Wrapping Up: Bohol and Camiguin — The road liss traveled

After leaving Dauin, Alex and I would spend a night in the tourist zoo of Oslob, then take a ferry over to a large island called Bohol. It was a just a tourist ferry, ie a small boat, and it sucked! There’s no pier for the boat to dock, so they have to shuttle you out to the boat, and then of course it was windy and choppy and it took more than three hours to get to Panglao, which was the touristy part of the island. Specifically Alona beach is where all the action is at, loads of tourists, not just westerners, but domestic tourists as well, plus loads of Japanese and Koreans. The Japanese and Koreans are kinda funny, they don’t like swimming, they hate the sun, but they do like snorkeling and scuba diving. And if there is a restaurant with fresh fish that they cook in front of you, they are there!

Alex, being the Tinder guru, already had us meeting up with a French girl and her Russian friend that evening. French speakers are like magnets on these apps, because if there’s one thing they all love doing while abroad, it’s speaking in French! And even if they say they’re going keep the dinner conversation in English, that happens roughly zero percent of the time, so it was good the Russian girl was there too! So we would hang out with them the next few days, which was nice because the weather was crap and our diving trips got cancelled for a few days in a row. We did have enough clear weather to spend some time scootering around the island though, went to the tarsier sanctuary, saw some caves and waterfalls, always a good time.

But overall this part of the trip was a bust for scuba diving with the wind and the rain, and a few days later we headed a few hours north on the island, to a very non-touristy place called Anda. Here the skies cleared up, the beaches were mostly untouched or just a few locals and it was a good place to detox a bit after too much drinking in Alona Beach. There were two tourist oriented, expat owned bar/restaurants and the rest was all the usual Filipino fare. The area was nice for riding the scooters around and had some scuba diving as well. Good weather, good visibility and lots of turtles!

This was also where Alex and I would part ways, as he was off to El Nido and Coron, the spots that I had already been to. It’s always nice having a travel buddy to do stuff with, especially in the evenings for dinner and then some drinks. It makes it much easier to approach other people (girls) and do very casual Tinder meet ups, where there is no pressure of it being a more date-like 1 on 1 meet up. So it was a bit of bummer parting our separate ways, although I didn’t mind a few days of alone time to relax and not do much of anything.

I chilled out for a few days and then took the ferry to a small volcanic island called Camiguin. Similar to Anda, and other places that are a bit off the well tread trail, it was particularly quiet and still very much in post-covid recovery. But I was able to book a nice sea-facing bungalow and there was a dive shop on the premises of the ‘resort’. The word resort can sometimes be used very loosely in the Philippines!

The only other people diving at the moment were some Spanish guys doing an open water class and two Germans who were staying at an actual resort nearby. So I was paired up with Germans, who in true German fashion were decked out in very new and expensive looking (and presumably the safest!) dive gear! But in not-so-German fashion their English was almost non-existent so we didn’t really talk all that much outside the usual pleasantries. Kinda lame. It’s no fun when you’re staying at a place to dive and you can’t really meet any other divers.

The weather was also back to being very hit or miss. It was very windy so a few times we couldn’t just walk across the beach and hop in the dive boat (because it would bottom out) so they had to shuttle us to the port area and get on the boat that way. Lots of little annoyances with the La Ñina weather pattern this year. It’s not supposed to be like this at the end of February! The diving was fine, but not as good as most places I’d been, in addition to being the most expensive I’d done, so it wasn’t my favorite dive locale.

Fortunately Camiguin is a great island for scootering around, you can get around the island in a few hours, and there’s a few nice beaches and snorkel spots, plus some waterfalls, peaceful countryside scenery, and you can even hike to the top of the volcano and check out the crater. I didn’t do this because the weather made the trail too muddy and awful, but it sounded kinda neat! Oh and I almost forgot Camguin’s most famous feature, the sandbar that is a 10 minute boat ride from the coast. It is possibly the nicest beach I’ve visited in all of the Philippines! It’s got beautiful white sand, turquoise water, and the volcano looming in the distance (although its normally covered by clouds). The tourists groups usually go in the morning, so if you go in the afternoon you have the whole place to yourself, magical!

It goes from sunny to cloudy in about 3.2 seconds

the only people on the beach were some fishermen

So that was just about the end of my trip. I flew back to Manila, met up with the woman from Dauin, Donna, to do two more days of muck diving, just three hours away from Manila. We saw some more really cool sea slugs, and then it was back to Manila to play poker for a few nights, managed to win a little bit, and then a cheap flight a few hours north to Taipei, Taiwan! Oh and plus a nice little fee for overstaying my visa. They don’t actually care if you overstay, as long as you pay the fine. It didn’t feel like it, but it’d been 2.5 months now in the Philippines! Wow. While I might get bored of city hopping after a few weeks, I can really do the laid back, tropical locations with good diving for a long long time! So that was all for the Philippines, definitely one of my favorite countries. There are many countries where you are one and done, but I’d go back to the Philippines anytime, in a heartbeat!