After a transit day in the port city of Dumaguete, that had a surprisingly nice seaside boulevard with a walking path and night time illumination by old fashioned street lamps, I got in the ferry to Bohol, home of the chocolate mountains, tarsiers and a large jungle area unique in the Cebu region.
Straight of the boat, the obvious choice is to head for Alona beach on Panglao island attached to Bohol by a bridge. Only downside was that this touristy place would be crawling with everything I wanted to avoid. So my original plan was to head inland immediately and then later to the more remote east coast of Bohol and Anda beach. But the night before leaving I had a chat with Simon from SiDive and he truly recommended the diving originating from Alona beach. So I trusted his advice and jumped in a tricycle towards Panglao arriving late at Beach Rock resort as recommended by Chano, whom I met on Apo island.
Going for a pizza on the beach my fears were reassured. People were dragging me left and right trying to sell me stuff, the pizza was half the size of the one I got in Moalboal at twice the cost. Only highlight was the Paulaner Dunkel Weissbier that came with it! But I didn't come here for that so I was up early next morning looking for a dive shop out of the 30 operating in Alona beach.. To my luck the most affordable and with decent equipment seemed to be the Mr Divers located right next door so I booked 3 dives and sailed off towards Balicasag island.
I ended up having my own personal dive master, which was great! For those of you that haven't experience diving before I will try to describe it a little bit. Dives here in the Philippines are mostly done at reefs close to the coast. So far I have experiences reefs that just stretches along the bottom often at a shallow dept, then there are slope dives where you start shallow and then follow the bottom down. Then there are wall dives, which are basically just that, a wall going straight down that houses corals and fish. On such a dive you will normally stay at a certain dept and them just travel along the wall. These kind of dives can then be combined with weak or strong currents turning it into a drift dive, that can range from just giving you a little bit of extra momentum to simply just hanging in there and doing drive by photography!
While you are down there your dive master makes sure you stay with your designated dept, stay on course and regularly makes you check your air. But on addition to this he is also you guide, knowing the reef like his own home, spotting and pointing out anything from turtles hiding in the corals to tiny sea slugs. And the end of your dive you will most often do a safety stop for 5 mins at 5 meters dept, to make sure you haven't ascended too fast and give expanding bubbles of air in your body time to leave it. This safety stop is also the perfect time to play around and use your last air, and very often you will see dive masters showing off a little bit making expanding air rings going to the surface or shoot air rings horizontally through clouds of bubbles. Quite cool and tricky to do.
After the first two dives I was very impressed by the amount of life down there, beautiful corals, fish everywhere and walls that just begged for being explored, so I decided to take an extra half day and postpone one dive for tomorrow to make it a total of 4 dives at Balicasag island. So next day I checked out, dropped my bag at the dive shop and went on the boat. This time there was only me and 3 Chinese girls trying diving for the first time so I again had my own dive master, same guy as yesterday, so we were playing around having fun and he started teaching me how to shot air rings. Managed to get the technique right, now I just need lots of practice.
After I came back from diving I jumped in a private car to save some time and get to the interior jungle of Bohol before nightfall..
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