You know you’ve been traveling too long when you step on a plane without looking at practically any details aside the destination. On our way to the Philippines from Malaysia, we thought the flight was 1 hour maximum. Almost 4 hours later we landed in the island of Cebu! It seemed closer in our minds…

From Cebu we travelled onward directly to the island of Bohol, a two hour ferry away. Bohol is a beautiful island famous principally for the tarsier, an animal in danger of extinction, and the Chocolate Hills. We discovered that aside this, Bohol is a truly wonderful island, rich with exotic nature (or at least for us!).

We rented a motorbike to explore part of the island, as well as stop at the infamous tourist attractions. We ended up spending 8 hours touring around, the majority of this actually on the motorbike driving. Actually, the island is much bigger than you think, and the distances were quite far with of course the roads not all being smooth cruising.

One of the smallest primates in the world, the tarsier was a very interesting creature to see. It is in risk of extinction, and only found on a few islands of the Philippines as well as neighboring Borneo. The animal is very small and territorial, needing an immense amount of space to itself especially given its size. It eats primarily other insects, hunting at night and sleeping during daytime. We visited the tarsier sanctuary, where they are left in their natural habitat, and we were brought through a small piece of jungle where we spotted 3. Of course they could not be touched, in fact, they are easily stressed out by direct human contact, especially if caged, and are known to commit suicide due to these situations. They are the strangest looking little things, a mixture of alien, Ewok, rat, bat, and who knows what else… The producers of E.T. and Star Wars most definitely inspired themselves with the tarsier!

On our way to the Chocolate Hills, we were flagged down at a local village by some friendly families who were celebrating a school graduation. They invited us to see how a Filipino graduation is, as well as take some pictures with the lovely graduates! After a quick stop, they recommended us a very authentic back-road to take us to our destination, and this is when the true road trip started – three hours of practically all off-roading through spectacular scenery, it was fantastic.

We drove through such diverse landscapes that were all beautifully maintained. Starting with the explosion of natural palm trees that decorated practically everything, to the rice terraces surrounded by lush green hills, the beautiful emerald Loboc River, colorful Filipino houses, and what they call the “man-made” forest, filled with extremely tall and thin trees. As we were driving, we left behind towns with names that sounded very familiar to us, inhabited by very friendly people. That was the case of Sevilla, Valencia, Pilar, Corella, and so on…. Who knew we could be so close to home so far away :-).

Finally we arrived to the Chocolate Hills, probably the most iconic tourist attraction of Bohol, and in our opinion rightfully so. The legend says that they are calcified tears of a giant whose heart was broken after the death of a lover. His tears created these perfectly round shaped hills, that in the dry season are a chocolate brown color, creating sort of an Alice in Wonderland landscape (to Josep, they seemd like the hills of the Penguin Village from the Arale cartoons…!). It really seemed as if we were in a fairy tale.

Before leaving Bohol, we made sure to visit Alona Beach in Panglao which is a tiny island connected by a small bridge to the island of Bohol. Alona is known for its white sand and crystal waters. However, as the weather was also not playing in our favor, our conclusion was that although being nice, it did not have anything particularly special, so staying longer didn’t make sense.

So guess what… yes! we decided to head off to the next island, a place known for its marine conservation that you will find out in our next post..