Bohol 1

After spending a couple of days exploring Manila on their own, we joined the Corbins on their holiday on Wednesday and flew down to an island in the Visayas called Bohol. It was a pretty early flight and we arrived a bit sleepy and hungry in capital of the island, Tagbilaran. We were met by Piers, a new AYAD who had arrived 10 days earlier and who would be based in Bohol for a year. We had some early lunch and then caught a jeepney out to a town called Loboc on the picturesque Loboc river, and then a boat to our accommodation Nuts Huts.


Nuts Huts had been recommended to us by a few people – settled in the middle of the jungle on the river, they were very much away from the hustle and bustle of any major town. The huts themselves were ‘traditionally’ Filipino made of bamboo and thatching with limited electricity but flushing toilets and a cold shower. The main dining/common area was up a huge flight of stairs, but overlooked the Loboc valley. That afternoon we took a boat trip up to the Loboc waterfalls. They weren’t quite what we expected and were actually quite small, but we were able to do some swimming which made it a lot of fun.

The next day we hired motorbikes to head up to the Chocolate Hills, one of the main tourist attractions of not only Bohol but the Philippines. It was great fun riding on motorbikes through the countryside and we were able to see people going about their daily business – something that we normally miss travelling by jeepney, taxi or bus.

Heading inland, we overshot the Chocolate Hills by about 30 minutes, but eventually found it my asking some of the locals. While not the most spectacular vista in the world, the Hills are an interesting site and quite pretty (Neil wishes to describe them as mellow spherical, angular and bulbus??!). Especially as we had blue skies with some clouds overhead made for some nice pictures over the surrounding landscape.

After eating lunch, we headed out to some falls not too far from the Chocolate Hills that many people had told us were very nice. The track down to the falls was great, riding through the Bilar National Park. Arrival at the ‘Logarita Spring’ was itself a bit of a disappointment as there weren’t really any falls, and the spring was a concrete swimming pool where a bunch of young Filipinos who were loud, roudy, and were singing the local filipino ballads.


So instead we decided to head back through Loboc to Corella and the Tarsier Visitors Center. Again after over-shooting the turnoff to Corella we asked around and realised the rickety old bridge over the Loboc River was in fact where we were supposed to turn off. Running out of daylight we decided to keep going for another half hour to see how close we would make it to the Center before we would have to turn around to make it back before dark. The road to Corella through Sikatuna was unpaved but we passed many houses, villages, rice fields and people at work. Unfortunately we were unable to make it to the Tarsier Center but on the way back school had gotten out so we passed heaps of local school children walking home for the day. It was great as they were so friendly and would always wave and yell out hello to these strange white people riding past them. At one stage I told Neil to pull over as I wanted to take a picture of a huge, decrepid old Spanish style church in the middle of nowhere and a whole class of school children ran across the field yelling hello and waving. It was really amazing.

posted by batik billy @ 2:30 pm