Wow, nice bicycle touring on Bohol. At times we were on main roads with too much traffic, and at times the roads were in pretty poor condition. But overall I wondered if Bohol didn’t have the most “best views/km” of anywhere we visited in the Philippines. And certainly those kms involved considerably less effort than what Jeff and I were doing in the cordillera.
We arrived late in Tagbilaran on the ferry from Larena, Siquijor, and the next morning ran into Jon and Tarikak (?) from Salt Lake City on their new foldable Bromptons.
That’s the same day we visited the tarsiers at the sanctuary about 3km east of Corella. They’re among the world’s smallest primate — about the size of my fist — and are found in Sumatra and Sulawesi as well though I didn’t see them on either of those (huge) islands.
Their large eyes and foot pads make them kind of cute. The volume of one eye is bigger than that of their stomach or their brain.
Not sure if there was accommodation in Sevilla, we headed to Loboc instead.
Our next wildlife encounters were during a night safari in Rajah Sikatuna Protected Landscape near Bilar. The star, I guess, is the “flying lemur” which isn’t a lemur (they’re colugos) and doesn’t fly (they glide). In the evening light we did see them gliding from tree to tree. It wasn’t terribly exciting. The two guides (both women) were most excited when we found a horned toad.
I thought the stick bugs (phasmids?) were kind of cool.
There was a tokay gecko (Gekko gecko) in the dining room where we were staying.
Jeff, Ferda, and I spent our last day riding together with some wonderful scenery in the forested Bilar Hills and the not-forested Chocolate Hills.
From that viewpoint Jeff rode NW to Tubigon to get a ferry to Cebu and a flight to Denver. Ferda and I went SE to Sierra Bullones via Nueva Vida Este and more fantastic scenery.
We started with more of these strange hill formations,
made a short detour in Nueva Vida Este to get lunch from friendly women,
and got into terraced rice field scenery as we made our way slowly to Sierra Bullones.
Wow, that was beautiful and unexpected. It’s between the very touristy Chocolate Hills and also very touristy Cadapdapan rice terraces (the following day for us) but seems to be completely off the tourist radar. The biggest town nearby is Sierra Bullones, located on a main road, but we had to ask around quite a bit before we found accommodation — in a comfortable room above the Barangay Hall (municipal government building).
The stunning scenery continued the next day as we pedaled NE to Alicia.
This road through Inaghuban is not the route that most tourists use to access Cadapdapan.
The (now famous?) Cadapdapan rice terraces:
and nearby Can-Umantad Falls where we enjoyed talking with the ticket seller who spent nine years working in Saudi Arabia and saved enough money to build himself a house on Bohol:
Here’s the view from the restaurant where we enjoyed lunch, the shade, and the (almost too) cool breeze:
After lunch we again took a different route from most tourists and again happened upon more unexpected nice scenery.
Is it roads like this that keep the tourists away?
As in Sierra Bullones there aren’t a lot of places to stay in Alicia. We found a place, had to wait about an hour for the owner to show up, and then the water wasn’t working. In the meantime (before we could shower) we rode to the fanciest restaurant in town and ordered pork sisig, rice, two pizzas, and a large bowl of soup. We had been quite hungry after a long day of not so easy riding, but that did the trick!
The next day, our last on Bohol, we had a casual morning, and then a nail found my tire on the outskirts of San Pascual.
We hadn’t been able to learn the ferry schedule ahead of time so we felt really lucky to arrive in Ubay just in time for the 1pm ferry. The next one wasn’t till 6pm.
Another ferry, another island, on to Leyte.
