december in the philippines will brighten your life with the most ugly-creative christmas trees and multi lingual carol-medleys. both form a stark contrast to the serenity and beauty of philippines' underwater world. once again i was absolutely amazed by what i saw, but before we dive into the sea lets just start in the air. mario and i flew with cebu pacific from singapore to cebu, jumped into a taxi to the bus station and took the first bus to moalboal before the sun was up, which meant that we arrived at the other end of the island around 9am, then checked out every single resort before settling for a beautiful bungalow in the first place we had seen ;) well you never know what might be at the other end of town...

actually moalboal is not much of a town, it used to be a fishing village and is now jam packed with resorts and dive schools. there is no beach in town, but people come here to dive at the house reef and pescara island offshore, and to be honest one can easily spend a week here and not miss the beach for one second, because between the amazing dive sites, and the nice little local restaurants with the obligatory sunset san miguel there is enough to keep the heart content. and after i had brought enough coffee bags to see me through the trip the instant coffee did not bother me at all, on accounts of it NOT landing in my stomach :D

yet one week in moalboal seemed enough, and so mario and i decided to swap location and because the philippines has rather a lot of islands to offer, 7107 to be precise, we decided to island hop as well and went from cebu to negros, to damaguete or dauin to be more precise. here we came, saw, and were shocked, as the prices were nearing twice what we had paid in moalboal. that was no good, but with a bit of compromise in quality of accommodation, a trip to the local market to buy food, and free access to the resort kitchen meant that we ended up sleeping expensive, but cooking our own food and thus made up for it. when it comes to the diving things were different, they were the for me rather typical veni vidi vici material, i came to see mimic octopus and saw the even rarer, but similar looking wonder octopus on my first dive in the black sands of the dauin shores, while a daytrip to the nearby apo island was colourful-fish-gallore ;)

in short travelling in the philippines is wonderful because every single of the islands is so distinctively different from the next, and this goes for landscape as well as people. and while the food is not as great as in thailand or laos, the spirited personality of the filipinos makes up for the lack in culinary diversity, and even for the ever present instant coffee. and bundle that with the most beautiful underwater world and seeing large whitetip reefsharks, seasnakes, wonder octopus, razorfish, flounders, leaf scorpionfish, green turtles, hawkbill turtles, ... but what am i jabbering on here, just go and see the video that says more than a million words ;)