Wednesday morning we woke up early again and made our way over to the pier to catch the 5:00 a.m. passenger speedboat ride to Bohol. The two hour ride was pretty uncomfortable, but we were too tired to notice and slept most of the time. Bohol is beautiful! It’s more of a countryside than a city. We saw all the cute kids walking together to school. The streets were clean and mostly free from vendors. Driving along we saw mostly quaint old homes, chicken yards, thick jungle forests and patches of clear green valleys, and of course occasional peaks of the ocean in the background.
We met up with Steve and Bette Gibson, an old couple from Provo, UT who in 1999 started The Academy for Creating Enterprise in the Philippines. It has since grown into other countries and this was the 20th anniversary since they started it. They are the reason we made this trip.
The Academy teaches people (usually returned missionaries) how to start their own businesses and keep them growing so they can become self reliant and end generational poverty. The Church’s self reliance class called “Starting and Growing My Business” was actually written based on the Gibson’s curriculum. Steve is starting to have health issues, so he took all his kids and their families and they made a family reunion out of it. It was fun to meet them all and witness their excitement as they saw for themselves what their parents/grandparents started.
The Gibsons were staying in a GORGEOUS hotel with a beautiful infinity pool and direct access to a white sandy beach with boats and sea stars all over the place. If we ever stay in Bohol, we should stay there! It’s the Bellevue Resort.
Our first excursion for our day out with the Gibsons was Chocolate Hills. It was quite a drive on windy roads, so I inevitably got sick. But boy was it worth the trip! I had seen many photos of the Chocolate Hills before, but climbing up all those stairs and seeing it in person was breathtaking!
Next stop was a local zoo that had some really interesting animals I had never seen before. The larger monkeys were not happy in their enclosures. We did, however, see the zoo’s pride and joy, a male Tarsier monkey. There are Tarsier sanctuaries in the area, but this was the only place, to my knowledge, that you can get close to and even feed a Tarsier. We had to be very quiet and be sure to turn off the flash on our cameras so that we didn’t stress out the monkey. Apparently if you do stress it out, it will commit suicide by turning it’s head 360 degrees. Hunter fed it a still somewhat live but impaled cricket. It was really cool. The monkey moves slowly and almost robotic-like until it’s ready to eat. Then it snaps the cricket quickly off the stick. He eats 40 crickets a day.
Finally, we headed to a floating boat tour for lunch. We basically embarked on this covered floating dining room. It had tables all around the outside of the boat with a long buffet table in the center. We got our food and then ate while floating down this gorgeous river that had thick, lush, forest on both sides. The cool thing about the forests is that they not only have deciduous trees thickly packed all together, but they also have many many coconut trees all throughout, pushing through the canopy toward the sky.
Along the boat tour they had certain staged “attractions”. One kid I’m certain was paid to swing from a vine and do a flip into the water. There was also a little covered stage where about twenty dancers were dressed in costumes and performed for us. At one point, our boat pulled in close to the stage and the ramp was let out. I don’t know why, but Hunter and I were the only ones who stepped off the boat and got front row seats to the entertainment. I get such a thrill out of watching cultural dancing, so I was having the time of my life. Then when they got out the bamboo sticks and started doing the Tinikling, one of the older dancers encouraged me to try it. And of course, I did! Mom taught us well, and I was able to do it with relative ease (except my backpack was flopping up and down on my back out of rhythm). It was a proud moment. Hunter wanted to join, but decided to capture it on film instead. When we got back on the boat, Steve Gibson was so proud and said watching me dance and connect with my roots was the highlight of the trip. Hunter said the older dancers kept watching me as I got back on our boat and were smiling ear to ear.
On the way back to the Gibsons hotel, we drove through a man made Mohagony forest that had been planted 50 years ago to help prevent landslides. It was GORGEOUS! Such tall, amazing trees!
After dropping the Gibsons off and strolling along the beach at low tide, we headed back to the pier for another long boat ride home. On the way, we stopped spontaneously at one of the chicken yards and asked the owner if he would show us how the roosters “box”. He humored us and put on the practice pads on the roosters’ feet. As soon as the second rooster was put in the territory of the other, they started attacking each other, which I had never seen before. And those red feathers that hang down their necks flare out like a lion’s mane when they’re fighting. Hunter got a slow motion video. It was so interesting. Hunter’s Grandpa Sebresos used to be in the Sabong business and would sell specialized knives for the rooster’s feet. I’m glad I just saw a practice cockfight. I think I would be too disturbed if I saw a real one. Needless to say, after such a long day of travel and sightseeing, we crashed.
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