The Adventures of Accordion Guy in the 21st Century

The Chocolate Hills

The Amorita Resort, where we stayed while we were in Bohol, provides its own tours and guides for its guests. Me and my family — mom, sister, bro-in-law and her kids — signed up and got a guide named Cathy and a tour van to take us around. Our first stop: the Chocolate Hills.

Bohol, with its combination of rolling hilly terrain and being an island sheltered by large islands or island groups, would be a great place to hold an Ironman triathlon. It’s got all the challenges for the athletes and for the spectators, it provides a lot of breathtaking views.

Creative Commons image courtesy of Wikipedia. Click to see the original.

It took a while — the better part of an hour — to get from the resort to the hills, but it was worth it for the view.

The Chocolate Hills set Bohol apart from just about anyplace else on Earth. They’re naturally-occurring cone- and dome-shaped hills formed by the erosion of the island’s mostly-limestone geography. They get their name from the colour they get during the Philippines’ dry season (October to May), when the sun dries their vegetation to a chocolate brown.

We’re currently a month into the wet season, so our tour guide said that right now, they’re more like the Pistachio Hills.

Between the hills are lush green valleys, like the one pictured above. To get a better view, we were taken to an observation point atop the highest hill in the valley. The staircase below took us up to the top:

From there, we got a commanding view of the surrounding hills:

Here’s a shot taken from where all those other tourists were posing for photos:

Here’s the obligatory self-portrait:

After a little looking around, it was time to head back down to the road where the van was waiting:

Before heading to our next destination, I took one last photo from road level. There was a great view of some of the hills and a lot of the surrounding greenery:

The Tarsiers

Creative Commons image courtesy of Wikipedia. Click to see the original.

Tarsiers are weird little creatures — they’re the smallest of all the primates. They’re found only on a number of Southeast Asian islands, including Borneo, Sulawesi, Sumatra and in the Philippines, where they live on the island of Bohol.

They’re tiny little monkeys with big eyes (each eye is about equal to the size of their brain). The eyes are a product of evolution and their being nocturnal. They prefer to stay in forests with small branches, as they climb only those things that they can wrap their fingers around.

They don’t move much during the day, which made it possible to get some pictures of them at their sanctuary. Of the four tarsiers we managed to see, only one was awake, but he was positioned in such a way that it was only possible to get backlit photos of him.

Loboc River Cruise

The Loboc River on a sunny day.
Creative Commons photo courtesy of Wikipedia. Click to see the original.

After the tarsier sanctuary, our next destination was the Loboc River, a slow-moving river and tourist attraction. There are as many as a dozen riverboats taking tourists up and down the river, many of which are floating restaurants. In addition to being part of our tour, it was also our lunch spot.

These boats — basically platforms mounted on two large outrigger boats and pushed by a small tug — carry about fifty passengers, not including the crew and serving staff.

Lunch is served from a buffet and is made up of classic Filipino comfort food: chicken and pork adobo, shrimp, pinakbet (a stew of vegetables including bitter melon, okra, string beans and eggplant), philippine barbecue (grilled pork kebabs), fried chicken and all sorts of tropical fruit.

This was my view from where I ate:

Once again, the obligatory self-portrait:

The boat travels about an hour upriver while the passengers eat, after which it reaches this point and turns around:

On the way back, we made a stop at this floating platform to catch a performance by a chorus of two dozen women, each one playing a ukelele, all performing pop songs that anyone from North America (or steeped in its culture) would recognize:

When we arrived, they were playing The Everly Brothers’ classic, Bye Bye Love. We hopped off the boat and onto the platform, caught a few more numbers and then continued downriver:

Seeing our boat, a number of stray dogs gathered nearby on the shore:

They’re used to getting scraps thrown to them from tourists on the boats, so they all sat at attention, waiting for their lunch. After a while, about eight or nine dogs had gathered, some scrapping with each other for the best spot on the riverbank:

Next: More beach bummin’

I am now living in a beer commercial. Those are my feet in the photo above, and just past them are the sands and waters of Alona Beach on the island of Panglao, a satellite island of another island named Bohol, which in turn is one of the islands in the Visayas region of the country where I was born: the Philippines. In the distance are catamarans which take tourists farther out to sea to visit some of the neighbouring islands or go snorkelling, scuba diving or dolphin watching. Above me is the welcome shade provided by palm trees. To my right and out of the shot are a couple of ice-cold cans of San Miguel beer.

The view above is the fulfillment of a promise I made to myself when my view was the one below:

This view is from “my hospital week”, when I spent in the ICU shortly after getting separated (“dying of a broken heart” is no longer an abstract concept, as far as I’m concerned). Fever-induced delirium — and hey, I’ll admit it, fear also played a role — makes you do things you normally wouldn’t, and I remember putting together a mental list of things that I would do if I got out of the hospital alive. If you noticed that I’ve been living larger than usual over the past several months, you now know why.

One of the items on the list was to visit the Philippines and go to a beach there with my family. My prior situation was such that I’d made peace with the fact that I’d never see the homeland again, but after twelve years, I’m back.

I stayed at Amorita Resort, which is located atop a cliff on one end of Alona Beach. The photo above shows a view of the beach from the resort.

The photo below was taken from the same vantage point, just with the camera panned slightly to the right:

The months of June through September are the lean season for this area; June is the start of the wet season as well as the school year here, so there’s elbow room aplenty. For every occupied lounge chair on the beach (which are mere steps from the water, yet quite well-covered with shade), there were two free ones.

There were more boats moored offshore than there were people swimming. It was probably as close as I was going to get to Oracle CEO Larry Ellison’s private beach setup (he just bought most of the Hawaiian island of Lanai).

I took the photo above from the same lounge chair where I took the first photo for this article. Amorita Resort is at the top of that small cliff.

As you walk farther down the beach, you’ll see all manner of places to eat. Most of them are cheap, cheerful and locally owned — no chains like McDonald’s here — serving a mix of Filipino food as well as half-decent approximations of “foreign” food. A couple of places are owned by expats who married Filipinas, moved here and set up shop, so there’s a place that bills itself as a bierstube as well as a joint run by a French guy who includes crepes suzette and coupe denmark (which is really just a French fancypants way of saying “chocolate sundae”) on his menu.

If dining on sand and patio furniture is too much like roughing it for you, there are other places on the beach that might be more to your liking.

Sunset happens more quickly as you get closer to the equator, and the effect is kind of magical. It’s even more so on the beach.

At night, the restaurants turn on the lights and the beach becomes a patio party.

We had dinner at one of those cheap-and-cheerful places on the beach. This one has plenty of freshly-caught fish on display; you could point at one and they’d happily grill it for you. I picked out a red snapper and fifteen minutes later, it came to me simply and perfectly grilled with a bowl of a soy sauce/fish sauce/chopped tomato/chopped onion mixture and a heap of garlic fried rice on the side.

This was my view at dinner:

All in all, a very nice Tuesday.