where we visit the ancient cities of Kalabantia, Pydnai, Letoon, Xanthos and Patara.
A multi-day trek on the Likya Yolu, finally! We walked over the busy Ramadan holiday when Gülizar — the motivation behind this adventure — had time off work. People come from all the world to walk this trail, and even with the crowds I was impressed on the first day — beautiful Mediterranean and mountain views.
When I was complaining about the high cost of flight tickets from Cebu back to Turkey, Alex, a young student from Qingdao (he’s now studying in PEI), asked me if I had looked at China Eastern Airlines. He was thinking of visiting a friend in İstanbul and said their prices seemed reasonable. Indeed it was about half the price of other tickets, and they even let you pay for the bicycles at the same time. Why hadn’t that come up in my searches? Check-in at the airport in Cebu went very smoothly, and our luggage went straight through to İstanbul.
China gives 24-hour visas on arrival so an 18-hour layover sounded fun. We arrived in Shanghai at about 7am after the short red-eye flight. The only place we could find to get money at the Shanghai airport was an overpriced ATM (flat 35 cny fee). We brought lots of warm clothes with us but left a heavy carry-on at the left luggage at the airport. Next was a cheap (18 cny/person) 24-hour metro pass — not available from the machines, but the guard at the turnstyles sold them and spoke enough English to make it easy for us. Woohoo, we’re on our way to Shanghai!
We got off the metro at the Yuyuan Garden station and were greeted with this gate:
The end of a wonderful three months in the Philippines. Where to spend the last week? We were at the southern end of Panaon Island so the first thing to do was get a ferry from Benit to Surigao City on Mindanao. From Surigao City, however, ferries go all over the place. We decided on the surfing island of Siargao.
First we had a short ride on Mindanao from Lipata to Surigao City where we found an ear doctor who loved to bicycle and had even completed an Ironman! Ferda’s ear was healing well, he said, but she still wasn’t allowed in the water.
We enjoyed Surigao City’s waterfront night market,
Continue readingLeyte treated us well — friendly people, pleasant riding, tasty food, good places to stay, and — one of the highlights of our trip to the Philippines! — whale sharks.
When we were doing a little research for our ride in southern Cebu (which never happened), I read about visiting the whale sharks near Oslob. Sounds like a disaster of feeding the sharks and too many tourists. That’s when I learned about whale sharks at Padre Burgos. Our goal in Leyte was to go see the whale sharks there. The ride from Hilongos to Padre Burgos via the provincial capital of Maasin was often narrow with too much traffic.
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.
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