Bohol: Diving, Chocolate Hills and Tarsiers
The uncharacteristically miserable weather aside (it rained heavily yesterday and has been overcast and drizzly most other days, even though it’s the dry season), we’ve enjoyed our first few days in the Land of Shopping Malls, which are absolutely everywhere in a way that I’ve never seen before in the third world.
After leaving Cebu three days ago, we went to Panglao Island off Bohol which is famed as one of the best scuba diving sites in the Philippines. I was going to get my open water certification, but had second thoughts as it was going to take four days, cost US$310 and none of the four included open water dives were at Balicasag Island, the best diving spot in the area. Instead I paid US$40 for a half-day intro dive at Balicasag which turned out really well, as it was a sunny morning and I was able to dive the reef wall with Wendy. While the coral was not as interesting as the Red Sea in Egypt, the fish were plentiful and very colourful, particularly the yellow and purple ones, and we swam among them easily. Later in the day, while snorkeling, a school of at least 300 jackfish swam only a metre away from us; they’re not colourful but it was still great to see so many of them bunched so closely together.
Twenty-four hours on Panglao was enough for us and after the dive we returned to Bohol proper to see the island’s other two main attractions, starting with the tarsier. The Philippine tarsier is the smallest and oldest primate in the world, lives on only four islands in the entire country (with a different variation living on Borneo and Sulawesi in Malaysia/Indonesia), and is an endangered species. There is a protection centre in Bohol where the staff are trying to breed tarsiers to ensure their long-term survival, and they also take visitors for walks (in the rain!) through the nearby jungle to see the animals. Despite all the photos I’d seen (or because of them, given that heavy zoom is always used), I wasn’t quite prepared for how tiny the tarsier really is. They can fit in the palm of your hand yet can jump several metres from tree to tree. They have proportionally huge eyes, can twist their head almost 360 degrees, and generally look like pre-midnight Gremlins or another type of weird alien animal.
Today we went inland to see the famed ‘Chocolate Hills’, more than a thousand individual hills that rise up from the otherwise rice-field-and-palm-trees landscape of the Bohol interior. The recent rain means the hills were more green than brown, but that’s probably a good thing even though it means they weren’t so chocolaty. In any case it’s a pretty interesting sight, like nothing we’ve ever seen before, so it was worth the two-hour trip there and back.
This evening we’re taking another fastcraft west to the island of Negroes, where we’ll spend the next four or five days before hopping to the next island for the Ati-Atihan festival on Sunday.
Tags: Asia, chocolate hills, diving, Southeast Asia, tarsiers, The Philippines
Nick