To get to Malapascua from Cebu, you catch a (non-airconditioned) local bus to the northern tip of Cebu taking about 6 hours, to a town called Maya, and jump on a ferry across to the island, another 45 minutes.
I arrived at the hostel I booked, Villa Sandra, and was instantly welcomed by some of the other backpackers that called this place their home. It turned out to be a very social hostel - it was very small, so everyone hung out together in a big group ... and almost all were solo travellers like myself.
One of the guys that was living at the hostel was a dive instructor at a school on the island, so I was showed by a few of the girls where the shop was on their way to the beach and locked in some dives for the next day!
As mentioned earlier, Malapascua is the best place in the world to see Thresher Shark. These sharks usually live at around 200m in the depths, but one dive site here, Monad Shoal, is a cleaning station for the sharks. What this means is that most mornings the sharks venture up to around 30m depths and have other fish and shrimp eat any parasites inside and outside the sharks body - a crazy symbiotic relationship!
This cleaning starts very early in the morning - the dives are scheduled for around a 5am departure!
The first dive I went out, descended to the rope line to watch the sharks at 30m ... and nothing. Not one diver from any of the shops spotted a shark that day!
I did two more dives that day at different sites, spotting the usual clownfish, lion fish and puffer fish. One of the more unique creatures spotted on this dive is the frog fish - a rather unimpressive looking creature but apparently is one of the fastest moving creatures in the world!
Also saw a decent sized moray eel hiding out under one of the corals...
The final dive of the day was rather uninteresting. The site had been used for dynamite fishing in the past, so the area is like a graveyard, scattered with dead fish!
The following day I did the thresher shark dive again at Monad Shoal and was lucky enough to see one!
That day a bunch of people from the hostel I had been hanging out with decided they were leaving Malapascua to travel down to Moalboal and go canyoning - similar to what I had done in Dalat, Vietnam months earlier. After talking to the dive shop. the dives I wanted to do didn't have enough numbers so I made the decision to go with everyone else down to Moalboal.
We hired a private minibus to take us there - arriving around 8 hours later, sore and cramped!
Rather than describe the experience, watch the video below made by the resident Dutch guy in the group, Niels Kok.
We ended the day in Moalboal with a few drinks down one of the nicer restaurants in the area - it has a quite of bit of tourism so choices are ample.
The next day the six of us caught another bus to the southern tip of Cebu island where the others headed by ferry to another island, while I went up to Oslob to swim with whale sharks!
While I would have preferred to come across a whale shark diving in the wild, Oslob is a place where it is all but guarenteed to witness these beasts. Just off the shore in Oslob is an area where every day the whale sharks are fed, and every day they come to eat - not following their usual migration patterns!
After the whale shark experience I headed back up to Cebu City where I spent a few days relaxing - eating, shopping, watching movies etc. Every now and again I got into moods where I wanted to forgo site-seeing and relax, and given there isnt much to do in Cebu this was achievable!
From Cebu I flew back to Manila for a couple days for more time-wasting before flying over to Bali, Indonesia, my final stop before heading home!
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