Planes, trains, and automobiles…and tricycles, and pump boats, and barges, and busses, and vans, and…Part 1.
This past weekend might also be known as my Philippine air, land, and sea transportation adventure! The plan was to head to Dumaguete, a town in the Negros Oriental province in the Visayas. From there, we would spend a day exploring that province, then a day exploring Bohol, a nearby island/province that’s home to the famous Chocolate Hills. I suppose I’d rather forgotten how well all of our travel plans have worked out up till now, but this weekend was a classic reminder that we’ve had it good so far! (Not that this weekend was bad by any means, just that it definitely defied our best efforts!)
A dozen of us descended upon the various domestic terminals of NAIA (the Manila Airport) early Saturday morning to catch flights on various carriers heading south (happily, I was on the Cebu Pacific flight, since they have fun little giveaways partway through every flight!) We touched down in Dumaguete around 9am, and from the airport we caught a multicab to breakfast (which was at one of our group’s relative’s place). We dropped our bags off there and headed to Bais for the dolphin watching…oh wait, that makes it sound waaay simpler than it was! First we took tricycles to downtown Dumaguete. Then we piled into a van and started driving the 40 km to Bais. And then we started picking up passengers (4 more than were in the pic below, if you can imagine)! The woman driving the van packed it to the gills!
We drove through a lot of sugar cane country on the way, and as we passed the fields, I couldn’t help thinking that it looked like they had been burnt recently (turns out I wasn’t far off, but more on that later!). We made it to Bais, where we caught another tricycle to take us to the pier. And when I say take us to the pier, I mean aaaaaallllll the way down to the end of the pier. Which sounds good in theory, since it was a looooong pier, but keep in mind that we’re rocketing along a narrow uneven strip of rutted, graveled road in a birdcage welded to a motorcycle…eep!
But! We survived and hopped aboard the tour boat and headed out, first for some dolphin hunting (well, technically it was dolphin “watching” but we had to hunt them down and then keep driving the boat in circles to catch up with them! Eventually we did see a bunch…it was amazing (and I have to say, dolphins aren’t nearly as creepy in person as they are in the movies!)…
After the guys driving our boat got tired of chasing dolphins for us, we headed to a mangrove area where we could walk into the mangrove trees. I’ve read about mangrove swamps before and they sounded murky and rather unpleasant, but this was beautiful! The clearest blue water with a bunch of trees all standing on their tippy toes in the shallows…not at all what I expected (maybe I need to read different books, eh!?)
After visiting the mangroves, we hopped back on the boat and headed for the famed white sand bar in Manjuyod. It’s a 7 km strip of white sand just off the coast…all the pictures I saw when I looked it up before we went showed a shining sliver of sand peeking out of crystal blue waters…but the tide must have been higher when we were there, because it never got shallower than knee deep! So we swam around for a bit, explored the huts (which apparently you can rent overnight from the government!), got a tad sunburnt, and generally had a ball!
It was getting close to sunset when we finished frolicking on the sandbar, so we headed back to the pier, then piled into the tricycles again and headed back to Bais. We spent a little time finding a CR (so some of us could wring out our sopping clothes!) and exploring the evening market (where everything imaginable, including chicken heads), was served up skewered and nicely toasted over hot coals.
And since you can’t have a meal without rice, of course there was rice! And it was wrapped in these adorable (and surprisingly functional!) woven coconut leaves!
We met up with the van that had brought us there earlier in the day and headed back to Dumaguete. On the way, we drove past the same sugar cane fields, and they were burning!!! Coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time (yes, I realize that I saw dolphins, mangroves, & a sandbar earlier in the day, but…well…something about seeing acres upon acres ablaze was just really cool).
When we got back to Dumaguete we (finally!) checked into our hotel, the Bethel Guesthouse, which was a very nice place…apparently it’s run by a religious organization (it was covered in religious pamphlets) but it was clean, quiet, and superbly located right across the street from the sea. The street in front of the hotel was quite charming — all the trees had tons of little white star lanterns strung through the boughs, which twinkled and reflected in the waves beyond — so pretty!
It was an excellent day, and a fitting prelude to the upcoming Philippine transit extravaganza that Sunday had in store. But, this post is long enough already, so you’ll have to wait for part 2!
Pics from the weekend are here!
