Planes, trains, and automobiles…and tricycles, and pump boats, and barges, and busses, and vans, and…Part 2
So part deux of the weekend excursion to Dumaguete and parts beyond (part 1 is here) started bright and early Sunday morning with breakfast at Cafe Filomena (the resto attached to the hotel). They serve up a tasty fish and rice breakfast (among other things), and I tried danggit (pronounced “dong-git”…tiny dried rabbitfish that is then fried…you eat everything…yes, everything!…and it’s quite good! a little briny, a lot crunchy!)…
After breakfast we headed via tricycle to the port to catch the Ocean Jet ferry to Bohol. We had a tour scheduled to see the tarsiers (tiny little monkeys), the chocolate hills, and a river cruise…which didn’t exactly work out as planned because the ferry left EARLY. I know! Nothing here ever happens EARLY!! How dare they! Apparently Ocean Jet has a nasty habit of leaving ahead of schedule, even when ticket-holding passengers (like us!) are not on board! The Ocean Jet ferry scooted out of its slip a solid 25 minutes prior to its scheduled departure time. Harumph. So there we were, at 7am, with no way to get to Bohol until the next ferry at 2pm (which would get us there just in time to spend a few minutes admiring the view from the port before hopping on the last trip back to Dumaguete). Foiled!
We spent a little time trying to figure out an alternate route and attempting (with only partial success) to get our fare back from the extremely rude guy manning the Ocean Jet ticket office before piling into a tricycle and heading to a different port to catch a pumpboat to Cebu (another nearby island…click here for a map), where we could take a van-ride to the next port and catch a ferry to Bohol from there. The pumpboat was basically a giant outrigger canoe packed to the gills with people! It’s more stable than it looked (or else I’m getting used to boats, because it wasn’t too terrifying).
Great plan, right? Except the van ride took 3 hours, and the next ferry from Cebu City to Bohol was scheduled to arrive in Bohol only an hour or so before we’d have to catch the ferry back to Dumaguete. Foiled again!
Instead of spending the whole day on a ferry, we decided to give up on Bohol and hired a guide to show us a few sights around Cebu. We headed first to go see Magellan’s cross, which is famous for being the first cross erected in the now uber-Catholic Philippines. Magellan planted it when he landed on Cebu in the 1500s. The whole thing was in a pretty little gazebo in a square — very picturesque. As you got closer there were people selling colored candles that folks were putting on the shelf around the cross (and I’m sure if were any hotter out, those candles would have been lighting themselves!)
I thought it looked like it was in suspiciously good shape for a 500+ year old piece of wood…
…and I was right! The placard below the cross says that the original cross is still there, but it’s been encased in Tindalo wood (which you see in the photo). In any case, it was spiffy to see a chunk of history!
After that we walked through the wall into the campus of the Santo Nino church. It was last built in the 1700s (you know how it goes…old buildings have a nasty habit of catching on fire or being destroyed in wars, and this one was no exception)!
But it looks pretty good for its age! There was a mass going on inside the church, so I didn’t snap too many photos, but it was a pretty church, with lots going on!
The balloons were super fun…everything from hello kitty to spider man to dolphins! I kind of wanted to get one and go scampering around the square, because the mob of little kids doing that looked like they were having a ball!!
I loved the stained glass windows, unfortunately, this is the best picture I could get without being intrusive!
After leaving the church, we headed to Lapu Lapu City to see the site of Magellan’s last stand, the Mactan Shrine. Crossing from Cebu City to Lapu Lapu City felt almost exactly like crossing from Duluth to Superior (except there was a real live town on the east side of the bay, and the bridge was shorter!). But there were tons of shipping containers, boats, and general port accoutrements as we went over the bridge between the two towns, as you can sort of see in my blurry shot out the car window…
We didn’t see very many jeepneys in the area, but there were lots of multi-cabs (I think that’s what they’d be called, at least!)…my favorite was the Hello Kitty one:
Once we got to the Mactan Shrine, we poked around a bit and read the placards. Magellan met his match in a warrior named Lapu Lapu (which is also the local name for grouper in the Philippines, so the joke goes: “who killed Magellan? Lapu Lapu. Who killed Lapu Lapu? The fisherman!” ha ha…laugh! You know it’s funny!)
At the shrine, there’s a giant monument in the center of a garden, as well as various placards explaining the events.
There was also a statue of Lapu Lapu, at the shrine, as well as several papier mache busts of the warrior, all of which provided our group with lots of entertainment!
Mactan is also famous for their guitar making craftsmen, so there were lots of guitars for sale. I very nearly bought one because I’ve been thinking of upgrading from my smaller guitar to a full-size (I played when I was younger), but the pragmatic traveler in me decided it would be too hard to get it home. But now I have non-buyers remorse…they were gorgeous guitars, and where else am I going to find a beautiful instrument like that for just over $30?! Is there such a thing as non-buyer’s remorse?
After leaving the shrine, we only had time for a brief stop at the Shamrock bakery (famous in Cebu for their Otep, which is a crispy sweet toast…basically the Filipino version of Trenary toast!). I didn’t get otep, but I did buy mangoes! (And they were stellar, as expected, since Cebu grows the BEST mangoes in the world…seriously.)
Then we headed to the Ceres bus terminal to catch a bus back to Dumaguete. (I know what you’re thinking…and no, the bus did not have water wings! We took the bus to a port and crossed the sea on a barge, then continued on the bus to Dumaguete from that port…sort of a roll-on, roll-off bus service!)
The bus dropped us off on the main road thru Dumaguete, and from there we piled into a tricycle to get to the hotel. After our exhausting day of foiled plans, multiple modes of transport (9 by my counting!), and Cebu touring, we got back to the hotel late Sunday night, packed up all our stuff (since our flight left early Monday morning), and crashed to sleep.
We had one last breakfast at Cafe Filomena before taking off for Manila…I’m seriously going to miss fish and garlic rice and eggs for breakfast when I go home (or, I could start getting up earlier to steam fish and make rice and…wait, no, I don’t see that happening!)…in any case, breakfast was tasty!
We caught a tricycle to the airport and just barely got checked in for the flight…actually, the counter had just closed as we walked in, but we were able to convince them to let us through since we basically arrived as they closed. However, two of our group who had been staying with family in Dumaguete instead of at the hotel didn’t make it…they got there minutes after the counter closed and had to catch the next flight out of town instead. Good thing they had taken Monday off of work!! Happily, we got to board on the flight we’d scheduled. Doesn’t Cebu Pacific have such cheerful planes?!
And here’s my last glimpse of Dumaguete!
It was a fun & frustrating weekend trip, but we were in excellent company, and it all worked out well in the end (though for a couple of us, the end was mid afternoon instead of mid morning!). And I got some Cebu Pacific swag out of the deal, as well!
Pics from the weekend are here.
