My Bohol Story. Check out some more pictures.
I left Clifford on Sunday night with two other teachers. We took a bus from Clifford directly to the Hong Kong airport. The rest of the teachers had already left on Friday right after school. We arrived in Hong Kong around 11pm, went to Burger King (I was travelling with boys) and spent the night sleeping on benches in the airport. They were surprisingly comfortable, just the air conditioning was a little too cold for my liking. I woke up with a bit of a sore throat which nagged at me for a few days.
We flew to Manila at 10am on Monday, the flight is only about a hour and a half, killed some time in the Manila airport and then took a 45-minute flight to Tagbilaran (the major city on the island of Bohol). We landed at around 4:30pm, our hotel picked us up and drove us from Tagbilaran to our remote corner of Alona beach. As we were driving it was hard to figure out how to feel about what we were seeing. The airport we arrived in was literally a three room building, each only about 12ft x 12ft big. One room for checking in, one room for once you've passed "security" (I use quotes because the screening process was a joke), and one room with the littlest conveyor belt I've ever scene for baggage claim when you arrived. So immediately as you walk out of the plane onto the tarmac and approach this hut-like structure, you can tell you're in a big of a primitive society. As we were driving to the hotel the biggest obstacles on the road were goats, cows and dogs who freely roam in vast numbers literally everywhere on the island. We saw kids walking home from school in uniforms one minute and the next we saw bare-footed, poorly dressed kids sitting around at little vending stalls. We saw immaculate marble mansions in the midst of delapitated straw huts. It was really hard to get a sense of how the locals lived on our island as the variability in what we saw was extreme. Prime example, I saw a gorgeous red BMW Z3 parked in the garage a of shabby plaster home, go figure! Certainly the Philippines receives some of the worst forces of the typhoons, and those straw huts I'm sure need to be re-built everytime one comes through, so perhaps the conditions of the buildings doesn't paint such an accurate view of the financial situation of the people there. About every third or fourth building was a church of some kind. Mostly generic Christian, some Jehovah Witness, a lot of Seventh Day Adventist, a few big Catholic cathedrals. The people are incredibly friendly and happy there. It was cool hearing some of the other teachers notice the difference between Philippinos and Chinese and connect their attitudes to the fact that Philippinos have religion.
We arrived at the hotel around supper time on Monday. It had 6 rooms, we occupied 3. No other guests. We did a little swimming, had a fantastic dinner, and I went to bed around early as I was totally beat. The next day was overcast but still over 30 degrees. We hung around the hotel in the morning. Did a little shopping in the afternoon. We ordered a beach bbq for supper which was disappointing for the price we paid. We each got between 3 and 4 various meat skewers for $9 Canadian. Highway robbery compared to the other meals on the menu. Wednesday we did an all day tour package from our hotel. We went to the big church on the island, saw the longest python in captivity, climbed the chocolate hills, walked across a suspension bridge, took a boat cruise down the river, saw some tarsers (don't know if I spelled that right) which are a tree climbing mammal of some kind with big eyes. Google them, they're cool. We had dinner back at the hotel and spent the night having a rocking dance party in the pool. Very fun! Thursday was our big beach day. It was hot, hot, hot! We started at 8am and rotated between beach chairs, hammocks and the pool until 8pm. A solid 12 hours outside on the beach, it was an amazing day, exactly what I was hoping for on this trip! After dinner we had a van take us down the beach to a beach front bar that had musicians sitting in the sand playing cover tunes for Oasis, GooGoo Dolls, Metallica, Celine Dion, The Corrs, you name it they played it. Six of the staff from our hotel came along and we bought them drinks and had fun chatting with them for a few hours. It was a great way to the end the trip.
Friday was a somewhat miserable day of travel home. Nothing big or bad happened, just people being grumpy because we were leaving paradise. We left at 8:30am and got home at 11pm. A very long day to be sure.
So that's my trip in a very big nutshell. I would love to go back to that hotel. I think I could get used to vacationing there in October. People who have been to other places in Philippines said Bohol was way nicer than the bigger more popular beaches. So we'll see, maybe this will be an annual trip for me. : )
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