Thank you Dumaguete for a wonderful vacation!

Thank you Dumaguete for a wonderful vacation!

We were supposed to meet up with Mike Feeney (expat proprietor of a local dive shop) at the airport at 8:30am and then proceed directly to Apo Island, he was nice enough to offer that extra bit of service so we could get the most out of our vacation. Because of a delayed Cebu Pacific flight from Manila, he had to proceed to Apo Island but without us. We arrived at Dumaguete 2 hours later, checked in at the hotel and got connected with Dive Works instead.

It was already 2pm and we really wanted to get wet so we went to DuCoMi's Pier. (DuCoMi is short for Dumaguete Coconut Mill, a big operation for coconut based products) Wonderful dive site! We parked right beside the beach, got dressed there, dragged our tanks out and at 3pm we made a shore entry. It was initially sandy/mucky and basically barren unless you knew where to look, until we got a little deeper and things started becomming more interesting. When we got to the pier, it was almost surreal! Every pillar is encrusted with soft corals and stuff. There was a sea fan that grew wide enough to reach from one pillar to the other, probably two meters, underneath the pier. We were dragging our tanks out to the water again by 5pm. We were told there are plenty of frogfish down there but we didn't see any on our two afternoon dives. But we did see so much more that we haven't seen anywhere else that we forgot about the frogfish. Click here for pictures of our dive. Everyone has seen corals and coral beds and reef fish and all that, but not everyone has been underneath a pier, and Ducomi's Pier is one dive you need to do when you're in Dumaguete!

We stayed at Hotel Palwa, thanks to Rhoody for the recommendation, and we weren't disappointed. It's clean, well staffed, has amenities, and is in the middle of the city. Wifi speed is decent, and the food is good. We'd stay there again when we come back (note that I used "when" and not "if".)

We went diving at Apo Island on Sunday and Monday. I have to say it is the biggest concentration of corals I've ever been to. They were in every place of every dive we did out there. We went to a coral garden, we went to a coral wall, we went to a coral canyon (yes it looked like a mini canyon with cliffs and a valleys and it's huge), I think we even got lost! We chased a couple of turtles who were trying to get cleaned (but they were not harmed in any way), we pulled at the tail of a banded sea snake, we watched fish swimming in schools and other fish just playing hokey. (This isn't enough to describe the beauty that we saw out there. Maybe a couple more pages for a full blown magazine article... Link to pictures from Apo to follow...)

Our last dive on Monday afternoon was at Masaplod North dive site, another marine sanctuary at Dauin where we saw a bed of garden snakes, various rays and other bottom crawling critters, surprisingly diverse anemone, and got chased by a pair of trigger fish. All that and more from another shore entry dive where the farthest we got from the beach was maybe 30 meters out and 15 meters down! Click here for more pictures from the Masaplod North dive site.

We rented a scooter for cheap and just drove around the city on Tuesday. We ate at San Rival Bakeshop and ended up taking home 10 boxes of their SansRival cakes back to Manila. Once in Manila, we realized we should have packed much more! We also went up to Valencia and walked around Forest Camp, a beautiful place stradling a fast flowing fresh-water stream.

We met up with friends whom we haven't seen in years, and basically fell in love with Dumaguete and the lifestyle and the people and their pace that we started asking for prices on housing and possible business opportunities!

It's been more than a month since we arrived, we haven't paid off all the creditcard bills that we accumulated but we're already planning for our return trip, hopefully that happens this December. I'd like to see how Christmas is like in that gentle city.