F&G: Cebu weekend

31 October 2012

Cebu Weekend

While no match to Sandy, we were worried Thursday evening that the heavy rains from tropical storm Ofel would impede our weekend trip to visit Fritz’s old college roommate, Hui. Hui had a long weekend off from her job in Singapore and flew over to meet us near Cebu. We stayed at Talima on Olango Island, a 20 minute boat ride from Mactan Island, home to Cebu’s airport. Despite Talima’s good service and beautiful view, we were a bit disappointed at its isolation and lack of walking opportunities.

We had a friend working in Cebu for the week and decided to spend Saturday exploring the city with her. We met our friend, Ging, in late morning near an office park and she asked us if we wanted to explore Cebu as tourists or locals. We opted for the locals’ tour and followed her lead for the rest of the day. We began with an inasal barbeque lunch. (Cebu is known for having better food than Manila.) Inasal refers to the sauce used to marinate and grill bamboo skewers of fresh meat. We selected our desired partially-cooked cuts of meat—four chicken legs and a fish—and returned to our table while the cooks gave the skewered food a second grilling. Ging also ordered us a plate of puso—fist-sized portions of steamed rice cooked in woven strips of palm leaves—and a delicious bowl of beef and leek soup. Our waitress brought over our order of bright red, perfectly charred chicken and fish and we dug in…definitely the tastiest meat we’ve had in the Philippines. While we still gushing over our delicious lunch, Ging led us a kilometer up the road to Fudge, a gourmet dessert shop, to cap off the meal.

Sufficiently satiated and completely trusting Ging, we hopped on the backs of two motorcycles. Before we realized what we had gotten into, Fritz and I were hugging our motorcycle driver closely as we curved up the side of a mountain through the coolest air we’ve felt since our arrival. After twenty minutes we hopped of our motos and walked through an entrance straight out of The Hobbit to see a breathtaking view of Cebu, Mactan, and Olango islands along with the silhouettes of other provinces. We waited for a brief shower to pass over before riding on the motos back down the mountains to catch our boat on Mactan back to Olango. We boarded our Olango-bound Bangka a little after 5pm and soon into our ride we were caught in the middle of windy rainstorm. We could no longer see Olango and the sun had almost set for the day, but the storm moved through quickly and we safely made it back to Talima for the night.

We had another tasty dinner at Talima: green mongo bean and coconut milk soup with ginger. We’re still asking around for a local recipe to replicate. Sunday morning we set out on tricycle for bird watching at Olango Island Wildlife Sanctuary. Our guide, Socrates, was a wealth of information and helped us identify 18 different species of birds, including the very rare Asian Dowitcher and Chinese Egret. Here are the various birds we saw:

Asian Dowitcher (think we saw 9 of these)

Little Egret

Whimbrel

Far Eastern Curlew

Common Redshank

Common Greenshank

Bar Tailed Godwit

Great Knot

Chinese Egret (saw two of these running around and feeding, really fun to watch since they basically were dancing around the sand)

Gullbilled Tern

Common Tern

Rufous Necked Stint

Mongolian Plover

White Collared Kingfisher

Pacific Swallow

Ruddy Turnston

Grey Plover

Rufous Night Heron (there was one of these that hung out near the main building and was pretty much tame)

When we walked out along the path around 9am as high tide was coming in, all of the stones were above water. When we returned two hours later, all but the first few were submerged. As impressed as we were at watching the tide come in, it seems so insignificant now after watching Sandy’s destruction.

We packed up in early afternoon to return to Cebu’s airport and were home around 9pm Sunday evening—another busy yet worthwhile weekend.