Our trip to Moalboal, Cebu and its amazing Sardine Run

13/02/2018 Akhona Kraai

After our great experience swimming with the turtles around Apo Island, we decided to take a ferry across to Cebu so that we could spend a few days in Moalboal before making our way back to Cebu City. After taking a trike to the bus station in Dumaguette, Negros, we arrived at the Ceres Liner bus terminal. We asked an official looking bus driver where the bus to Bajo was and we hopped on. An hour or so later we arrived at the port and took a Maayo Shipping ferry which dropped us off at the port in Cebu. Right outside there was a bus waiting with ‘Cebu City’ written on it with a piece of cardboard. We confirmed whether the bus was going to pass by Moalboal en route to Cebu City and the driver confirmed it was.

We got on the bus at exactly 12:17pm, which took a very scenic route along the coastline with the wind blowing on our hair because there was no air conditioning on the bus, just one big window that opens up widely. Since we have quite a lot of baggage, we bought two seats next to us to put our photographic equipment right next to us and the entire trip cost about 375 pesos including the ferry crossing

The bus we took passes through Samboan, the 5^th municipal income class municipality in the province of Cebu. It is famous for it’s waterfalls such as Dao Falls and Hidden Falls to name a few,. It is also not that far away from the infamous Kawasan Falls, known for being an overcrowded tourist trap. We arrived in Moalboal at 14:00pm sharp and got a trike for 150 pesos, which is expensive but we didn’t feel like a lengthy negotiation with the driver. He wanted 200 pesos but Derek knocked him down by 50 pesos. As many travelers will know, you are always ripped off when you arrive in a new place, and the trike mafia is very powerful in Cebu. The road to the hotel was very bad and luckily for us, not too far.

We stayed at the so-called Anthony’s Beach Resort. Though it did have a balcony, we did not use it much due to limited visibility – tree branches that had overgrown so much that there was barely a view of the sea. The room itself was very basic, with lots of old furniture that needed to be replaced. The shower head was attached to a tiny nail on the wall, whenever we wanted to take a shower, we would have to fiddle to get it in the right position… lol . We of course knew of these problems from the reviews we had read on Agoda prior to us booking the room so we were not entirely disappointed. We booked here as it was the cheapest place right on the beach. It was a bonus that there was a hot water heater available. When you travel to villages and islands as much as we do where hot water is a rarity – you tend to appreciate small pleasures such as hot showers. 🙂

Later on that evening, Derek went out for a snorkel and he rushed back to was tell me about the amazing sardine run he encountered about 50m off the beach. The thing with Anthony’s Place is that the facilities may not be great but the location is fantastic. We were right on the beach front – in the morning we just went downstairs to the beach with our snorkel gear. We swam out over the reef and floated along and as soon as we hit the drop-off we were right in the middle of a massive school of sardines.

I was swimming amongst them, just watching in awe of the beauty they possessed and Derek was mostly filming. There were quite a lot of other sea animals we saw over the reef. Clown fish, sea horses and various unusual sea creatures. The sardines were amazing and I remember thinking there are so many of these sardines and surely there must be predators around here but I didn’t want to ponder on that much because I was really in the middle of the deep blue sea, a bit far from Derek and the sea beneath me was full of millions of sardines…

The synchronized movements were so captivating and spectacular to witness then all of a sudden they simultaneously moved and there was nothing underneath me. I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw a whale shark swimming down deep into the ocean. My very frantic/panic stricken voice was caught on video by Derek (we have full face masks, so we can easily breathe and speak while on water). Since we had made the decision not to go to Oslob to visit the whale sharks, it was truly amazing for me to see it in the wild like that. Just magical…..

Stills photographs just don’t do justice to the beauty of a sardine run – the video below gives you some idea of what it is like…

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