Bohol: Diving, Chocolate Hills and Tarsiers & Malapascua Island: Visiting the Thresher Sharks

Our time in the Philippines is slowly coming to an end! After leaving Boracay, we continue to Cebu and then travel to Bohol and Panglao Island. We are going to take our diving course at Alona Beach, where Elena will get her diving license and Claudio will do an "Advanced Diver" course, which includes "Adventure Dives" such as Night Dives or Deep Dives. In the meantime, Elena will be hitting the books because there is a lot to learn! And the dive master Frank, who is teaching the course, is a special type of person. He is also a bodybuilder and a "real machine," as Claudio says. On the third day, he tells us that he came in fifth place at the Mister Universe competition two years ago and eats ten eggs for breakfast every day - well, bon appétit! But most importantly, Frank is a good teacher, and by the end of the course, Elena will have enough knowledge of the theory and equipment to go diving. We dive several times at the Alona Beach house reef, which is great because the reef drops off after a few meters and forms a proper wall where you can easily glide along thanks to the gentle current. Wonderful. We see some amazing corals and colorful fish! However, the rest of Alona Beach is not so nice, so we decide to return to Bohol Island, specifically to Loboc. There, we visit the Loboc River and take a nice evening cruise to see the fireflies dancing and flickering in the bushes. What we learn: by clapping rhythmically, the fireflies, which are actually flies, start to blink in sync - a beautiful spectacle in the dark of night. Well, until the bright, round full moon rises. The next day, we rent a scooter to explore the island and see the "Chocolate Hills." These are hills of unknown origin that are perfectly round and blend into the landscape, turning brown during the dry season - although we see them more green. Our scooter ride on Bohol also takes us through many rice fields and terraces, with funny scarecrows with coconut heads, through rural plains with a few houses and villages, through suddenly appearing small mystical forests, through the Chocolate Hills area and up the hill until we reach the other side and see the glimmering sea. During the ride, we marvel at how incredibly beautiful it is here, and we continue riding for another three hours until our butts are pretty sore! Luckily, the roads here have almost no potholes, and there is very little traffic! So we have a really nice day on two wheels. Additionally, we are celebrating our halfway point tonight! We can hardly believe that half of our trip is already over! When we set off the next day to see the Tarsiers, which can be seen in a small reserve on Bohol, something unfortunate happens: the rear tire of our scooter bursts while we are driving at full speed. Fortunately, nothing worse happens...we pull over to the side of the road and park our scooter. And we are in the middle of nowhere! Thankfully, some friendly villagers inform us that there is a nearby hill where we can get some mobile reception because our phones are dead right next to the road. But it's not easy to be rescued here because the hotel owner doesn't want anything to do with the damage we experienced. However, he refers us to the owner of the motorcycle, who instructs us to get the scooter repaired. We are getting annoyed because the "village" we are in consists of three houses, a small school, and a chapel. In addition, renting a scooter in the Philippines is really easy and completely paperless and without insurance - just not ideal in case of damage. When the scooter owner tells us that we will have to pay something if we want to be picked up, we shake our heads in disbelief. It takes three more phone calls until someone finally assures us that we will be picked up soon. Since the sun is already scorching in the sky, we seek shade at the small school and before we know it, we are surrounded by twenty children, each shouting an English sentence: "give me money." Hm. Since we don't react much to that, the shouting stops. But the children are naturally curious, they sit down with us and play the game "who sits closer to the foreigners?". After a few minutes, we notice that the children know 2-3 more English sentences, so we can tell them that we come from Switzerland and our names are Elena and Claudio. We learn that the girls are fascinated by blonde hair. And when further communication fails due to our lack of Filipino language skills and the children's lack of English skills, we show them photos of our house in Switzerland, a mountain with snow, skiing, and sledding, each accompanied by an ear-piercing scream from the children: "woooooooow"! Eventually, our rescue comes in the form of two boys on scooters, one of whom we can exchange our scooter with. But only for ten minutes because they noticed that this scooter also has poorly inflated tires. Oh dear. Somehow, we manage to reach the Tarsiers. The Tarsiers are...peculiar animals. They are the size of a human hand and are actually nocturnal, so they are either sleeping or looking at us with grumpy but huge eyes. Tarsiers are also very sensitive to noise, and if it gets too stressful for them, they commit suicide. So we try our best not to make any noise and not to disturb the five Tarsiers, who are sometimes cute, but also somewhat resemble a mixture of Gollum, Yoda, and E.T. Then we're done with Bohol and make our way to Malapascua (which is difficult because we take a slow bus ride north: with people constantly getting on and off, our journey takes five hours instead of three and a half). But we really like Malapascua Island! It is a small island without a pier, so we have to transfer from the small ferry to an even smaller boat and ride directly to the beach. Here we sleep in a super nice hotel, and right below it is a wonderful Italian restaurant - finally some good food (unfortunately, the Philippines is not blessed with great food!). On the first morning on the island, we have to wake up very early because we are going on a dive to Monad Shoal, a spot 35 meters deep where thresher sharks come every day to be cleaned by cleaner fish at cleaning stations. Malapascua is famous for this spectacle, and that's why we came here. Thresher sharks have beautiful tail fins that are as long as their bodies - they look strangely beautiful with their big black eyes that are made for seeing in the depths because these sharks usually swim deeper in the sea. We set off to the sea at dawn, with the starry sky still above us, and as the morning breaks, we jump into the water in full gear and start diving. We feel a bit uneasy because we don't know if and how many sharks we will see. But our dive guide reassures us that the sharks don't like bubbles and stay away from the divers. However, our experience underwater is more or less disappointing because the visibility is not good, so we can only see a few meters ahead and can barely recognize the sharks. One thresher shark can be seen in its full length, moving like a shadow through the water. Claudio sees two more sharks, but only from a distance. And since the dive site doesn't have any reefs or other special features underwater, we are left somewhat disappointed after the dive. The second dive we do later that day has to be aborted after ten minutes because of a broken O-ring on Claudio's oxygen tank (stay calm...even though the oxygen seems to be uncontrollably spurting out of the tank) - no luck here either! And yet, in the following days, we have two really good dives where we see small reef sharks and dive through dark tunnels. The rest of our time in Malapascua is spent at the beautiful Bounty Beach, where we sunbathe or play ladder golf - or visit our favorite Italian restaurant.