Next stop: A small village on the beach known for it’s muck diving. To get there would be via trike, bus, trike, boat, motorcycle, trike! Easy. We started off by taking a trike the few miles to get us to the main road in Moalboal, where there is no bus station, you just have to flag down the bus on the side of the road. And we were unpleasantly surprised to find out that the bus stop not only had no shade, but it was in front of the new Jollibee, which was having their grand opening weekend. Yay. This meant they put massive speakers out front, replaying the same the pre-school aged Jollibee song, at full volume. Jolly jolly - jolly jolly jolly jolly! And there were huge groups of Filipinos eating outside on white plastic tables, right next to the speakers like it was nothing. I don’t know how they do it. But anyway, worst bus stop ever!
After a loooooong 25 minutes, the bus finally came, and of course it was basically full and there was no under carriage for peoples’ bigger backpacks, so you just mash in there, full luggage and all. Fun. Eventually some people got off and we could sit down. 1.5 hours later we got dumped off at the bus station, which of course isn’t near the ferry pier, so we had to take another trike to get to the pier to take the ferry. The ferry was only 20 minutes or so, and from there we decided to hop on the back of motorcycles (instead of a trike) to get into the main town of Dumaguete. There we went to the bus station, but it had a shockingly long line waiting for the bus we wanted, so we opted for another trike to take us the last 12 miles. The trikes are not very comfortable for non-Filipino sized people! Finally we were dumped off at the side of the road in Dauin and found our way to the guesthouse, a collection of mostly bungalows with a section of black volcanic sand beachfront. Nice! Sometimes getting relatively cheap beachfront property is harder than it might seem in the Philippines!
In Dauin we met some other divers staying there, two older Americans who were friends, the guy from NYC, the woman from Michigan. Dauin is famous for it’s muck diving, which is basically diving in spots that have a mostly sandy bottom and searching around for sea life in their holes, in the weeds, or among the debris – the muck. At first glance it might not look like much, but when you pay close attention there’s lots of little critters to be found everywhere! And when I say little critters, I do mean little, as in tiny. Some animals are just a fraction of the length of your fingernail, and take a very discerning eye to spot! Of course there’s also larger nudibranches (sea slugs), shrimps, crabs, octopus, cuttlefish etc. The nudibranches in particular are extremely diverse and colorful in this area.
Most of the diving is just walking in from the shore, the only tricky part is getting to the access points, as most of the shoreline is on private property. For our first dive site – The Pier - we had to load all the gear into a little truck, take some very bumpy road, pay a local landowner for access, gear up on land and walk in the water, and then put on the fins while battling the waves and undertow. It was so choppy that the NYC guy, Paco, who isn’t super mobile, couldn’t get his gear on correctly in the waves and had to abort the dive. Bummer.
But once we were finally there the dive site was awesome! We saw so many cool nudibranches that I’d never seen before. In most dive locations there are only a handful of nudi varieties you see over and over, but here – wow! The variety and brightness and vividness of the colors are spectacular. I really wished I had an underwater camera. Fortunately the woman I was diving with, Donna, who is still actively diving at age 74(!) had a camera and case that is designed for macro photography (shooting very small things from close up) and I could borrow some of her photos. Muck diving sites are very very popular with underwater photographers, with good reason. And I must say, I’m very tempted to get a decent underwater set up for this type of diving as well, as a photographer it really sucks being able to see great compositions in your head and not being able to take proper photos, and meanwhile having to watch other people take all these really nice shots!
So anyway, that was a great first dive and proper introduction to muck diving. For our second dive we drove the truck down past a resort and when we were gearing up the owner came out and yelled at us, he was really pissed off, as we were supposed to park a few hundred feet back and walk from there, not drive all the way down to the shore. Oops! Unfortunately at this dive site the waves were even bigger and Donna didn’t feel comfortable making the entry, so it was back to the guesthouse to do a shore dive from there. Doing these walk-in shore dives isn’t exactly ideal. But the nice thing about muck diving is that you can do some of the same spots over again and what creatures you see can be totally different depending on the time of day, the tides, your eyesight, and of course total luck.
Another thing to do from Dauin is take an hour boat trip out to the marine reserve Apo Island, which is famous for having stellar corals and lots of turtles. We picked a kind of lousy day to do it, completely cloudy and bit rainy, but better to be underwater when the weather sucks! We still saw some turtles, a sea snake, but for being a famous dive site, it was a bit underwhelming. Oh well.
The rain kept coming, so we spent a lot of time just chilling in the bungalows reading or whatever. On the last night there some Aussie girls arrived and they wanted to go find some flamboyant cuttlefish. They showed me some videos of what it looked like – I’d never seen or heard of one before, and that became our mission for the morning, find the cuttlefish! Our group was 10 people, the 3 Aussies, Donna and Paco, Me and Alex, and three instructors/divemasters. So 20 eyeballs! I had to laugh when one of the Filipino instructors forgot his weightbelt and used rocks from the shore to put in his BCD. Very Philippines!
Muck dives usually don’t have much current, so people normally spread out and just kind of do their own thing, hunting around for stuff. At one point I saw a dark little object moving around, I assumed it was just another fish, and then I saw it’s sides light up – yellow and purple. YESSSSS! Found it! And there was another one right next to it! So cool! I was near the divemaster, Maya who excitedly came over, but there was no one else around! Maya was banging on her tank, but no one was coming. So she pointed for me to stay put with the cuttlefish while she went to go find the rest of the group to come over. So I had a good few minutes to just chill and watch they little things all by myself, the bright colors changing, undulating, pulsing as they crept along the sandy bottom. So cool. And then the rest of the group came and I got out of the way a bit so everyone could have a look and take photos and all that stuff.
photos don’t do it justice!
It was a great way to end the time in Dauin, we all got to see what we set out to find, and I got to take the credit for finding them!