Underwater Images from South Leyte (Padre Burgos), Philippines, Easter 2008
Living, Food and Diving:
South Leyte in Philippines has gained some fame due to regular sightings of
whale sharks in the Nov-April period, so we decided to go for a short trip this
Easter. My colleague and scuba instructor Raymond (Clearwater Bay diving)
organized the trip; he's popular enough to rope in two dozen divers, who pretty
much filled Peter's Diving Resort (where we stayed,
in the village of Padre Burgos) to capacity. HK to Padre Burgos is probably only
around 1000Km, but P. Burgos is remote enough to make the journey a pain in the
{butt + neck + back}: 3.5hours to Cebu, van to the pier, 3 hours in a painful
ferry to Ormoc, followed by another 3 hours by van to Peter's dive resort. Yet
someone forgot to notify the whale sharks about the planned rendezvous -- they
were elsewhere.
Peter's is one of two or three
resorts in this area, and probably the largest.
Most rooms are pretty basic, but we had asked for the only suite they have - a
comfortable bungalow with working air-conditioning.
The bathroom shower at full power provides a rain-like trickle, but it's warm
rain.
The nearest town with shops is 3 Km away, so all eating
is in the resort, buffet style, three meals a day. The food is fairly basic --
the main dish I enjoyed was a mixed veggie that the cook would put out with
every meal. On the last night, we paid extra to get a whole roasted pig -- that
was pretty good.
So, it was painful to get there, living was pretty basic, and wasted two full
mornings chugging slowly in the boat without a whale shark. You'd think we were
not happy. Wrong! The diving was just
superb. Probably the best reefs I've seen in
Philippines. Also, the dive staff, including the Aussie David who runs the
operations, and the other local DM's are an excellent bunch. Underwater macro
life has fantastic variety; especially, the wall at
Napantao is the most beautiful reef I've
dived so far -- order of magnitude better than, say, Verde Island or Apo Island.
Totally we made eleven dives, in sequence:
Day 1: House reef (shore entry) check-out dive on
the evening we arrived.
Day 2: Heaven's gate, Turtle
rock, Medicare north, and
Bunga north (night dive)
Day 3: [morning looking for whale sharks], Bunga south,
Peter's bend, House reef
(night dive)
Day 4. [morning looking for whale sharks], Napantao
(two dives), Max climax (night dive).The
thumbnails below link to some
photos from the trip, with brief comments. All these photos were taken
with my Canon G7 camera in a Canon WP-DC1 housing and a single Inon Z220S strobe
operating in slave mode; the only exception is the black frogfish shot that
Kitty got with her Canon S80 camera, also in canon housing.
If you want the original of any of these, send me email.
