most turbulent flight I had ever been on. We had a layover in Hong Kong (which was actually cheaper to fly from China, instead of taking the train to Hong Kong and flying from there). The layover was so long… 16 hours… We arrived at midnight and we had to make sure we were at our gate by 2:45… (we learned our lesson from the first airport). The chairs that we slept on were not the best, but I was able to get some rest before the next leg of our journey. The second flight was a smooth 2 hour and some odd minute journey to the islands. We off and through immigration and customs with no problems. . . If you forgot what the heading says, now is your chance to go and reread it… got it?… OK… So, when we booked the hostel off of hotels.com, we didn’t realize that “The Flying Fish Hostel” was a chain… We booked the one in Dumaguete (a different island about 150km to the south)… not Cebu City… We found this out while we were in a cab trying to get to the one in Cebu City, while my phone is trying to hook up into a local network. It all worked out and we only panicked for about 30 minutes or so. Luckily, they were able to switch our reservations to the one in Cebu without any problem. It was so nice to sleep in a bed.

A Brief hisetory of the Philippine Islands (Cebu and Mactan)

Basic Info

• Manila- Capital City
• Languages: Filipino, English, Filipino Sign Language, and 19 regional languages
• coral reef islands
• 2,000 inhabited islands (divided up into 3 parts Luzon, Visayas, Mindanao)
• Colonization by Spain, America (part of treaty), Japanese rule (WWII)

The island of Cebu and island of Mactan are extremely close. Depending on where you cross, it’s between 1-3km across the water. Ferdinand Magellan (Portuguese) arrived in Cebu island during 1521. He was going around the world for King of Spain. The research that I have found, notes that Magellan allied with Rajah Humabon and the natives of Cebu Island. Lapu-Lapu was king of Mactan Island and had been feuding with the Rajahs over trading area; or Lapu- Lapu refusing to give provisions to Magellan as requested by the other Rajahs (conflicting info was found, if anyone knows more about Philippine History please contact me, so I can fix my information ). The Battle of Mactan took place in April. It was at this battle that Magellan met his fate.

After the Spanish-American War, the United States acquired the Philippines as part of the Treaty of Paris, along with Puerto Rico and Guam. This was not something that the people of the Philippines wanted, so they attempted multiple uprising, but were unsuccessful. In 1935, The Philippines became a Commonwealth. During WWII, Japanese troops invaded. (I could go on, but I said that this was a brief history of the Philippines. I was trying to stay focused on the two islands that I had visited…)

Day 1: Aquarium – Ocean City Park

Waking up Wednesday morning, I felt more relaxed than I had the night before. We decided to walk to the shopping plaza by our hostel to find breakfast. We found a wonderful pancake restaurant (more international in my mind than IHOP lol). We decided that we should stay local today, as we got a late start. So we went to Ocean City Park, which is an aquarium. It’s no Georgia or Shedd Aquarium, but it was pretty nice. They focused on ecosystem conservation. I had a cute bird show where they showed off their talents. They used the parrots to talk about recycling. They had many tropical fish to look at, sharks, and stingrays. We were able to get some good photos out of the day. After we walked across the street to the mall for a snack/early dinner. We stopped for doughnuts at DD. We walked around and found some decently priced clothes. As we were leaving we tried to Grab a car (Grab is similar to Uber or Lyft) but none would pick up in the area. We saw some buses at the mall and tried to ask about how to get back to the hostel area… We were ushered to a “taxi”…This was a tourist taxi driver… So, over priced rides to popular tourist destinations. We decided to let him take up the mountain, so we could go to Sirao Flower Garden. He was telling us that we would get there in time for sunset for some gorgeous pictures… Nope. I’m gonna be blunt. The Philippines has the worst traffic I have ever seen. Think I-4 at rush hour, but you’re on city streets not highways, and it’s like this at all times… We missed sunset by 15-20 minutes and the pictures aren’t great. I did my best editing them but… it what it is… We got back to our hostel and we were out 2000PCP (about $40 usd)… Again, we are not great at being spontaneous, and he was already trying to get us to hire him for other things that were WAAYYY too expensive. I did my research while were at the hostel before going to bed that first night about the price of taxis and buses to get around. When we got back to the hostel, we decided that we would wake up early to get down to Moalboal for snorkeling.

