Glenn and I recently extended our "mode of exploration", usually including car, sail boat, SCUBA gear, or hiking boots, to bycicle saddle! An experience that definitely calls for more!

Preparing for our weekend get-away to Cebu we pondered the usual options: diving in the west, whale shark watching in the south, or island exploration in the north. Each of these options include a minimum of three hours in a bus... We simply didn't have it in us.

Instead, we decided to explore Olango Island, just off of Cebu. Not in a car and not by foot, but by bike! Through "bugobikers", a Cebu-based outdoor adventure organizer specializing on bike tours, we were quickly set up.

Sunday morning our guide Laurence picked us up from the hotel. Together we went to Mactan Island, where our bikes were already waiting for us. We plus our bikes boarded a small bangka over a narrow plank. (We thought we were brining special items on the boad... we changed our minds when we saw furniture pieces being loaded onto the boat!).

After a 15 minute boat ride we disembarked on Olango Island. What's great about the island is there are no cars allowed. The only motorized vehicles we had to bully with were motorcycles and trycicles.

Olango is a rather small island. It can be circumnavigated in less than 2 hours. Still, it's home to 25,000+ inhabitants. On top of the human head count, Olango is home to various bird species.

The Olango Wildlife Sanctuary, a 1,000ha area, is the summer residence for migratory birds, escaping the winters in their homes. Needless to say the Sanctuary is, at least once a year, an attraction for birdwatchers.

We had missed the migration season by a few weeks. Yet, we enjoyed walking out to sea to get closer to the mangrove-covered wetland, a perfect nesting place for birds. The tide was coming in so we waded through belly-high waters to reach the outlook.

After a refreshing coconut juice we paddled on along the well maintained asphalt road around the island. We stopped at a German-run resort for lunch and even dared to stick our heads underwater to explore the marine wildlife in the Mactan channel. Spoiled divers as we are we concluded this snorkel experience to be a great way to cool down.

From there we decided to bike along the roads less traveled. Slightly uneasy because he hasn't explored the area yet, Laurence prepared us we "might get lost". Well, it's an island.

We turned off road and found ourselves in the middle of small communities in the back of the island, away from the nice resorts facing Mactan Channel. Children greated us and chased our bikes. Clearly, not many bikers pass through here. We got a glimpse of a relaxed Sunday afternoon in the fishing communities.

25 kilometers later we were back at the pier, loading our bikes once more on a bangka. Our pick up received as back on the mainland and by 5pm, we were back at our hotel.

Our suggestion: if you really want to explore the Philippines (not the tourist hubs), go on a bike tour! You are faster than walking but slower than rushing through the place on a motorbike. It's a great exercise and a low carbon footprint activity!

Underwater Love!

After an exhausting travel to Southern Leyte, we were once more rewarded with a priceless dive experience!

Just like during our first trip to Padre Burgos we were fortunate to meet a marine biologist cum dive master who turned out to be our dive buddy for the weekend. Formerly working for Coral Conservation Cay, Hew was back to Southern Leyte to reminisce his days with the foundation.

Having the eye of a dive master and vast local knowledge of the dive sites he spotted the most remarkable micro life, which Southern Leyte dive spots are famous for! The most fascinating for me was—without doubt—to see mating nudibranchs! Some of those “sea slugs” are so tiny it’s rather hard to spot them in the first place. To see them mate was an absolute highlight! Don’t get me wrong, I’m not an underwater sea-slug-sex-pervert! The act of reproduction is, for (almost all) animals and plants, purely to sustain the species – the very essence of nature. It was such a life-defining yet intimate act to witness that I feel truly grateful to have seen it! I mean, how many times do we have the opportunity to peep into nature's bedroom?

Another highlight was to see the manta ray which we were told “hangs out” at a certain spot but has not been seen regularly. Expecting little we got the most: he hovered around our small dive group twice!

The school of dolphins jumping in front of our dive boat and chasing us on the way back to shore was an unexpected add-on to our dive experience we gladly would have paid for.

After each dive we tried to identify the creatures we saw by going through various dive books along with our underwater pictures… sometimes we were so engrossed our dinner got cold. It’s amazing how little we know about the world beneath sea level!

