Trip to Bantayan Island

Last weekend, to further celebrate our 5^th anniversary, Andrey and I traveled to a nearby island to stay at a simple cottage on the beach. We enjoyed 4 days/3 nights in what was indeed a simple beach cottage ($28 per night) that was ideally placed on what proved to be the best part of the beach. Our cottage not only faced the beach but was on the beach. It was a fantastic location. The food wasn’t the best but on the second day we discovered a very unlikely restaurant that had definitely the best foreigner food on the island. We ended up having all our remaining meals at the very rustic White Sands restaurant that was also primly located on the beach. The sign-less restaurant was totally unassuming. In fact, we almost missed it because when we came across it we couldn’t even tell it was a place of business. As it turned out, the owner, a German-French gentleman by the name of Robert, was an excellent host and made sure everything was made to order. It’s amazing how good food can bring such happiness. Perhaps it was because we set our expectations quite low after our previous meals on the island. Some of the food we enjoyed over 3 days included fresh grilled snapper, some of the best scallops we’ve ever had cooked in brandy, roasted potatoes, Italian antipasti-type salad, pizza, seafood pasta, and 2 really good American breakfasts with real coffee which is very hard to come by. Thank you Robert!

Bantayan island is just a 30 minute ferry ride northwest of the northern tip of Cebu island. Going there involved a 3 hour bus ride to the northern part of Cebu. On the way there the bus trip was great as it wasn’t crowded and traffic wasn’t bad. On the way back however, the bus was completely crammed, traffic was awful, it was hot and smelly and it took us 4 hours instead of 3 to get back into the city. We learned that since many Filipinos come to Cebu City for work, many times leaving their family to do so, many of them travel home on the weekends. That makes Sunday evening a really bad time to get back to the city. We met a woman who works 6 days a week. Each Sunday, on her only day off, she travels 3 hours on the bus each way to go home, see her family, perhaps bring them some money - only to stay for 3 hours before heading back to the city for another week of work! It’s amazing what the people here must do to earn a living and support their families. The bus trip only cost 50 pesos (about $1.10 US) each way which was great because with the money we saved on travel and on the cheap room we were able to splurge on eating good food at White Sands.

Te small town where the beach is located is called Santa Fe, which is a small friendly place with shade-lined streets. There are hardly any motorized vehicles on the roads – only a few motorbikes but mostly there are pedalcabs that are not made for big people like us. We had to really cram in to fit on our way in from the port. Mostly we just walked everywhere.

A real highlight of our time was renting bicycles and exploring other parts of the island outside of Santa Fe. We took a main road out of town about 10 km before we saw a sign to a beach resort. We turned off and after biking on some smaller dirt roads another 3 km or so we found the resort which was perfect b/c we really needed a break. We stopped and had mango shakes, french fries, and a little rest before heading back. On the return trip we decided to take a different route and ended up going through the coolest little fishing villages right in the middle of a palm tree forest. It was shady and cool and almost everyone who saw us pass greeted us (this is true of pretty much everywhere we went actually). Among the greetings were (especially yelled loudly from little kids), “Hey!” “Hello!” “Good Afternoon!” “Hey Joe!” “Hey where are you going?” “Where are you?”(our favorite) “Hi!” and there were lots of smiles and laughs. That was really fun actually. In addition to all the kind greetings of the locals we were greeted by roosters, pigs, cows, goats and I even saw rams! The rams didn’t greet us but seriously every other animal either snorted or crowed or mooed as we passed. It was wild! We were thankful that unlike Thailand, there were no wild dogs to chase us or bark at as.

Another fantastic element was the weather. It was perfect! This might not sound strange but since it is rainy season and it has been raining almost daily for the past 2-3 weeks, we were shocked to have had 4 perfectly sunny, hot days. And the beach was probably the nicest we’ve seen in the Philippines so far. We’ve been to two beaches in Cebu, one natural, one man-made and a different beach on another island and none of them were substantial enough to go for a walk for more than 5-15 minutes. But this beach was lined much of one side of the island and we were able to walk quite a ways end to end.

So our anniversary was very memorable. We plan to take any future visitors with us to experience Bantayan as well. We’ll be back.

Bus trip to Bantayan...

Road-side scenes during the bus trip...



Arriving at the ferry terminal - look at all the "trikes"
Arriving on Bantayan - taking a pedalcab to the beach cottage
This picture was taken from the deck outside our cottage - that's all that was between us and the ocean! :)
The beach cottage


White Sands restaurant during the day

White Sands restaurant at night
Kind man grilling the fresh fish we just ordered



Our twice daily walk to White Sands...

More White Sands restaurant (we were obsessed!)


Fishing village in a palm tree forest we passed through on our bike ride

Our last evening...
Road-side scenes from the bus trip back to Cebu...