The Philippines: You can’t help but smile as this country defiantly avoids categorization. Just when you think you got a place figured out, something completely wacky happens. We arrived from Hong Kong to the regional capital of Cebu, located in the heart of the Visayas Islands. Our target destination was a little island called Malapascua, a (relatively) short bus and ferry ride away. The ride to the port of Maya was uneventful… well, except for Ana getting whacked in the face by some palm branches through the window (bus drivers use all available road space). The ferry ride on the other hand was a rough experience. First of all, the “ferry” was nothing more than a glorified double-outrigger canoe with an engine: not exactly ideal for the high seas. And the seas, they were high. I wasn’t completely convinced that the boat was going to stay afloat, as we took on a lot of water with waves crashing over the bow. The worst part was that our bags (and myself) were sitting on the front of the boat, so all of our clothes got completely soaked. Oh well… at least we were in better shape than the smaller boat next to us: the one with the small girl in the back bailing water out at a frantic pace. Yikes! We sat next to a group of local Filipinos for the trip and were immediately offered some local treats of sweet corn tamales that were pretty delicious. Man, people here are so friendly! The group was headed up by the gregarious and absolutely charming Hector, who quickly befriended us and peppered us with questions: “Hello, What is your name? Where are you from? How many children do you have? How did you hear about Malapascua?” Hector was excited when he heard that we live near San Jose, as he has some relatives that live nearby: “Ah, you know Milpitas? My cousin was the mayor of Milpitas!” Small world!
The island itself is pretty small: You could walk around it if you had a couple of spare hours. We stayed a bit off the main drag, on the opposite side of the village to Bounty Beach. Bounty Beach is the longest (and nicest) beach on the island, so that’s where most of the resorts and shops are located. We came into town to eat dinner the first night… lured in by the promise of cheap ($0.50) beers and an all you can eat buffet on the beach. During our dinner an impromptu live performance started up, headlined by 3 gay cross-dressed ladyboys. The show was quite elaborate, with dancing and lip-synced musical acts. At one point, there was even a fire breathing show! Ana kept asking for the camera, but I was hesitant because I figured that they would probably ask for a tip (JOB: mind out of the gutter!). Sure enough, the three came by our table asking for contributions to their fundraising cause: something to do with Christmas and gay awareness or something. When Ana pulled out her change purse for a (admittedly small) contribution, the middle ladyboy whispered “bitch!”, flamboyantly pirouetted with one wrist in the air and strutted off indignantly. Seriously, I’m not making this stuff up… I don’t have the creative genius to make this stuff up! Too funny.
Malapascua is pretty famous for scuba diving, especially for catching a glimpse of some big marine life. The thing to do here is to wake up early in the morning to get a sighting of some thresher sharks off of an underwater island called Monad Shoal. Here, the thresher sharks circle patiently… waiting to get cleaned by smaller fish picking off parasites. Supposedly this is one of the few “guaranteed” places in the world to see them, as they normally hang out in deeper waters. The chance of spotting a thresher shark here is something like 80%, so we were (kind of) willing to overlook the 5:00am wake up call. Our dive party consisted of myself, Ana, our dive instructor James, and another dive master named Adrienne who was tagging along for the dive (Hi Adrienne!). Pretty amazing diver to dive master ratio considering that diving here costs an affordable $30 per person. Sitting at the bottom of about 10 meters of water, we waited for about 30 minutes and saw absolutely nothing. I couldn’t believe our rotten luck: We were going to be the 20% statistic that didn’t see the sharks. Then, finally, one of them appeared… taking shape through the murky, low visibility water. It swam right by us, checking us out with one sideways looking eye. I could barely get my camera set up in time before it swam off out of view. A few minutes later, another thresher came up from a different direction and actually circled around us for a loop before swimming off. Pretty cool, but I was a bit anxious to have the big guy go out of my peripheral vision behind us. Finally, we were quite lucky to see another two sharks circling each other before having to surface back to the boat. All in all, a total of 4 sightings. Not bad!
Back on shore we met up with some of the other people staying at our resort. As it turns out, most of them were actually on the island on business: engineers setting up the new power plant to deliver electricity to the island 24 hours a day (previously on 6 hours). We took a tour of the plant with Marilyn, a young electrical engineer from Manila, and were duly impressed with the scale of the operation: This is going to change a lot of things here. Malapascua may not turn into the next Boracay, but it will probably get blown up with development in the next couple of years… so book your trip now! Anyway it was great hanging out with all the guys from Big Foot engineering every morning for breakfast: Hope you guys had a great Christmas party!
Check out the picasa web link for our photos of Malapascua: http://picasaweb.google.com/richmosko/Malapascua
And here is where Malapascua is on a map of the Philippines.
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