17 – Bohol

My good friend Marj turned 33 on Friday 28th November. Aruna, Alison and I decided a few weeks ago that we should do something special for this beautiful girl who had helped us so much and become a really good friend to all of us. She works so hard, hadn’t had a holiday in ages and she’d never been to Bohol, 2 islands south of Negros, so we planned to take her there for a long weekend. When we told her our intensions a couple of weeks before, the expression on her face was priceless! And it all went without a hitch … (until the last day that is).

A former AYAD, Scott, who had been assigned in Bohol had recently returned and established a tour company in conjunction with a Filipino friend. So we contacted him and he planned our entire trip making sure we got to see the typical tourist attractions of the island as well as some of the not so well known places that he had discovered himself.

We left on Friday and flew to Cebu, the island between Negros and Bohol. We were met by Marj’s brother who lives there. They hadn’t seen each other for several months. He treated us all to lunch for his sister’s birthday before dropping us at the port to catch the ferry to Bohol. Scott met us off the ferry and had a green jeep and driver waiting to take us up into the hills where we spent the first night in Nuts Huts overlooking the Loboc River. He came back for us in the morning and we had a whole day of touring taking in the chocolate hills, the butterfly farm, a picnic by the river, the bamboo suspension bridge and the tarsier sanctuary. The pictures tell the story! And stay tuned for a movie Alison is planning to make and post on youtube.

As the sun was setting we were dropped at Alona beach and we checked into our bamboo cottages for 2 nights and booked a snorkelling trip for the following day. Then we settled back for some great seafood and cocktails on the beach!
The snorkelling was excellent. We dived off the side of the pumpboat into the flat crystal clear waters teaming with tropical fish and colourful corals.
Sunshine, seafood, mango shakes, fun and friends … we didn’t really want to leave. We were returning on Monday, a public holiday, by a different route – early morning ferry from Bohol to the bottom of Negros then 6 hr bus from Dumaguete to Bacolod. Alison and I had a meeting on the Wednesday in a town actually closer to Dumaguete than Bacolod and we were toying with the idea of just meeting them there so we could stay an extra day! But we thought we better not … and then …

We discovered that the 1 ATM in town had run out of cash. We didn’t have enough between us to settle the bill for our accommodation and they didn’t accept credit card. Despite Monday being a public holiday we were advised that the ATM should be restocked by lunchtime. So there was nothing for it, Alison and I would stay behind, fix up the bill in the afternoon, get the evening ferry instead, stay the night in Dumaguette and arrange to meet up with our colleagues at the Wednesday meeting.

In the end it was a blessing in disguise because it meant we could spend an extra day lazing on the beach, catch up with the AYADs in Dumaguette and also see a bit of what GK is doing in Dumaguette. The volunteers from the GK office in Dumaguette took us to see 4 of their 7 villages. The first one they showed us, which was built in 2003 using fibre cement sheeting and coconut timber framing, was in the process of being rebuilt with hollow block construction as there was a termite problem and they’d also found the sheeting had not been durable enough to resist impact. I found it very worthwhile to see and hear the lessons they’ve learned and meanwhile Alison was able to talk to the residents about the progress of their health programs.

The purpose of our Wednesday meeting in Bayowan was to inspect a reed bed water treatment facility that has been installed in the GK village there in partnership with a German water engineering company. We are keen to implement something similar in one of the villages on our side of the island. We stayed in Bayowan overnight. Our long drive back to Bacolod on Thursday was broken by a few side trips to inspect GK villages and one to inspect a propsed new site. A lady who owns a small island just off the coast wanted to donate the island to GK to build a village for the poor fishing families. On inspection we soon determined it was not going to be feasible to transport construction materials to this island, let alone the social ethics of putting a whole community on an isolated island and the environmental ethics of constructing a whole community on a pristine island. Through further discussions we ascertained that our donor happened to have a good relationship with the families that owned the land closer to the highway and would discuss with them the possibility of swapping her island for some of their land which would be a more appropriate location for a GK village.

I was eventually back in my apartment at 8.30pm Thursday evening - one week after I left for a weekend only to be gone for a week … but what a good week!