Call it knowledge or trivia (I guess that depends on the eye of the beholder) but did you know that:

• Tiger nudibranchs eat each other? Unbelievable! Those little, colorful, and cute creatures!
• Some nudibranchs grow as big as 30 centimeters (bigger than a man’s hand!)? And we’ve seen two of them, almost choking on our regulators!
• Tunicates have a spine-like structure, thus are “closely related to vertebrates, which include fish and all land animals with bone”? Crazy!
• The area around Sogod Dive Resort lost three dive sites in the last two years due to inappropriate fishing techniques (mainly net fishing which destroys the corals by dragging a net on the bottom of the ocean)?
• I love to see more MPAs (Marine Protected Areas, not to be confused with the Motion Picture Association!), which in Padre Burgos three of the operating dive resort set up to rehabilitate the underwater life and educate local fisher folk?
• The local government does little to nothing to support (dive) tourism in the area but instead makes life hard for the existing or interested investors? Local politics!

The tourism experience in the Philippines is really a mixed bag, a box of chocolates where you never really know what you’ll get. Stunning natural beauty goes along with the most devastating and ignorant fishing, farming, and waste-burning practices.

I like to think that well educated local dive masters take back to their communities the knowledge, which will slowly but truly convert ignorance into competence.

The hidden beauty

When I hear about beautiful waterfalls in the Philippines I'm... let's say... rather skeptical...

I've seen a few which have been promoted as tourist attractions and usually I'd find one of the two realities: a) a 2-meter drop which, depending on wet or dry season, does or does not carry any water, b) a nice waterfall that has been turned into an amusement park with entrance fee (camouflaged as "environmental fee"), tubes, rafts, food stalls and a lot of trash floating in them.

The Inambakan Falls in southern Cebu taught me yet another lesson: there is beauty out there which is responsibly developed to enjoy it!

To get to the falls it requires quite some local knowledge. The narrow trail passes by small huts where old men offered us Tuba (local rice wine) while guiding us into the right direction. The walk is not difficult, just hidden. We crossed seven rivers (or was it just one river which we crossed seven times?) but did not come across any other "tourist".

When we finally walked up and down a few man-made concrete stairs (the kind of development which provides for accessibility and safety but doesn't spoil the experience) I almost didn't believe my eyes!

There was actually a curtain of water falling into a turquoise pool of water! The surrounding smoothed rocks were covered in lush green moss. The falling water was received by a mushroom-shaped rock, which crushed each drop of water into fine mist, creating this fascinating draft inherent to waterfalls. Swimming against a fairly strong current we discovered a cave behind the waterfall. For years and years drops of water have been eating their way through the rock!

After a refreshing dip we decided to explore the source of the waterfall. Climbing higher and higher, against the stream like salmons, we discovered truly untouched nature and a couple more water slides and steep falls. Careful not to slip we dared to challenge the stream and cooled off in the current.

As careful as we were we have to lament one casualty: Glenn's nice gecko shirt got sucked into one of the plenty whirlpools... never to be seen again. In swim shorts he made his way back to the car... Truly a tourist attraction!

Smart, brave, nuts?

Smart, brave, or nuts? I guess it is in the eye of the beholder to bestow either of these adjectives on our plan to drive from Tacloban (Leyte) to Padre Burgos (Southern Leyte) on a 125cc motorbike.

Burned by the public transportation system to explore Leyte last year when we visited the island, we decided to take matters in our hands this time.

Leaving Tacloban city center on our Kawasaki we passed the van (V-Hire) terminal. Seeing half-filled vans and people waiting in the heat for the cars to fill up, we were convinced we outsmarted the system by opting for “self-service” this time.

Twenty minutes and five road forks later we considered our salves brave! Brave enough to dare the islands’ street signs, which require a vast amount of local knowledge—including the names and locations of major cities and municipalities—to actually be helpful for guidance. Being smart, we were prepared with a GPS and a google map print out (neither trusting our local knowledge nor the local dialect to ask for directions).

After two hours (with another two to go) our behinds were in such pain that we knew, we are nuts! What on earth had gotten into us to torture ourselves voluntarily?! Just as these thoughts crossed our minds, we crossed the Agas-Agas Bridge, the tallest bridge in the Philippines and home to the first Zip line on the island!

We pulled right over and gave our butts a rest by flying—face first—down a two-kilometer meter zip line! What a great thrill! Not only because of the adrenalin rush flying over the bridge and treetops at a height of 114 meters in a harness clipped to a steel cable. A thrill, too, because there is no legal safety net in case of an accident...

Bungee jumping or skydiving, I’m used to signing a waver or any sort of legal document of the site operator assuring safety and maintenance standards and accepting (well, in most cases not) liability in case something happens.

Well, judging by our own standards we considered the zip line to be “safe” and went for it. Nuts, you say? Yes, maybe! But it was worth every one of the 280 Pesos per person!