We woke up too early, as we always do, and had a few coffees. We headed down to have included breakfast at 7:30ish. The breakfast was buffet style, but with ooooh so many options. It was incredible! I feel like growing up in North America you get used to included breakfast meaning “Continental breakfast” (hardly breakfast at all), but the rest of the world does it right! We had a bit of everything; from your usual cereal bar, salad bar, twenty bread choices, a huge selection of hot foods, rice, potatoes, many meats, baked dishes, baked eggs, boiled eggs, congee (with every topping imaginable), grilled fish, sweet foods… everything you could imagine. We ate like kings, going back three times to try more. When we had finished, we went back upstairs and finished packing. Our driver was meeting us downstairs at 9am. We checked out (an American man was busy talking to the only man at reception about how the restaurant didn’t have salt and pepper shakers and how this was a travesty), but we had to wait quite awhile. We made it down to the lobby at exactly 9am and our driver approached us. We jumped in his van and sped off into the pouring rain (emphasis on the “sped off” part)…

If we had thought our driver from Moal Boal to Cebu was fast and aggressive, he had NOTHING on this guy. This guy drove his twelve seater van like a stolen lambrogini, veering and bobbing between cars and scooters in traffic jams and despite the torrential rain. I had to actively try not to look as he drove as it caused me so much anxiety. As we made it to the countryside, he would accelerate through school zones. Every time the driver did something particularly risky while driving, he would cross himself and grab his rosary he had tied to the rearview mirror. Two hours into the journey we had a brief stop for the driver to have a meal. I bought a cappuccino for something to do. After about ten minutes we jumped back in our stolen lambrogini van and sped off. It was a four hour drive in total from Cebu to Maya Port in the north of Cebu. 

**Now for the sad part. Skip this if you don’t want to read sad things about animals.*

Just as we were driving through the neighbourhoods of Maya Port, maybe ten minutes away from the Port itself and finally being done with this terrifying drive, a happy puppy ran into the street. Our driver was of course driving super fast, but he slammed on his brakes. We hit the dog. Like…we watched it happen. We heard the thud and then felt as the tire hit him.I grabbed my face in horror. Jives said it looked like I was about to cry, honestly I’m not sure how I didn’t cry. The driver got out and “checked” and told us the dog was alive. Honestly, I kind of wish he wasn’t, as there was no way that the dog wasn’t really injured. Maybe the driver was lying and the dog was dead. A local man walked by just laughing at the situation. I didn’t know what to do. There really wasn’t anything we could do. It still haunts me.

The driver tried to explain many times that it wasn’t his fault and that he was actually an animal lover. I just nodded along. The whole time I was thinking to myself, that one of the many times the driver zoomed through a school zone, he could have hit a child. He was so lucky it was a dog he had hit, but still… he didn’t have to hit anything. He could have driven slower, or at least a normal speed.

We arrived at the port and got out to pay the environmental fee at the booth on the pier. It was 300 pesos for two people. We then got our bags and boarded our private boat to Malapascua. A man ran up to our car as we were getting out and opened the trunk to carry our bags. He was shocked to find there were not any bags in the trunk, as we travel with personal sized backpacks only. We walked down the gangway and boarded the boat, I was still so shaken by the accident. 

The boat was like one of the traditional Philippines boats with the pontoon-like things on the sides. The washroom door had a huge shark jaw painted on it. It was raining a little, but it was nice and cool. We pushed off from the dock, and a man used a large bamboo stick to do so, and then off to Malapascua we went. 

The ride took maybe thirty minutes. The island wasn’t too far away. We arrived right behind our hotel on what I would later learn is called “Cemetery Beach” with large stone tombs. We walked to the hotel restaurant and had a welcome drink of watermelon juice as a lady explained the hotel to us. We then walked to our room, which was on the other side of the resort, along a beautiful plant lined walkway lined with white buildings with blue accents that made it look like a small Santorini. 

We entered our room, sad that we weren’t on the waterfront side…. But low and behold, we could see water through our room, there was water on both sides of the hotel. Our balcony overlooked the main port where the ferry boats arrive. It was a beautiful little bay area lined with trees, one fig tree was turning red and another tree was blooming orange. The water was that perfect shade of turquoise, white and blue boats bobbed up and down in the harbour as people hustled by with packages and boxes, having evidently just arrived at port. 

We relaxed for a moment on our balcony before setting out towards “Bounty Beach” to have a late lunch at “Villa Potenciana Restaurant”, a vegan/vegetarian spot right on the beach. The restaurant was a ten minute walk away from our hotel. We sat on the beach and I ordered a Mongo Curry, a Philippines special and Jives got a Pita Burger. The “burger”was a large sloppy plate of veggies on a bun! My curry was delicious, it used a Filipino bean I had never heard of that tastes a lot like a lentil, with many veggies and rice. You pay as you order so it was nice that we could just get up and leave when we were done. 

We then walked down the beach a bit more in search of a place to buy a beer. We bought one beer at a shop and it didn’t have a price…so it ended up being really expensive. One our way back to our hotel we came across another shop where beer was mainland prices, and we befriended the owner! He said to us “we are neighbours now” and I told him that we would definitely be seeing him again. 

We then walked back to our room and enjoyed a beer together on the balcony. The tide had gone out completely, so we put our swimsuits on and walked along the coast (the rocks) avoiding crabs and sea urchins. There were so many sea urchins! We walked around the cove to an area with slightly more water, where we went in for a swim. 

There were lots of big chonky starfish in pink and clear with purple bumps. A little doggo followed us out to our swim spot and sat and waited for us on the beach. There were so many cool little things to see in the water; large spindly starfish lounging on the rocks, large spikey sea urchins with bright yellow eyes ( I had no idea they had eyes), tiny colourful fish hiding in the corals, a puffy copper and pink pincushion that I assume was a type of coral, and a sea urchin with a neon blue jelly on the top! 

We got out of the water just before the sun set below the horizon, drying off before heading out to find some dinner. We ended up at a place called “Angelina”, an Italian restaurant with outdoor seating under a huge tree on the beach. We sat down and the waitress warned us that if it rained there was no room indoors. We took our chances. We ordered a spinach and parmesan cheese pizza and two glasses of red house wine. It did begin to rain lightly, and the ladies insisted we sit indoors at a reserved table whose reservation was at 8:30pm (it was 7:00pm). They also dragged our neighbours table in and put it under the awning, but it never did really rain, only some drops. We left by 7:30pm, so plenty of time to set our table back up for the next group. Only one negative note, we got charged for a 500 peso salad we didn’t order and we had to ask the server about it which always causes so much anxiety for us. The issue was fixed and it was no big deal, we just would normally rather pay then make a deal about something like this.