Exploring The Island of Cebu // The Philippines

Seeing that the Philippines are super close to Taiwan, I could not give up the opportunity to go travel around a bit in another new country! The Philippines have an incredible amount of different islands, so all of the Philippines I was not able to see in just 5 days. We spent our long weekend away on the island of Cebu.

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From Taichung, we took a bus to get to the airport in Taipei. It went super fast and was super cheap so I will definitely be doing this again instead of getting a taxi to drive us 2 hours to the airport.. for like 10x the price. From Taipei, we took a non stop flight to the island of Cebu! Seeing that in the city of Cebu there is not really that much to see, our first stop was on the West part of the island: Moalboal. 

It was a 3+ hour drive there, so we didn’t really get to see the little beach village in the daylight on our first day, but the vibes in the evening were nevertheless amazing! We stayed in the area of Panagsama beach (incase anyone cares). After arriving at our Airbnb, we went out right away to go explore. There were little restaurants, bars, massage places, souvenirs shops, etc. about 5 minute walk from our house, so it was perfect. We had dinner, some drinks, and later went for a much needed massage (that only cost 5€..). A very nice, relaxing night after a whole day of traveling!

Yay! Our first full day on Cebu island. We booked a day trip to go to the Kawasan waterfalls in Moalboal today, as it is one of the best waterfalls on this part of the island. So after we got breakfast, we headed over to where we would meet our tour guides. To get to the waterfalls, we had to drive for about 45 minutes. This was nice to hear because I had slept super bad the night before so I was excited to be able to close my eyes for a bit in the car. Little did I know, we would be taking a motorcycle type tricycle type taxi. I am not sure if these are sold this way, but I had never seen or been on anything like it. It was not very relaxing (I definitely couldn’t sleep), but it was super fun actually. We sped through the rainy streets of Moalboal and a short 45 minutes later we got to where the tour would begin. We decided that we wanted to see and experience the waterfalls by canyoneering. You can also go trecking or something, or just hike from the bottom to each waterfall.

Canyoneering is starting from the top of the mountain/waterfall and hiking, climbing, swimming, sliding, falling, jumping... (I think you get my gist) down. In the photos the water looked super clear and super relaxed so we thought this would be the best way to see the waterfalls. Hmm.. you should know that the night before, and maybe even the days before, there was a storm with a lot of rain. So the current was strong and water levels were very high, maybe not the best conditions to go climb down a waterfall but hey, we are brave and adventurous students (lol) so yeah of course we would still do it. (Btw, we only found out about the high levels and strong current after already being partly down the waterfall so really we didn’t have much choice but to continue on down for the next 3-4 hours). 

Regardless of the occasional slipping off of a rock, or getting carried away by the strong current and having your tour guide grab your arm (aka life saver), it was a lot of fun. I don’t think I have done anything this “thrill seeking” in a while. I honestly felt like we were on an episode of survivor and we had to find our way back to civilization by hiking and climbing through the jungle. After 5 hours of “canyoneering” and two scratched up and blue knees, we made it out of the jungle alive. 💪🏼🐒

We got back to the office to grab our bags and got a ride (tricycle motorcycle taxi ride) from the canyoneering company to our new Airbnb in Lambug Beach, where we will be staying for one night. We were honestly so tired from the whole day that when we got to our room, the only thing we thought of was food and relaxing. The landlord was nice enough to order us some foooood, so we didn’t even have to leave the house (perfect). We ended the night by staying up waiting for our fourth partner in crime to join us after her mini trip of visiting her friend on another island. 😴

Waking up in Lambug Beach Saturday morning to the sun shining was the best way to wake up. I could feel the warmth from the sun radiate through the window and heat our room; I loved it. We quickly got ready and ate breakfast, and then headed straight to the beach. We had about an hour of good sunshine until, of course, it had to start raining. At first it was some light rain, not a big deal, we stayed on the beach and kind of just ignored it. 

However, like 20 minutes later the rain started to really come down. Being on a public beach, there was no place to sit with a decent roof, so we hid under a tree, which still got us as wet as just standing in the open rain. The thing I hate most about rain is having my clothes get soaked and not being able to properly dry them, and because we were traveling to the next location a few hours later, this was going to be the case; traveling 2 hours with a bag of wet clothes. Putting my drama queen attitude aside, I knew everything was going to get wet regardless so we enjoyed the remainder of the morning and went into the ocean; enjoying the warm water while outside of the water it was getting pretty cold.

