Bohol!

This weekend I took a trip to the island of Bohol with my best PC buddies, Erin and Anna. We did a lot of fun things, and had a great time. Here’s the highlights. We stayed in a place called Nuts Huts, which is a very hip, very eco-centered place. It’s built on the mountainside along the Loboc river. You can either take a boat upstream from the town of Loboc to reach it, or hike in from the national highway. We took a boat in. The main room (restaurant, lobby, hangout) is about 100 steps up from the river. And about 100 steps down from the highway. The bungalows are along the river, but all of them are raised up on the mountain, so you have to climb a ladder to get to your room. It’s a really cool place, but if you weren’t expecting a workout before and after every meal, it might not be the best place to stay.

We visited the Chocolate Hills, which are basically a bunch of small hills that rise up from the perfectly flat land in a series of bumps. It’s not that remarkable, but it’s a big tourist spot.

We tried to visit the National Park nearby, but while the entrance fee for adults was 8 pesos, for non-citizens it was 100 pesos. If we didn’t know we were being ripped off, we would have probably paid it, but even when I talked the gate guard down to 200 pesos for all three of us, we still felt we were being overcharged, so didn’t go in.

We hired a local guy, Joseph to take us up the river to the waterfalls in his boat. We thought it would be a nice relaxing afternoon ride. We were wrong. Joseph ‘docked’ the boat on some rocks (I really didn’t think he saw them, the way we crashed into them) and took us on a hike along the river that made me feel like I should be in an REI catalog. It was very intense, and if you slipped, you would probably fall 30 feet into the river. Joseph did it barefoot, just running along like we were on a sidewalk. It was neat though, lots of climbing up rocks and on tree roots until we got to the top of the waterfalls. After we were filthy and sweaty, Joseph led us back to the boat and Erin and Anna took a swim, and got a ‘hydro massage’ from the waterfalls.

The next morning we thought we would do the ‘exciting cave hike just across the river’ advertised in the Nuts Huts main room. Joseph came and picked us up in a tiny tiny boat. We couldn’t all fit in it at once, so he took me and Anna across the river and went back for Erin. Joseph points up the mountain and tells us the cave is up there. Then he starts zooming up an almost vertical narrow pathway. Also it is covered in wet leaves, this being the rainforest. After about 20 minutes of this, when all three of us thought we couldn’t go another step, and Joseph was walking along while weaving a basked and telling us stories, we took a break in a clearing where some local men had been gathering firewood. While the three of us gasped and tried to find a single dry spot anywhere on our clothes that we could wipe our face with, Joseph started chopping wood. I’m not kidding. We asked him how much farther, and he said we were almost there, and there was no more straight vertical like that. We believed him. After another 15 minutes or so (and it wasn’t as bad as the first part) we reached his brothers house. From his brother’s house, we could see our bungalow, hundreds of feet below. We rested at his brother’s house for a bit. When Joseph said we were halfway to the cave, Erin, who wasn’t feeling well even before we left, decided to wait for us at the house. Joseph and Anna and I trooped on. More intense hiking, and we were over the top of the mountain and finally, to the cave. The first cave we went through was small, and there was a family gathering bat guano to use as fertilizer. One of the neat things about this trip was how authentic it was. Joseph taught us about local plants and their uses, he told us about the livelihoods and history of the people of his village, and we ran into people really doing things, like gathering guano. We continued on to a second cave, where Joseph told us people hid from the Japanese during WWII. All I could think was that they must have been pretty safe, because who in their right minds would go through all that work we just went through to find some poor Filipino peasants. At times Joseph was actually using a machete to clear away plants from the path.

The caves weren’t that amazing, compared to some National Parks caves we’ve been to, but they were still neat to see, and you could touch anything and walk wherever you wanted. After the caves, we began our descent. Joseph left me and Anna at one point to go and fetch Erin, then the four of us continued down the mountain. At times we were worried about falling head first down the side, but we didn’t. Back at river level, we walked along the path that the villagers take everyday to the market, and headed back upstream to where we’d started. We passed kids playing in the river, women hanging up laundry, people doing their daily activities. It was a really neat hike, and both Anna and I had been wanting to do a hike like that since we arrived – but we were definitely not prepared for such a hike to take place that day. We had no idea what we were getting into when we decided to ‘explore the caves’. Back at our bungalow, we took showers and hung our sweat-drenched clothes out to dry. None of us could imagine climbing the steps again, our legs were like jello. But we had to check out. We asked Joseph to come in his boat and take us to town on the river because we were not going to be able to climb 200 stairs up to the highway.

The town’s river landing is also a tarsier viewing spot, and we stopped to see the tarsiers. Tarsiers are the smallest primates in the world. They are about the size of my hand. They look kind of like gremlins, and have huge eyes. After the tarsiers, we got a jeepney back to the capital of Bohol, Tagbilaran. We got lunch, and even though we were exhausted, we went to pick up Erin and Anna’s custom-ordered guitars. We hung out at the guitar workshop for a while, then went to a pension for the night. The girls had bought me a harmonica so the three of us could jam once they got their guitars. We had a fun night.

The next morning we took a ferry back to Cebu, and the girls got on their flight to Iloilo. I had 5 hours to kill until my bus left, so I went to the mall and saw a Filipino movie called You Are The One. It was great. If you can get your hands on it, and if it has subtitles, you should watch it. It’s a cheesy love story, but explains a lot about Filipino culture, and it was cute.

I got back to Cadiz about 9:30 and went to bed. It was an excellent trip.