bohol: tricycle tour

yesterday lauren and i set out at 6am on an adventure to bohol. at the dock you go through security to check your bags, then purchase your ticket, then go through more security and get patted down, then let drug dogs sniff your bags, then pose while they take a mug shot (not joking), then finally you are safe to go to the waiting area once two other people have checked your ticket at separate gates. i have never felt more safe (or unsafe? wondering why exactly they need so much security). It is a one hour and 45 minute ferry ride to bohol, on a boat called "supercat". we sat in first class - apparently all they had available - which basically means you're on the upper level and you get crackers and peanuts (woohoo). the ride starts out with a prayer for a safe journey, which I found pretty hilarious because it is broadcast on the tv with wave sounds as the background noise. they played a terrible movie while we were in route, which the passengers really enjoyed. i was entertained by the flying fish that would leap from the water, startled by the boat, and glide impressively far distances away from the supercat. during parts of the trip i watched fishermen, far out to sea, in little wooden boats... at other times we would pass through areas where the current had brought tons of garbage together, and i would stare shocked at the plastic trash swirling in our wake - terrible... we passed plenty of islands on our way to bohol, many of which appeared uninhabited, and one that was distinctly similar a shot of the island from LOST - Lo and I both took a moment to appreciate that :)

when you deboard (is that proper boat lingo?) the supercat and walk along the dock, there are kids and adults and babies in little wooden boats on either side of the dock begging for money. almost all of them are completely naked, and they look sickly and sad (usually light hair is a telltale sign of malnutrition, or the distended stomachs that can be so deceiving to those uneducated about the effects of starvation). just another day in a developing country.

we quickly found a tricycle we could hire for our day of tourism on bohol.

http://img1.photographersdirect.com/img/8719/wm/pd1574057.jpg

that is a link to a picture of a tricycle. it is a motorcycle attached to a covered side car... that picture is literally almost exactly what ours looked like. pretty funny. All of them have religious words painted on the back, such as "Jesus is Lord", I mean all of them. Ours only broke down once (our driver gassed it and the engine reved rather than accelerating and I said "our chain came off" and Lo said "is that common?!" and sure enough, he made us get out while he put the chain back on the bike, we were on the road again within minutes). they are very loud and pretty stinky, but such an authentic Philippine experience we couldn't pass it up. I'm not going to say he was a safe driver... in fact, he was often texting while driving/passing cars and motorcycles. But Lo and I only covered our faces and braced in anticipation of a crash a handful of times, so I'd say it was pretty successful considering we rode that tricycle for at least 4 hours. one other thing about our driver, besides being a nice guy, was that he was constantly sneezing/coughing/hacking up loogies... haha, umm, over share? maybe. Lo and I are just hoping it was allergies, but something tells us our tour guide had TB. We even tried to inquire about his "cold" asking him, I think his name was Glen, if he gets sick often - which he said he does. great. good thing we have immune systems! Tuberculosis is so common here, I'm sure we've encountered out fair share of it already.

ok, back to the tour. our final destination was the chocolate hills. we started off in the downtown area (aka the shakes are more tightly packed together), and as the kilometers ticked by the towns became less frequent and the road began to meander along a river. without warning our driver stopped, several other cars were parked in the same area, and instructed us to get out. at this little roadside tourist attraction on the bank of the river they have captive Tarsiers - one of the smallest primates on earth. They look like bug eyed little balls of fluff, with long, rat-like tails. they cling to branches in open cages and visitors can get very close and take pictures (no flash) and feed them bugs for a donation - we video taped that as true tourists would.
http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1081/1232072359_6ec67b9537_m.jpg
there's a picture to give you an idea until i have the opportunity to post my pics :)

there was another enclosure that held what looked like lemurs at first, but then when they stretched out they had webbed skin between their limbs and looked more like big flying squirrels... turns out there is such thing as a flying lemur found on some of the islands in the philippines:

http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/126883/flying-lemur

i hope these links work. anyway, there were three of them in a little cage, so sad. I couldn't really handle this part of the tour. there were also two small monkeys in a really tiny cage, they were adorable, and some lady was feeding them grapes and they were going wild to get a grape. It was really sad...

