Weekend getaways in northern Cebu

In the Visayas I came upon a fellow traveler who told me he had bought himself an old bus and is converting it into an American-style mobile trailer. When it is done he will only see the islands again his own way: with a portable bathroom, a proper bed, a kitchen and a flat-screen television. This may seem drastic, but he has had it with dirty public toilets, the rundown wharves, and the lodging amenities that are either too expensive or too miserable. I would like to be able to travel with him, too, because I am just as fed up of trying to get some satisfaction out of places we try to boast to the world of our little paradise. Something is very much amiss with a concept of luring people to see our shores, or even of decent standards. A trip to an island for tourism seems far more exhausting after you have left it than when you had first arrived. Traveling on my own, it has become a bit of a struggle. This year I am doing my share of Suroy Suroy sa Sugbu – the Cebuano’s version of roaming the islands of the country’s second best known tourist destination for which foreigners, the Japanese especially, and now the Koreans, apparently favor. I chose the northern portion of Cebu province, going to Camotes island in April and Malapascua island in August. The first is more of a local favorite, the other a divers’ lair with a reputation for following the steps of Boracay, so they say. My next target is to see Bantayan island off the northern tip, but this might have to be for later. Having gone to these islands, I couldn’t help comparing this and other trips elsewhere in the country to similar distant voyages done in our neighboring countries, to such places as Luang Prabang in Laos, Siem Reap in Cambodia, Hoi An in Vietnam. These countries supposedly less modern in the race for development have a better grasp of welcoming visitors.

Camotes island The early morning that I had set out for Camotes from the port of Danao, about 50 kilometers from Cebu City, I was forced into a bad mood. The departing boat was off schedule and I missed my ride, giving me no choice but to wait in a canteen that reminds me of a provincial outpost, the air stuffed with cigarette smoke and other mixture of scents. Ticket sales are done by word of mouth for other, lesser boats; you follow a queue to a beaten up table planked down out of nowhere for potential passengers. When you finally get on the boat, you will find legs raised on your bunk seats because they were made too high and too narrow to make the one-hour ride comfortable. The boat is an oversized outrigger that must have been built in a rush for business. I wanted to see this island for nothing as special as a weekend get-away, to where most of the city folks would spend the remaining days of celebrating the Holy Week in April. They put their cars in a row in-row out watercraft and serve their joy ride around the sparse island whose popular site is a lake good for picnics. A young couple brought their folding bicycles, which was probably the best thing to do. With half the day gone, I decided to hire a motorcycle driver to take me around for a roadside birdwatching; that was well worth it for the kingfishers and the starlings and the brown shrikes. Filipinos by and large have a strange notion of the outdoors. I have long noticed that local visitors prefer to make the space cramped; they pack the beaches with picnic tables for a feast where food never seems to run out, with blaring music and boisterous noise of what constitute fun under the sun. Even at night, in my room that feels like a dungeon for a price that would make you feel sorry for yourself, you can hear the disco and a basketball tournament going on simultaneously. You would also feel rotten getting into a fight with the boat company. It doesn’t make sense, I tell them, to put up a tarpaulin sign giving a schedule of your trips when you tell me to be here two hours ahead of time because it might leave without me whether or not I have paid for the fare. And as it turned out, we left very late. Try complaining and you will be dismissed right off with a sorry smile and other passengers will cut you off. Where has my country gone? The last time I had experienced something like this was 15 years ago in the backwaters of Borneo. As compensation, Camotes offered a quiet morning stroll along a cove, the beach sands flat and fine on which a mother was showing her toddler how to build a castle inhabited by a collection of starfish. The seabirds played on the soft waves of a low-tide. My weekend went by just like that. I see the point of my Visayan friend; he, too, has traveled to other parts of Southeast Asia and misses the ease and better amenities, of the good business sense that the Thais or Vietnamese or Indonesians would put into the service industry. What makes it so hard for us to clean a public toilet? To keep water running from a tap instead of leaving huge pails of collected water that you aren’t sure is clean for washing? For higher standards of accommodation, we equate it to a higher price set for the demands of foreigners as we see it (or, something we do not normally set for ourselves.) For us, something is always broken in the bathroom, something is not right about the lodging room; it smacks of making second-class citizens out of us, our own doing. Malapascua island When you go to Malapascua island off the northern coastal town of Daan Bantayan, you will see that the resorts are foremost made for foreigners. It looks pretty and stylish on the front shore, a sight inviting you to come to paradise, but you will find, behind it, the makings of a slum where the local people live. They call it a ‘Little Boracay’ for, like the famous island resort, being able to attract tourists from abroad, mostly scuba divers who want to see the thresher sharks the island is known for. Yes, the sand beaches alone would be a good enough reason to come here by sheer enticement, and so I did, hoping for a dive as well (but never got to). There are tourist buses that can take you directly to the town’s port from the capital city, the air-conditioned ones. A Japanese tourist who had hopped onto a non-aircon bus in the middle of nowhere was made fun of by the local passengers; in the typical good-natured way of the Cebuanos, they called him a ‘lost stranger.’ On the island, a fan room in one of those beachfront hotels could be had for more than a thousand pesos a night. Heavy on the budget, I thought. I may have been lucky coming at a low season; the German proprietor of the Hippocampus resort reduced it to 750 pesos because the door to my veranda had a termite hole which was promptly covered by a piece of plywood. If you have done many short trips, the room at Hippocampus is what you would need: a spic-and-span bathroom with a shower that works, clean towels and white sheets with a mosquito netting over the bed, a balcony where you can relax or read a book after a swim. It has got wi-fi signal as an added treat. I allowed myself hilot by one of the local women, on a bamboo divan under the full moon on the beach, but it was not the best there is. Afterwards she led me through a maze of dwellings, to show me a local restaurant where food is three times cheaper than those on the front shore, a secret from other tourists she tells me, as if repaying me for making her earn a living for a day. My time was short and sweet, and nothing much else compelled me to stay longer. My suroy-suroy was over. I could try Bantayan island another time, to complete the islands of Cebu’s north – yet I’d hate to leave it without rating any of them an A hands down. On the way back in town, I saw at the market kiosks the newspapers’ headline: the Tourism Secretary has quit. We have not made much headway in boosting Wow Philippines. And there is no mystery to this; we can see how it can be done from our neighbors, and know that tourism is not only for the outsiders, it is for us too, with hundreds more of islands to boot. Once his traveling bus is ready, my Visayan friend will drive it to Bohol, to Leyte, to Negros, and further more. He wouldn’t have to worry about a toilet and a comfortable bed at his own rate. - YA, GMA News Illustration by ANALYN PEREZ, GMA News