The travel from Moalboal to Siquijor is quite a hustle. You need to take 1 bus, 2 ferries and 4 tricycles, with an overall travel time of 5-8h depending on your waiting times at the ports (Moalboal - Bato - Liloan - Sibulan - Damagute - Siquijor port - San Juan). Nevertheless everything went quite smooth apart from some minutes searching for the oceanjet tickets in Damagute.
Two guys joined me on my trip and directly after we arrived in Monkey Business Hostel, we headed out to Dulce Amore, which is a well known Italian lead restaurant, with very tasty food.
After dinner, I headed to Chelle's Bar, where the group I was in Moalboal with was at. Connor and Daniel (Canadian twins), Nick and Sira (Dutch couple traveling the world) and Merle (German) arrived already one day earlier on the island and where ready to get some drinks and play darts and pool billiard, which both is available in Chelle's. Still it needs to be mentioned, that basically in every bar in the Philippines you'll find a pool table and you might always be beaten by the filipinos. When heading to the next place we unfortunately got witness of a scooter accident. One guy went from the bar on his scooter down the road, when one of the thousand dogs on this island jumped 2 meters in front of his scooter. The British guy flipped over the dog with his scooter, dropping on the ground, while the dog was basically directly dead. Bleeding out of his mouth, the guy went over to the dog, being sorrowful that he harmed the dog and then carried the dog on his two arms to the ditch. A picture that could have been out of a bad horror movie or drama, which we'll all keep in mind.
The evening ended with beers at JJ's, which is a hostel with big parties on Fridays and Sundays.
Next morning I went to Janin's for some pastry before heading to Apu divers. The German led dive shop was only about 10 minutes walking from my hostel and very well rated, which is why I choose it to do my open water diving license.
The first day we did some paperwork, talked about the equipment and I startet chapter 1 out of 5 of my theory for the test to be written. Studying in a hammock at the beach could have been worse. Afterwards in the pool we did 45 minutes of exercises, from balancing out, loosing your mask underwater and the buddy system - what to do if you run out of air or if one diver is weak and you need to help him.
In the afternoon after lunch we went for the first of four dives in the sea at Coral Garden. Me and my German instructor Elias were joined by another student who just had to do her last dive. The dive was already a huge success. Everything worked out, we went 12 meters deep and we saw a couple turtles, a lion fish, harlekin sweetlips juvenile and for sure many Nemos - always a popular sighting under water.
Afterwards I went for a beer and sundown to the beach and for diner at Dagsa. Dagsa offers a wide range of food, filipino, thai, pizza & pasta, as well as everyday live music in a nice environment. I tried pork sinigang, which is a sour soup consisting pork belly pieces. Before going to sleep I got myself a calamansi juice at the hostel restaurant and studied for one more hour. Calamansi is a mandarine-kumquat mix, which looks like a small lime and is predominantly available in the philipines.
Next two days, I did three more dives at Sawang and Tubod Beach, up to the maximum of 18 meters depth for open water diver license. We saw big turtles on every dive, up to 1,50 m diameter, as well as bended seasnakes a robust ghost pipe fish, a pipe horse (both part of the family of sea horses), a clown triggerfish and a group of huge rainbow runners. The exam was easy to do and on my last dive I even took fully care about a new student.
Overall, diving is just a really impressive experience that you should try if you haven't yet. Doing the open water license should also always be considered since it only takes around three days. I paid P19.000 / 320€ for the license including all the equipment, transfers and lunch for a 80% one-on-one course.
During those days I had two more times breakfast at Janin's, which offers besides pastry also Filipino breakfast, consisting of rice, egg and some sort of meat.
During the third day on Siquijor it was raining heavily all day. This was not a problem while diving under water, but we were quite critical about the next days, because we all even received weather, taifun and flood warnings on our phones and some people even flew from the island. Especially because of this, we were quite surprised that the next day was dry again. Hanna, a german girl I knew already from Moalboal, and I took a scooter and went a bit around the island. We met Nick and Sira at the Old Enchanted tree, which hold some "natural fish spa" in front of it, and went then together to Tubod marine sanctuary. The latter is first of all a really nice part of beach which also offers the possibility to snorkel for a small enviroental fee. You're able to see many more corals as well as different fish in quite shallow water.
After a sundown drink and diner at Monkey Business Restaurant, we packed our luggage and went to bed early to leave the island in the morning.
Next stop is Bohol island, which only one ferry around 8:20am is heading to.
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