Visayas Safari 2024, Philippines
Trip Report written by club member Danielle Riethmiller
Our club trip to the Philippines started with an optional add on Visyanas tour organized by Choi GoAdventures and Val who planned an action packed itinerary of land tours, fantastic diving, and too early wake-ups. After landing in Cebu, Val suggested we start our trip in a most Filo way – by mall walking. I was absolutely shocked at the amount and size of the malls all throughout our adventures, this one was 9 stories and had everything imaginable within it. We had our first of many many delicious meals and much to everyone’s shock, I agreed to an early night without even having any cocktails. We started our site-seeing early the next morning with a cultural tour of Cebu, including a visit to a guitar factory where we were able to get a behind the scenes look at the entire process of creating the guitars – which they do entirely by hand. Jim went full nerd mode while the rest of us danced and sang along with the staff as they performed with instruments all made within the factory. This day was also our first (of many) Lechon experiences. We ordered a couple kilos of the roasted pork dish with lots of sides, most of which Val and Darren told us not to ask what they were… But regardless of the suspicious ingredients, everything was delicious!
The following morning we started bright and early for a long travel day to Malapascua. Choi arranged everything, including snack breaks, and even had our ferry drop us off directly on the beach in front of our hotel. Upon arrival we discovered we had showed up just in time for Fiesta Malapascua, the major celebration for the island for the year. The Fiesta meant live music, markets, food stalls, and unexpectedly – cock fights. Like lots of cock fights. The party atmosphere was infectious and fun, but unfortunately did not suit our 4am boat time. Nice and early, a bunch of sleep deprived divers congregated on the beach to be the first in the water to see the thresher sharks! Our efforts were highly rewarded, with each of our groups of divers spending the entire hour with multiple threshers, coming very close and making for some incredible diving. Our night dive this evening was equally special, we were on the hunt to watch some Mandarin fish mating. We switched off our torches and our guides used red lights to illuminate the Mandarin fish without scaring them off and we perv-ed on them for ages before letting them get down to business in privacy. Our guides told us this was their “secret spot” and that seemed evident from the lack of other divers around – as this was such an incredible site and I expected lots of other people to be there.
We had another travel day to arrive in Bohol, which was a bustling metropolis in comparison to Malapascua and while we were all so excited for fresh water showers and air-conditioning, I think everyone was a bit overwhelmed with the volume of people around. The diving here was a critter filled wonderland – cuttlefish, octopus, turtles, leafy scorpionfish, frogfish, eels, nudis, shrimpies, crabby-bois, just every critter you could want to see. Our night dive here was my favourite dive of the entire trip – I am obsessed with crabs and this site just packed them in EVERYWHERE. Decorator crabs, sponge crabs, orangutan crabs, coral crabs, just all the dang crabs. A bobtail squid, octopus, cuttlefish, nudis, eels, frogfish. Action packed scavenger hunt vibes and I was all about it. Our next day was some nice coral diving and saw the Goleby’s joining the crew. These dive sites were much busier and we witnessed divers in matching bucket hats and one diver being towed on an actual leash by another diver, quite the people watching. We went to a nice Italian restaurant that Darren had raved about from a visit 10+ years ago, claiming they had the absolute best homemade mozzarella. They didn’t have any when we arrived. Despite that devastation we had an incredible dinner and probably a few too many drinks. When Mark – Kenny Rogers – went to the bar to drink in peace, Emile asked a bartender to tell him his pick up from the retirement village was there to collect him. Initially he looked confused but then looked over to all of us absolutely cackling.
Next on our adventure was Siquijor – pronounced sick-e-whore. Really. I promise. A long travel day had us arriving just in time for dinner and a cocktail called Liquid Marijuana. I still couldn’t tell you what was actually in this drink, but I do know Rochelle’s dancing went viral on Tiktok and there were actually no tarantulas. No I will not explain that. Our dive day here was spectacular. Unbelievable. Incredible. Other synonyms I can’t come up with. It was critter diving in its most pure form. You couldn’t go more than half a meter without seeing something weird and wonderful. There were so many frogfish/seahorses/octopus/cuttlefish/pipefish/waspfish/dragonets/anemone shrimp/sea moths that it wasn’t even exciting any more. I was so overwhelmed and excited that I was finally grateful for the time limits on the dives, because I was running low on air. That good. We learned about the Filipino “lip thing” during dinner, and it resulted in a lot of weird facial exercises while we tried to learn how to do it correctly. Filipinos will use their lips to point to something or emphasis something they are speaking about, this is not what we achieved. Mostly we looked like we were blowing bad lip kisses at strangers.
The next day we ventured to Dumagete – it rhymes with spaghetti – and wow. The diving here is wild. This was black sand muck diving at its best. Critters just absolutely everywhere. This was our cephalopod wonderland – we saw blue ringed octopus, wonderpus, flamboyant cuttlefish, so many other octopus and cuttlefish. Just fantastic. Our first night dive here was a shore dive, down what could only kind of been called a road – barely a track really. The dive was so good, Chris decided to take some of it home with us – accidentally bringing a hitchhiker in the form of a feather star attached to his bootie. Mr. Feather was rescued and returned, but not before Emile could wear him as a hat. Our attempt to get back to our hotel was thwarted by the lack of a road, as it just disappeared. Our driver got out of the vehicle at one point and when we all looked around real confused, he shouted “I’m just looking for the road!” Some creativity and lots of off-roading later we made it back to the hotel and then immediately had to go to bed, as we had a 3:30am departure time.
We caught an early car ferry back over to Cebu to head to Oslob for the whale sharks! The experience with the whale sharks in Oslob is highly regulated and while it was crazy busy, it was also well organized. The whale sharks are fed from canoes on the surface which attracts them to the area, but they are free to come and go. The whale sharks we saw here were mostly juveniles and it was cool to be diving beneath them and see the snorkelers up above. The people watching here was so entertaining but also a bit troubling – I witnessed one woman accidentally ride a whale shark for a second, another got hit in the face with a tail fin, one diver was physically pulled down by their guide after they lost control of their buoyancy and almost head butted a whale shark.
We’d been slowly hemorrhaging divers for a few days, with a couple different illnesses plaguing the group – so by the last day of diving for this portion of the trip the group was down to seven. Apo Island is famous in the Philippines for being a community organized marine sanctuary with stunning corals and lots of turtles and I heard from the crew who actually made it there that the dive was pretty and they saw a steady stream of bubbles due to the geothermal activity under the island. I myself was on a deep dive into using google as a doctor and convinced myself I had measles and was probably going to die. I ventured out of bed exactly once the entire day, to join the group and crew from the last few days for dinner. I lasted about 15 minutes, but have been told the festivities lasted deep into the evening with lots of fun new Filo treats being shared. We said goodbye to Mark, Val, Darren and Choi the next morning and the rest of us who were travelling to Tubbataha hopped on a plane to Manila and then Puerto Princesa.
This trip was an absolute whirlwind of an adventure and I couldn’t have asked for a better group to do it with. Choi and Val did such a good job of organizing everything and it meant we could all relax and enjoy ourselves while Choi did all the hard work. Unfortunately, all this trip did was make me desperate to return to the Philippines because the diving was even more incredible than I ever imagined.
Luckily it wasn’t over yet, because we had our Liveaboard to Tubbataha next!
You can read about the rest of our Philippines visit in the MV Stella Maris trip report.
Happy Bubbling,
Danielle
Overseas Trips Coordinator
