Crash! Boom! Bang! Uh!

A little travel guide to the Philippines. I love travelling, and I have to. Because if you don’t love travelling for its own sake, you really have a problem in the Philippines.

Judging by their questions in the Philippines forums, many German visitors in particular seem to have no idea what travelling here is like. Impossible schedules meet unrealisable wishes. Time for some realism.

Our last big trip of the trip is about 250 kilometres as the crow flies from Tablas to Cagbalete. It takes us a good 24 hours, a ferry, a banka, two buses, a trike, a minivan and an island crossing on foot. No, this is not a standard little trip. But with only slightly high waves and time pressure, even the standard trip in the Philippines can mutate into a marathon.

We start in Odiongan with the trike 15 minutes to the harbour. As tickets for the Montenegro ferry to Batangas are only sold on the same day, you have to be there two hours in advance. The nine-hour night ferry is almost never sold out, but at just under €30 it is almost 50% more expensive than before Corona. The bunks on the air-conditioned deck are comfortable. We settle in quickly.

We land in Batangas at two o’clock in the morning. It takes half an hour to get off the bus. Over to the bus station and find the first bus up to Cubao/Turbina. The first bus wakes up after two hours. Once we arrive in Cubao, we fill up with petrol and look for the JAC Liner bus to Mauban. The website said departure at 8.00 a.m. As so often in the Philippines, this was incorrect information. It doesn’t leave until 12:00, too late for the last banka to Cagbalete.

So change of plan: two hours with another rolling freezer to Lucena, a good distance south of Mauban. The TV serves up the bloodiest American C-class butchery films. Crash! Boom! Bang! Argh! If no blood flows from the bottom edge for a moment, the Filipinos immediately wake up in irritation and scan their surroundings anxiously like gophers. Toddlers start screaming. Alarm! Danger! Butchery movies are the only side-effect-free remedy for speeding drivers and technical weaknesses.

In Luzena, there are only minivans to get an hour further to Mauban. They are fast, but only leave when they are full. In our case 15 people. Our two kiteboards and four kites cost another three seats – after the usual tough negotiations.

Once we arrive at the harbour, we wait another two hours for the next banka to Cagbalete. The wind blows mightily over the rather miserable shore panorama of Mauban with its cemetery on the hillside. Eight industrious workers manage to load the boat with around four tonnes of building materials and provisions by hand within an hour.

A good 20 knots of wind whip the sea to a swell of over one and a half metres. The captain only ever accelerates briefly uphill. Then the massive booms crash into the next valley. Heavily laden with construction steel and concrete blocks, they bend and twist.

As soon as I tell Sebastian that many Filipinos like to turn their inner selves inside out when this happens, the little boy in front of me starts to do the same. He has a really impressive capacity for his size. Fortunately, thanks to good ventilation, the domino effect that often follows is avoided. The passenger next to the captain has probably just eaten something wrong…

After another hour and a half, we arrive in Cagbalete on the 60-person boat. After a short walk across the island, we reach our last destination of the trip: Flat water without end…

Yes, well-developed tourist destinations are generally easier to reach. I just don’t understand why, with a choice of 7000 islands, practically everyone always wants to go to the same five overcrowded and already destroyed islands.

The Philippines have so much to offer. The further off the beaten track you are, the nicer the people are. Find your own dream beaches! Use buses and ferries instead of domestic flights. And please don’t travel halfway around the world for a fortnight.