So, after making a donation that I hope goes to the animals (though I doubt it), we climbed back in the tricycle and continued on our way to the chocolate hills. We eventually entered a forest of really tall trees and virtually no undergrowth. compared to the jungle-like forest where many of the villages are built, this seemed so open, and similar, Lo and I agreed, to some of the forests in the santa cruz mountains... once we made it up through that forest the landscape opened up into big fields of rice patties, dotted with the occasional water buffalo (which was always accompanied by one or two while cranes). We even saw men out farming, with one of the water buffaloes tied to a plow... looked like they're from a different time period. talk about slow going! It was really beautiful though, even when it started raining... they don't call it a rain forest for nothin'!!

finally reached the chocolate hills, at which point you have to hike up hundreds of stairs to get to where you have a 360 degree view of the chocolate hills. They are difficult to describe so I'll pull up a picture:
http://x75.xanga.com/6ccc2be727030179021154/z136647627.jpg

basically, they are all a similar, round shape, treeless and close together. there are over a thousand of them according to our tour guy (I think he was more of a tour guy than a tour guide... to me, there is a difference). They were formed from coral/shell deposits and erosion. Lo and I are still trying to work out the details of this formation since the information board was very poorly written and the english didn't make much sense. it's my next research project. It was funny because there are tons of "professional" photographers who sit up there and take your picture with the chocolate hills, but they don't use the real chocolate hills, they have a backdrop set up - we found this odd. but they do really funny photos of people jumping with a broom between their legs so it looks like they're flying on a broomstick over the chocolate hills. Lo and I did our own version where we are the licking the chocolate hills (we used the real ones, since they are right there and all), so silly... i was a little disappointed there wasn't chocolate available at the chocolate hills, but we did get ice cream bars (little round chunk of mystery sweet flavored ice cream on stick), always delicious :)

Having reached our destination it was now time for our tour guy to bring us to the bohol beach club, the best resort in bohol apparently. unfortunately we ran into a complication along the way... it started off with a random guy on the side of the road flagging down our driver, who stopped and proceeded to yell over his should in Bisaya to the man for several minutes. when he finally started up the bike and continued driving, Lo and I noticed that he was creeping along at a painfully slow speed, especially in contrast to haste he had made during the rest of our trip. I think we were particularly annoyed by this because we both had to pee, but also because we didn't know what was going on. Lo attempted to ask, and we eventually deciphered that there were police up ahead and his car was the wrong size (i think he was saying something else, but we kept hearing wrong size), and there is a penalty. During the whole trip, our driver honked whenever we went around a corner - i think for safety, since most of the roads had signs warning about the high risk driving - and also, whenever we passed oncoming traffic - i think this was just to be annoying. Now that he had the warning about police ahead, every once in a while he would honk extra and the oncoming car would slow... our driver would yell something at them, and they'd yell back, then he'd keep coasting along. finally, he pulled over, justifying the stop with "i have to pee" - ah, to be a dude and be able to pee so easily on the side of the road. Lo and I got out to stretch our legs and explore a muddy dirt road leading into the jungle. then, just as we were heading back to the tricycle, our driver yelled something at a passing car, listened to the short response, and then broke into a sprint for his bike yelling for us to follow. we were both smushed haphazardly in the side car (it wasn't exactly spacious) and zooming down the road before we had figured out that the police must be gone and we were racing to get past the check point without a "penalty" (a fee). interesting adventure. We made it without a run in with the cops and were finally dropped at the bohol beach club.

the rest of the day was good food, swimming in the ocean and the pool, then finally, back to the tricycle (yes, he waited for us) to drive to the dock just as it was getting dark out, and head back to Cebu. It was an exhausting day, but a wonderful adventure!!