Author: Francesco Riscica
In the summer of 2004, my partner, with whom I share a passion for scuba diving, and I decided to go to the Philippines, an archipelago in Southeast Asia made up of more than 7000 islands.
Although the weather isn't ideal, we opt for two islands that, from my personal research, appear magnificent for their colorful seabeds and the variety and abundance of marine life. Our final destination will be the islands of Cebu and Bohol.
After an interminable journey from Rome to Milan, then Doha, Qatar, and a stopover in Singapore, we landed in Cebu.
The town, or what little we managed to see, is very hospitable, although one quickly realizes the poverty the population lives in. After landing, we embark on a journey within a journey, boarding a car that will take us, after a three-hour drive covering about 80 kilometers, to our first destination, Moal-Boal, at the Sampaguita Resort.
Here, after a grueling journey lasting more than 24 hours, a delicious dinner awaits us, accompanied by a table full of divers, contemplating the photos they'd taken that afternoon. The spot is a popular spot among macro photography enthusiasts, and we too enjoy it, trying to bring home some magnificent memories of our dives.
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Unfortunately, the weather isn't on our side, and the days offer only a few hours of sunshine. The sea isn't calm, but our desire for nitrogen fuel pushes us to dive frequently. Visibility isn't the best, especially since the water appears green, due to the filtering effect of the top 30 meters of water, which are teeming with plankton.
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In these areas, boats called bangkas are used for transportation. The dive center owns two, built according to Filipino maritime tradition, with long, streamlined keels and shallow drafts for safe access to the coral reefs. They also feature characteristic lateral stabilizers that give them their gull-wing shape.
All dives are on wall dives, and the beauty of the seabed is astonishing. The walls are teeming with anemones of every color, some of truly remarkable size. Soft corals and hard corals add an unimaginable amount of color to the walls, and the seabed is teeming with fauna, from frogfish to scorpionfish, from coral groupers to parrotfish.
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Truly stunning walls, “vertical gardens” that plunge up to 50 meters and more, disappearing into the deepest blue.
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The walls are truly remarkable, and even though the bad weather doesn't encourage us, we don't miss any dives. Pescador Island, the kingdom of pelagic fish, certainly deserves special mention, even though we saw plenty of them when we were there. A small island lost in the middle of the sea, full of caves and ravines, just 30 minutes from the coast, it's the most beautiful dive site in the area.
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After about a week of stay, we move towards Bohol, the second island planned for our trip, the
We're not too disappointed by this, considering the still terrible weather conditions, and we hope to find better weather in our new destination.
We get back in the car, and after a journey of about 2 and a half hours, we arrive on the southeast coast of the island of Cebu, from where we take a ferry that will take us, in about 2 hours of sailing, to the island of Bohol.
The weather is already improving, and we relax while waiting to reach land. They pick us up at the port, and after about a 30-minute drive, we arrive at Panglao, home to the Ananyana, a truly fantastic resort, entirely in Japanese style, very comfortable, and boasting a vast, white-sand beach.
The place is truly beautiful and the weather has also improved significantly, giving us, in the following days, entire days of sunshine and calm seas.
The diving center is well organized, and the dives are truly remarkable. Perhaps the wall is less colorful than the first site, but the visibility is significantly improved, and the spectacle that presents itself to us with each dive is truly astonishing.
The boats here are also local, and I must say they handle the sea very well. The dive masters compete to show us multicolored nudibranchs, boxfish, ghost pipefish, and everything else this sea has to offer, as it is rich in a wide variety of marine flora and fauna.
Here too we must mention a dive site above the others, a remote island in the open sea, about an hour from the resort, called Balicasag.
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Here we are lucky enough to encounter Chevrolet barracudas, truly remarkable in size, and the spectacle of the colors on the walls leaves us speechless.
At the resort, comfort is truly at home, and the weather allows us to take a trip inland on the no-fly day, to the Chocolate Hill area, where there is a rare natural spectacle.
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Indeed, the area is covered with hundreds of hills shaped like panettone, a trip well worth the two-hour drive, allowing us to see part of the island's natural beauty. A special mention goes to the Filipinos, a population always smiling and kind, even when their conditions of absolute poverty would lead the traveler to believe otherwise.
Reproduction of the text and photos in this article, even partial, is strictly prohibited without the author's consent.
