2016.01.29: Moalboal - White Beach

Hello everybody!

Today I will be discussing a few of the lessons we learnt on Cebu Island. “What?” you say, “I said something about our journey to Moalboal”?! Yes, yes I did, and this is my opinion: “eh”. We chose Moalboal because of it’s advertised “White Beach”, but while I do admit it was beautiful, I don’t think it was worth the stop in our limited time trip.

We caught a taxi from the airport to the South Bus Terminal, and from there found the right bus to Moalboal. One thing to keep in mind, arrive early to make sure you don’t miss the bus. Another thing to keep in mind, if it’s not busy, the bus only seems to leave when it gets full, so you may be waiting awhile. During this wait, I decided to explore the station and see what kind of food I could buy and made the bad decision of purchasing this huge back of cookies for 70PHP (~3AUD). Good bargain I thought! Nope; stale, weird tasting cookies that we could barely finish half the bag of by the end of our week in the Philippines. So some advice: around the Philippines they have these bakeries called things like “Julie’s Bakery”, if you want a cheap snack go here and buy some loaves - they’re usually fresh, they’re sweet bread, and generally only cost 5P each.

Moving on… ~3hours later we arrive in Moalboal, the bus kicking up dust as it takes off and several habal habal and trike drivers approaching us to offer us a ride. We’ll walk thanks, and so we head on down to the water we see in the distance; a jetty set in this bay area around by trees and not a single grain of sand. Still very beautiful though and we decide to sit here for a little bit and adjust our clothes to the climate like the locals seem to do.

Eventually we decide to ask somebody about White Beach and were told its about a 10minute ride out of town! We catch a trike there for 200P return, though the driver stops a long the way at “toll” booth, which are nothing more than shacks set up with a person to collect a 10-20P payment to let tourists in. 5minutes later and we stop at another one?? Seriously? Fine. Okay, we’ve come this far and “it’s only a dollar”. And then we are there, beautiful blue water, white sands, as promised. Not mentioned was the guys who come past every 5 minutes to offer you expensively priced drinks and ice creams and only get the hint that when you tell them “no thanks” you mean “no, I won’t buy them, now, or in half an hour, or in 2 hours”, when you stop making eye contact with them and ignore them. 

On a more positive note: SEAHORSES! Vanessa smartly brought her goggles. As I’m not a swimming kind of person, that didn’t even cross my mind, but I did come prepared with my brand new underwater camera. This will be its first big test, and boy did it work well! In her explorations, Vanessa came across some white seahorses and we spent a lot of our time there trying to capture them and all the other little fishies around that area.

Back to Moalboal, and we sit at the bus stop waiting for our bus to our next destination: Oslob - where we once again face the struggle of waking up before the sun, and this time to swim with Whale Sharks!