Our journey to the Philippines took 30 hours. Our route included a 13 hour layover in Singapore, and then when we arrived into Cebu we still needed to get a taxi to the bus station and then a bus and then a tricycle taxi on the other end to our final destination. The first taxi was cheap but had to go through the entire city full of traffic which took around an hour, then we sat on the bus for around 45 minutes before it left, then we encountered more traffic, followed by a long dinner stop for the driver, and eventually, in the dark, we arrived in Moalboal where we would stay for a week. It was A Lot, but we made it!

On our first day we were so tired that we slept until noon, and then went for a walk around town. We stopped in at a few dive centres and discovered that it would be stormy all this week, so the boat trips out to Pescador Island, the top dive site, would all be cancelled. We continued our walk along the sea front, where it was indeed quite grey and windswept, and looped around to the other side of town. We saw signs for a dog rescue so followed them out to a house with around 50 rescues, including some adorable puppies and some tiny kittens. We had a few pets and then continued on our way. It started raining, so we went back to the hotel for a bit, then ventured back out in the evening once the rain had stopped. After dinner we went to a pub quiz, which only had very large and long tables, so it wasn’t possible to form separated small teams, everybody ended up merging together into huge 10-12 person teams. We were sat with a bunch of international students from Hong Kong, and our team covered a lot of nationalities and specialist subjects. Despite some dodgy scoring methods, we ended up tied for first place. The tie-breaker was a 1 on 1 finish the lyrics round, so we selected the girl who had known the most of the songs in the previous music round. The previous round was all 00s emo music, but the tiebreaker was Adele – and it turned out every single member of our huge team knew all the lyrics except the one girl we’d picked to represent us. Fortunately, neither did the guy from the other team, and after 5 attempts our champion was finally able to get the right lyrics, beating the other guy and winning the quiz for us. We won a bottle of rum, but passed on doing shots as we’ve also given up alcohol for lent, so wished the students a fun night and turned in.

The next day it rained all morning, so we still didn’t make it outside until around midday. With bad conditions for diving, and the other thing we wanted to do here being a bike ride to various hikes and waterfalls which also wouldn’t be fun in the rain, we didn’t really know what to do with ourselves. The weather forecast was that this rainy period would last for around 4 days, right up to when we were due to check out. As usual were in no particular rush so could just wait out the rain, but the accommodation here is more expensive and less nice than we’d got used to in Vietnam, and our small windowless room was not particularly appealing to stay in during the days. We decided to book diving for the next morning, and just hope for the best. It wasn’t raining when we got to the dive shop, but the owner still announced that Pescador Island boat trips were forbidden by the coast guard, so we would have to do alternative sites. We still got to do two dives which were very enjoyable, especially as it had been a while – plus they were the cheapest dives I’ve done anywhere in the world at $20 each including gear rental. It ended up being quite a sunny day, but we didn’t do much else in the afternoon.

The next day it was raining again, and Pescador Island was still a no go. We had a lazy morning, still tired from the 30 hour journey messing up our sleep schedules. In the afternoon it was dry, though cloudy, so we headed out for lunch by the water and then rented snorkel gear. Moalboal is famous for the ‘sardine run’, as year round just off the coast thousands of sardines can be found swimming tightly together, breaking up only for snorkellers swimming through. We had a great time diving down into the sardine ball and watching them close ranks above us, swimming with and against the school, marvelling at their movements and testing out my new dive case for my relatively new camera.

We had more ‘what do we do’ conversations, especially as last minute accommodations in the Philippines are few and far between, and mostly either hostel dorms or very expensive even for a very basic room, so it’s not somewhere we can be as flexible as we’d like to be.  We were due to check out the next day with no availability to extend, so we needed a plan. We gave our number to a couple of dive centres and asked them to message us in the morning if Pescador Island dives were running. We decided that if it wasn’t, we’d rent a bike and explore and just deal with the rain. In the morning we got a text that the diving was going ahead, and we finally made it to the island! It was a great dive, and it was an incredibly sunny morning. We returned around 11am, and intended to pick up a takeaway lunch and set out on a bike trip as soon as possible. Unfortunately our lunch place didn’t open until 12, and then many of the bike shops were sold out for the day, so it was around 1pm by the time we hit the road. The great weather continued as we wound our way up to the highest point of Cebu Island, Osteña Peak. The last 20 meters to the viewpoint was a short uphill hike, with a mandatory guide ‘for our safety’ for 10x the price of the entrance ticket, which was absurd, but since a guide, two entrance tickets and bike parking still only came to $5, we got over it and headed up for the view. We were surrounded by dome-shaped hills, with the ocean behind, and the island we’d dived at that morning in the distance. The drive through all these mounds on the way up to the peak and the way back down was a highlight of our time in Moalboal.

We continued south on the bike to find a few waterfalls, but discovered that although we still had a few hours of light left, many of the falls closed at around 4pm, some with a last entry of 3pm. We managed to visit one waterfall exactly at 4, where the lady at the entrance allowed us to have a quick dip and did not charge us the entrance fee. After this though we were done with our roadtrip itinerary since everything was now closed, and wished we’d managed to set of an hour earlier as planned. We did at least have the bike for 24 hours, so planned to head back to the most famous waterfall, Kawasan Falls, in the morning. This is a place where a canyoning trip through 3 levels of falls is the most popular thing to do, but since we had our own transport and were happy to just swim and do a couple of rope swings into the water without a full guided tour, we decided to skip this. We only discovered once already at the first level of the waterfall that if you don’t do the canyoning tour you can only access 1 of the 3 levels, and once inside the canyoning was more expensive than the tour from the town including transport and food and the entrance ticket we’d already paid. We left feeling a little frustrated, and added on another smaller waterfall that we’d missed the previous day due to timing. It was another beautiful day, in fact incredibly hot and sunny, despite the weather forecast suggesting thunderstorms, so we messaged the bike rental to ask for a couple more hours and headed out to a beach and a quirky round of mini golf.

Having now ticket everything off in Moalboal, albeit in a slightly different way than planned, we were ready to head to our next destination, and headed for the bus. When we arrived at the stop, a group also going to the same ferry port as us who had been waiting for the bus for 45 minutes already were haggling with a minivan driver to take them there directly. We offered to jump in to reduce the per person cost, and were able to almost immediately set off for only a few dollars more than the bus would have been, and straight to the port rather than requiring an extra taxi from the bus station. We arrived in good time for the ferry, and landed on our second Phillipine island, Negros.

Thanks for following along on my crazy adventures!

 Ros ♥

If you’re interested in how I got here, or where I went next, check out the rest of the story!