Cebu: The Best Worst Vacation (Part Two)

Matt's photo of us at the beach at the resort!

Once on Mactan, wander around to several hotels (even the ones owned by Koreans and Japanese, which the locals warned us against), and with the help of locals and tourist police, find a room that fits our budget at Boyla Diving Resort. We chose the cheapest and least moldy room with a view over an abandoned pool for thirty-five dollars. Perhaps it was mostly destroyed in a typhoon or earthquake, but the “indoor pool” was just a tiled floor; the furniture in the lobby was ancient. Tried to use the TV, to find that it only served as a prop. Also, breakfast wasn’t included. The faucet in the plastic sink leaked all over the newly tiled bathroom.

We explore the “beach” in front of the hotel (really just garbage and rocks). This is where we learn that Mactan Island is originally a coral island, making it great for diving, but not for swimming. All of the so called “famous beaches” are really man-made for hotel use only. We were inundated by locals trying to sell us island hopping tours as we tried to find a spot to swim, looking a bit further down the “beach,” we see a blue infinity pool…I wanted to cry.

Matt suggests we go back to the hotels and see if we can use their beach for a fee. We walk back to the main road, all the while hearing shouts “Where you going?” “Tricycle?” “Sir, Mam, how about island hopping?” “Sir, food? How about Maribago Grill?” Only “yes” is an acceptable answer, to which we wouldn’t give, so they followed after us until there was another innocent tourist to irritate or we turned onto a hotel drive.

After several inquiries, and suggested prices of $100 each per day for a crowded dirty pool and a tiny beach packed with locals selling tours, we settle on the local five dollar beach, with dirty water and sand and the same three guys coming up to us every fifteen minutes to ask about island hopping or jet skiis.

On the way to our hotels.

We march determinately back towards Boyla, over the potholed mud road between goats and dogs, trying to avoid wading through puddles. We walk past the “dressing room,” the only remnants of a building, beyond Boyla, and around the corner. We quickly come to a high cement wall with some wooden doors advertising “Nordtropic Resort,” knocking on the door, a guard lets us in. We enquire about rooms, fully booked, but one room, which costs two hundred dollars a night, cash. Seeing what little hope we had in our eyes vanish, the manager offers a fifty percent discount, as long as we don’t use the kitchen or the extra bedroom. We agree, deciding that if nothing else, we’d have a decent hotel room for New Year’s Eve.

Back at Boyla, the electricity in the entire neighborhood goes out. We feel our way down the stairs to the lobby, where the emergency lights aren’t working and the maid has to give us candles from Santo Nino’s shrine. We sit outside for a bit while locals again try to sell us tours. Finally the power comes back on. We give up and go to bed over the sound of a generator being used somewhere next door.

Wake up at six in the morning to the deafening sound of roosters. So many roosters!  Cockfights seem to be a major source of entertainment for the locals and their roosters are big and mean. Still, you feel a bit sorry for them tied up in the lawn with only a six inch tether.

Check in early at the new hotel and jump into the pool. It is clear that this hotel is owned by a western, because of the little things (like light switches being where you’d expect). Eat dinner at the hotel restaurant, loving vegetables. I can never get over how fruit and vegetables are not so easily accessible in the tropics. Enjoy the dance music over the loud speaker, eat cake and a traditional Filipino dessert, Biko (a yummy brown sticky blob of rice, sugar, coconut, and mango) that the hotel gave us. At midnight, go up to the roof to watch the fireworks show. All of the papers and news stations had many stories warning against lighting your own fireworks, complete with gory pictures, but this didn’t seem to deter the locals. In fact, some of the fireworks nearly missed us, and hot ash landed on our clothes.

New Year’s was such a relief with nice people, a clean hotel, and a lovely pool. Even the sky turned blue after we had been in the hotel for a few hours! We decided to save the holiday and stay at the resort. The next few days are happily filled with swimming in the pool.

We attempted a couple of trips to the hotel beach, but being new, the sand kept washing away and the water was dirty. Matt and I rescued a starfish, who a year previous could have latched onto the coral rocks, but now gets washed up on the cement sandbar. This along with the large amounts of tourists I saw bringing back starfish and large sea shells back from island hopping makes me question how environmentally sound all of this resort tourism is.

Being a Korean resort town, Maribago has very little to offer in the way of food. You can either eat at the expensive resort cafes or at the expensive Korean-style hot pot and seafood restaurants. Other than Maribago Grill, which is a terrible place if you have food allergies because they sneak chicken in your dish and call it pork, there isn’t much for “normal” food. As a result, we had to walk a few kilometers to McDonalds (we would have happily eaten at the resort, but we felt like we needed to get out of our own world once in a while). We didn’t make it, made it as far as a jeepney stop—a palm and metal pipe shack filled with goats and pregnant ladies, and decided to turn back to town. The next day we succeeded in getting to McDonald’s via jeepney.

A typical local store

It quickly becomes clear why locals hate Koreans. Not only do Koreans only stay at Korean resorts, ride in Korean buses with Korean tour guides, and eat at Korean restaurants, there are several Korean grocery stores stocked with Korean detergents, chopsticks, water and cola brands, things than can easily be purchased everywhere in the world at cheaper locally-made prices.  This means, Koreans rarely put any money into the local economy—except help paying a few salaries—which seems to go more towards Cebu City since some of the resort workers find it cheaper to commute back and forth to Cebu City than rent a room on Mactan.

Check out on Sunday, and head north to the Lapu-Lapu and Magellan Shrines. Again, locals follow us around trying to get our business… they are willing to follow you kilometers out of their way. After the shrine, get mistaken for wealthy tourists and get shown new condos for investment—well worth the clean bathroom (but where is the toilet paper in such a posh place!?!). Then head to the airport, where the relief we had felt after checking in to Nordtropic vanished and we find out that we have to pay a thirty dollar terminal fee to exit—which means scrambling for a cash machine at the last minute.