Siquijor – Our Journey

Our Journey from Moalboal To Siquijour

The journey to Siquijor can be a nightmare, well for us it was. We arrived at the port in Dumaguete around midday, after getting a tricycle from the ferry. We faced a queue of locals waiting for tickets so we joined in. After some investigation work I discovered that there were only three ferry’s at the weekend and one  was cancelled. The next one was at 6pm.. Not too bad only a 6 hour wait.

Fast forward 3 hours and we are still queueing as the ferry had sold out and everyone was now in a rush. The other ferry docs at a different port in Siquijor.  Little did we know everyone that had tickets for the cancelled ferry, were also trying to get their tickets reissued. So now we are standing in the queue with some people chatting away. We have been in their personal space for the best part of the day at this point. They informed us that there are only 11 tickets left. Haha! did I mention this was the only way of getting to Siquijor? Not only that but the current temperature was the same as the surface of the sun? I’m going crazy! People are pushing, Olly is keeping calm but both of us are aware how incredibly English we are at how annoyed we get with queue jumpers.

Eventually we get the tickets, and get on the ferry. The ferry takes 2 hours and we finally arrive at our accommodation. It’s dark when we arrive so we can’t see much but when we arrive we are convinced the tricycle driver has made a mistake. The hotel was amazing and the receptionist walked us to our room and we walked along the beach.

Arriving at our Hotel

Turns out we have a beach view room with a private balcony on the beach. This has to be wrong..we paid £11 each for this room. Instantly knowing we wanted to stay longer than 3 days we went online to check if we could extend. The room prices had gone up to £245 a night. Completely baffled at how we had managed this we got chatting to another backpacker. He was the only other person in the resort and he informed us there is a backpacker hostel with the same name. Even though this resort had dorms, the hostel was further down the road.

The dorms were only £6 a night so we extended. We swapped into the dorms as this hotel offered free breakfast, had its own private beach and was a great  place to chill out for a while. It sounds crazy but we have been so busy and on the move so much we just wanted time to sleep in do nothing, which is exactly what we did here.

After meeting Johnny and Aled at our hotel we went to all the local waterfalls. This was amazing as we were the only ones there which is unheard of. The boys spent most of the morning swinging off a 25ft rope swing or jumping off the top of the waterfall.

Overcoming fear

There’s something about having so many accidents the first time travelling which puts fear into my mind when it comes to these kinda things. Not to mention   having my sisters voice in the back of my head. The fact I didn’t do something because of fear kills me as I wouldn’t of even given this a second thought before. This is something I 100% want to overcome on this trip. That and my baby biceps wouldn’t of been able to handle the rope swing and I would have fallen in fabulous fashion and gone viral for the wrong reasons.

Olly skills

So me and Olly carried on exploring for the day and took it easy. We found some great places to eat and made full use of Olly’s eating talents. He took on a spicy spring roll challenge in order to get a free beer. It really doesn’t take much to amuse us! Of course he ate them in 0.25 seconds and got his beer 😂

We mainly chilled on the beaches and found hundreds of blue crabs, a dogs skull, jellyfish and millions of sandflies 🙂. Oh and on Paliton beach I couldn’t swim due to jellyfish, I couldn’t sit on the beach because of the sandflies so I sat on the water edge thinking I was safe. I open my legs and a bloody shrimp bit my bum!!! That was it back to the pool for me. 🏃🏼‍♀️💨

 

Where to next?

We met a Canadian girl in our dorm room called Ally. She introduced us to some locals at our hotel who invited us back to their home on a different island. So the next day we backed our bags and off we went. After our Siquijor guide I will post about what happened when we went to see Sarah and her Family In Kabankalan!