Malapascua island

The best places are those that make you work to get there...Malapascua is definitely that kind of place. I'm not sure how or why Brent decided on this island (especially since the guide book only gives the island a page of notice) but it was amazing. The journey there though put us near our breaking point. We read the limited information on how to get to the island and it was going to go like this: 1.5hr ferry from Bohol to Cebu, 3-4hr bus to Maya port(that runs every half hour), then a 1hr banka (small boat) to malapascua island (that should run every 30 min, but only until 4, then you could be screwed. We figured with all that and leaving Bohol at 9:30, we still had some wiggle room to catch the last boat. My lord did we misjudge the Phillipines! The ferry was half hour late and took closer to 2 hrs. The buses run every hour (and of course we had just missed the most recent bus by 10min), and actually take more like 5-6hrs. Our bus was especially awful bc there was no air conditioning, we were crammed in like sardines for a lot of the journey and the radiator kept overheating, so we were stopping every 20min to pour water into it. So yeah, we didn't make it to Maya until 5:30, an hour and a half after the last boat. We were so bummed...until we saw a ton of locals waiting for a boat that was going to leave at six. Yay!! And we weren't completely annoyed when they charged the gringos over twice as much as the locals to get us to the island. Our journey hadn't quite ended there though bc we still didn't have any accommodations or diving set up for the next day. We were guided to thresher shark divers (5 star padi shop run by Brits). These people really have quite the operation out on the island but they were open so we were happy...until we started getting push back about our diving experience when we wanted to do the am thresher dive that went down to 28 meters. Neither of us keep a log book (which yes, we really should) but we've been certified since 1997, I'm sure we have done a dive or two. Brent even pulled the "two doctors on honeymoon" line...which he never says and it didn't get us very far. But we did compromise with the lady to have us do two dives, one of which would be a "check out" dive and then we could go down the following day to try to see some thresher sharks. Not perfect, but at least we were going diving! They then pointed us towards a hotel right on the water and we were set. Our first dive the next day was amazing. Great visibility and a lot of fish life! Highlights were the frog fish, some sort of eel, tons of lionfish, some sort of horse flute fish (I don't think that's really it's name), plus other cool prawns, crabs, etc. For our second dive we were searching for pygmie seahorses. We had some American people using nitrox, and driving the rest of us divers crazy! They had these huge cameras abs would get to something and take tons of pics and then when someone else would try to get a look, the nitroxers would push off the reef and ruin the whole thing. Urgh it frustrated me! Needless to say, no pygmy seahorses were seen :( Brent did spot a giant school of squid though, so that was good. We finished the night off with food abs drinks above the dive shop with our other diving buddy: Magnus from Sweden. He was great and joined in our group the following morning to look for threshers. The morning dive was about as deep as our second dive the day before and beside descending into a group of jellyfish (thankfully neither of us got stung) and a pretty tough current, really not a technical dive. After the morning dive we had the rest of the day to walk around the island and relax. Sadly though this was the end of our Malapascua trip and we had to repeat the journey back to Cebu, which is where we are now. We are flying to coron tomorrow for some more beach bumming and wreck diving! Hope everyone is doing well, see you all in just a few days. Love you.