Before heading for lunch, we went back to our airbnb and got into some clean, dry clothes. Then we were picked up by another one of those tricycle motorcycle taxi rides to bring us to where we could get some food and also take a bus later to go down south to Oslob.
Getting a bus took foreverrrr, and whenever one passed us it was always so full that people were even standing where the doors usually close. Luckily, these two taxi guys started talking to us and offered a private ride down to Oslob for a certain price. After some negotiating (which you really have to do in this country because they might take advantage of the situation if you don’t play hard) our HUGEEE (limo) van arrived and drove us down about 2 hours.

 By the time we found our hotel, everyone seemed pretty K.O.. I am not sure if this was all over the Philippines on this day, but when we arrived at our hotel, we were invited to join the family for a home cooked dinner they had prepared for us. They kept saying “it’s fiesta!”, so what I understood from it is on this day, all family guests or hotel guests get offered dinner. The food was really good, and again, it was done for us so we didn’t have to worry about anything – definitely a nice feeling of having to do nothing after a long day. 

During dinner, we had made the plan for the following day which would require us to wake up around 6am. At the time, we didn’t really look forward to waking up this early, but wow… it was so, so worth it.

Getting a very, very early start to today, we also started the day with a very, very exciting activity. We had signed up to go swimming, in open water, with whale sharks!!! These animals are super safe for humans and (I don’t think) can do any harm to us, which makes it a little less bad-ass for swimming with them but WOW, I DON'T CARE - IT WAS AWESOME. 

There were so many of them and they were so chill with us just swimming there, I still can’t believe it. The company where we got our gear had warned us not to get too close, and not to touch the whale sharks (obviously) but it was so hard not to because the SHARKS were the ones getting too close and swimming into us. At one point, I was just coming back up from trying to take some underwater pictures, one of the sharks basically swam between my legs like this was some kind of game or something; not giving a single ****. What I liked most about this experience was that the sharks were in the open water; yes, I am sure they don’t love humans annoying them but at least they were able to swim away if they wanted to. I loved it --- If you go to Oslob, go swimming with whale sharks!! Do it!!!

The rest of the day was super relaxed and super needed. We laid out by the pool (I was almost the whole day in the pool) and everyone just got to do what they wanted that day- read, write, swim, sleep. The weather was warm and sunny all day; it was perfect.
In the evening we did what we always do --eat, drink, talk about conspiracy theories, then sleep. ​

Today, we would leave Oslob and go back north to the city of Cebu. This being our last day, we thought it’d be best to go back closer to the airport so we didn’t have to leave at 2am with a bus to catch our flight early Tuesday morning.

We woke up relaxed.. very relaxed. Got breakfast, packed, and took the cheapest and easiest bus I have ever taken. Going from Oslob to Cebu City, which is like a 4-hour drive, it only cost us 260 pesos/3.25 euros. I think a bus ticket from my place in Antwerp to my grandparents’ house (30-minute ride) already costs more than that. The bus back to Cebu is where we spent most of our day, especially seeing that from the bus station to our hotel was another hour by Uber.

 I was feeling pretty sick by the end of the day, not enough sleep I guess, so I was all for ending the night early. We went for dinner in Lapu Lapu, not a very special town. Walked around a little bit in this not so special town, then got a ride back to our room. We had to get up supppperrrrr early (again) the next day, as our flight back was at 7am (I promise you, I barely slept this vacation). So seeing that the next morning we would be gone by 7, today was our last official day in the Philippines, and here is where our 5-day vacation came to an end.

The Philippines had been on my “to-go” list ever since I was accepted to come study here in Taiwan. It is super close and super beautiful so it would be extremely unfortunate if I didn’t get to go. These 5 days off were exactly what kind of vacation I needed; a mix of relaxing and actually doing/seeing things. The Philippines have soooo many islands, so I am not scraping it off of my list yet; there is so much more to see (and plenty of more time to see it all one day)!
 
On to the next adventure...

With love,
Sara