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Malupascuba
Our driver Danny picked us up at 08:30 for the 3 hour journey through Cebu, heading North to the Port of Maya. Cebu City was a tactical location so we could get to Bohol easily, and overall you would say it wasn't the most iconic of locations but it served its purpose. I didn't think 1 hour into our journey that we would be surrounded by lush green forests and coconut palms on one side of the road, with the coastline on the other. It was so stunning, not sure my in-motion pictures did it justice. Another reminder of just how beautiful Asia can be away from all the traffic and industrial pollution.
Danny was older than some of the other local people we had met already, he started driving in 1984.
On getting to Maya Port, we watched as our driver spoke to the port men. There seemed to be a boat ready for us to get on, but we were told we would have to wait 30 minutes. 10 minutes later we were directed to another boat, our bags were taken off is and loaded on board and we followed across the unsteady rocky bay, along a thin plank and then onto the boat. This boat could apparently hold 26 people although I think 20 would be a push. We paid over the odds for the porters to carry out bags (100 pesos but we read it should be 10 per bag) and we were then told that we would have to wait for the boat to be full to go, or for 1500 pesos it could be a "special trip" to go straight away (80 pesos for it normally). We declined, one because we knew it was too much and two, because we had about 260 pesos left to our name. It took some time for them to stop naming random sums of money to understand we could only pay what we had left. In this case, having little money got us across much cheaper than it could have been - we will probably now carry two money supplies! (One containing what we want to pay and the other out of sight). The cargo was then loaded up (mainly banana boxes stuffed with food supplies for the restaurants). We are sure this was just originally a cargo trip and the other boat was probably told to leave without us so these folk could earn some more money out of us by taking us across on our own. In some ways you can't really blame them.
As we got to Malapascua, we realised that having no money would mean we couldn't pay for the small boat to take us off the bigger boat onto shore. It worked out ok as they followed us down to our hotel to wait for us to change some money (there is no ATM on the island, so now I'm very happy that I have my stash of US Dollars left over from the last trip on my person!).
The island itself is 2.5km long and 1km wide. It was hit badly by Typhoon Yolanda (Haiyan) at the end of 2013 and most of the places on the island lost their roofs and a lot of places still remain closed (there's a graph on Wikipedia and this island was in one of the worst areas for number of homes destroyed). It is very much a work in progress here in getting it rebuilt, you can still see broken palm trees and destroyed buildings around but that makes it sound bad, it's still paradise!
The view from our room is amazing. We are on the second floor, with a balcony that looks out onto the water, probably about 10 meters from the sea. The local area is very quiet compared to most beaches, even if it's the largest amount of Europeans we have seen on our trip so far (the owner of the hotel and dive school is German).
Later that afternoon we went to go and sign up for a 3 day PADI Scuba Dive course. We were quickly introduced to our instructor, named Tata and after picking out some kit we headed into a room to start watching a two part training video, with questions in the handbook to run through. This took about 2 hours to complete.
Most of my friends will know that me and the outdoors, especially involving any adventure type activities normally ends up in some kind of story. My swimming isn't too great and I'm not the best at breathing underwater (at least with a snorkel). So I can already hear my mother saying to me "why would you want to go diving then". I want to try new things, even if I fail at them, hopefully not doing so much damage to myself in the process!
That evening we went to a restaurant about 10 minutes walk back from our hotel. The food was good (Coconut Chicken Curry) and that with a drink cost me about £1.50 at the most!
Bowls of Rice Consumed; 9
Hours Travelled; 27
How Nervous I am Diving (out of 10); 11
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