Day 2: Moalboal for beach exploration

We woke up early so we could get breakfast and get ready for the first bus out to Moalboal, which is south and on the other side of the island. We got on the bus and the bus started on it’s route. Did I mention how bad traffic is in the Philippines? … I did… Okay, so I don’t need to explain why it took 1 hour to get 5 miles?… moving on… We drove through the mountain side, picking up and dropping off locals as we went. I spent most of the time watching the beautiful scenery go by. I would like to say that there were a lot of homes along the side of the road. It was much different than we are use to seeing in the states. They use a lot of pallets and sheet metal to build these homes. I saw many dogs, roosters/ chickens, cows, and goats tied along side of the road on the mountain sides. The dogs were not all tied up (most were stray dogs that walked along the road). 3 hours later, we finally made it to our bus stop. We walked off the bus, and were greeted by locals with tricycles, ready to take visitors were they wanted to go. We met a local and he took us down the road. We were both kind of skeptical about this because we weren’t going towards the resorts, which is where we thought we were going. We got to a local area where our guide gave us life jackets and snorkeling masks. We left our bags with locals that ran these tour group activities. We walked down to an area that led to the beach. We left our sandals on the rocks by the water. We waded into the water, got our masks ready, and started swimming. We saw coral, starfish, anemones, and many other fish. Our guide took videos (not pictures… we even asked for more pictures when we got to the second area… oh well… next time, we are bringing our own phone bag and take pictures ourselves). We swam for there for about 45 minutes looking for sea turtles. Our guide found one, but it was out past the drop off. We decided to go to the sardine area, and we are glad that we did. This area was more of a resort area (like we were expecting). We got into the water and saw thousands of sardines. It was fun to see them move. Then we heard some commotion and saw a green sea turtle swimming with us. We got as close as we could while making sure that we were giving the turtle space that it needed. Soon a second one came up from the drop off area. It was amazing to see these animals up close. After about an hour at this location we decided to get out. Our guide offered to take us canyoneering. We decided that we were going to pass and opted for relaxing on the beach for the remain afternoon. We found a small restaurant to eat at on the beach. We relaxed in the water, swam, and perfected the mermaid hair flip for Instagram. We drank coconut water/ milk (idk what everyone is calling it these days) from a freshly harvested coconut. We made our way back to the bus stop and rode 3 hours back to Cebu City bus stop.

Day 3: Mountain Tour

As we were eating breakfast on Friday, we talked about our options for the day. We knew that we wanted to go back to Sirao Gardens for some better pictures. I went on the Grab app and found out that you can rent a car and hire a driver for something called the mountain tour for the equivalent to 5 hours. We figured that we could get all the photos that we wanted this way. It was much more affordable than the other tourist taxi that we had taken. It took us to Sirao Garden (Little Amsterdam), Top of Cebu (look-out/ restaurant), and The Temple of Leah. We got wonderful pictures from the garden, Top of Cebu (we passed on the restaurant because we were still full from breakfast), and The Temple of Leah. The Temple of Leah was built in 2012 for Leah Villa Albino- Adarna as a symbol of her husband’s (Teodorico Soriano Adarna) “undying love and ceaseless devotion” (https://www.choosephilippines.com/go/history-and-culture/5344/cebu-temple-of-leah-shrine)… A little much, in my opinion, but it’s gorgeous. It didn’t seem like everything was open that is mentioned in the link, but our pictures are wonderful. It’s definitely worth a look, if you are there. When we left the Temple of Leah, we asked our driver, if he could take us to the Mactan Beach area. He did (but charged us per hour since our tour was over, which is fair enough). We relaxed and did some more swimming before heading back to the hostel for the evening and packing to go back home.

Despite all the problems that I ran into for having this trip be completely spontaneous, I completely fell in love with these islands. I can’t wait to go back for a longer time period, so I can get some canyoneering and hiking in on the south end of the island. I am also planning on getting to the northern parts of the Philippines. I would recommend spending some time in the Philippines, especially if you love exploring. There isn’t a shortage of things to do. Just make sure that you add some time for travel.