I occasionally wonder what sort of value traveling has to me at this point in my life. I’m not sure the best way to word this because it’s not really a concrete thought and it’s not even a serious question, but essentially when I look at the limited resources in my life (primarily: money and time) I wonder if one day in the future I’ll look back and say, “you know, I really should have skipped some of the trips and spent more time <investing in friendships / developing hobbies / doing an intensive language course / watching TV / etc>.” When I’m old and decrepit will the memories I make bring me warm feelings and a smile, a feeling of contentment with a life (reasonably) well lived?
I certainly think there is a real value to traveling and seeing the world, but I also wonder about diminishing returns in terms of some of the more practical bits (appreciation for different cultures and ways of living, etc). Does travel become “just” an enjoyable experience and indulgence?
I mention all of this because I was thinking about it when we booked a trip to the island of Cebu in the Philippines (with a quick stop over in China). My heart honestly just wasn’t really in it and I felt a bit like I was going through the motions of travel just to do it. I (we) didn’t really care all that much about going but we had a week of vacation and didn’t want to waste it.
The tl;dr; here (if I can even say that after 3 meandering paragraphs) is that this trip took us out of a somewhat long-ish depressive spell and put us solidly into “we are incredibly happy and feel grateful with life” and as I type this some 5-6ish months later the positive impact on our outlook on life is still felt.
The reason for this isn’t totally clear, but this trip ended up being a great reminder about a very different way of living and traveling. Warm, lazy days and scootering through towns and forcing ourselves to slow down a bit. I can’t tell you how lucky I am and in general how chill and enjoyable and easy my life is, but it was still a pleasant shock to the system to do a bit of a different types of travel we’ve done and would like to do more of in the future.
China
After our last failed attempt at a transit visa-powered trip to China we figured we’d make another run at it with this trip to the Philippines. Unfortunately this time around we only had something like an 8ish hour layover but we took what we could get.
Our small expedition into mainland China was in Shanghai. Here are my main takeaways:
- This is perhaps the most “serious” I’ve felt going through immigration in a while. I know it’s dumb because millions of US citizens travel to China every year for tourism (if my blind faith in Wikipedia isn’t misplaced), but just the same it was hard for me not to have the fact that relationships between the US and China are tense in the back of my head
- Again possibly a dumb thought but an honest one, Shanghai felt unique to me. Pretty much every country I visit feels unique, but some less than others
- Shanghai is of course a huge city I saw a tiny tiny fraction of it, but what I saw felt both relatively clean and safe.
- I was somewhat surprised to find myself wishing I could spend a lot more time traveling in China.
- We didn’t eat much food because we didn’t have much time, but we did eat some great mall food-court dumplings that I’ve thought of several times since.
- The fast maglev train from Pudong into the city was enjoyable, though not ALL that novel coming from the common Shinkansen here in Tokyo.
One somewhat notable memory for me was trying to avoid putting our destination on our transit visa down as “Chinese Propaganda Museum” but also not having any other great addresses readily available on our phones.
As far as what we did here, really not much. We took the train from the airport into the city center (a few trains I suppose – the trains and stations we went through were nice enough though perhaps a bit dated feeling). We went to the propaganda museum. No photos but this was the #1 thing Lindsay wanted to do. I would say it was pretty nice, though perhaps not a must-do in my opinion. I sadly only have this photo of the entrance hall of the building (the actual museum was just a small area somewhere stories up in this giant building).
The mall food we ate was great, and was around USD $11.50. So not really cheap, but reasonably priced considering we were in a mall. My favorite thing was the 手作传统酒酿糟, which I believe to be something like a mildly fermented rice with soy perhaps? Honestly I’m not 100% and haven’t googled much so am letting the mystery live.
After eating we walked a lot more, Nanjing road I believe.
We walked to the bay / outlet (“Chen Yi Square” I believe), took some photos, and pretty soon after made our way back to the airport. In between there we went into a grocery store and got some more snacks. The main thing is I was happy to find that I left feeling like I wanted to see more, and was excited about the future.
Cebu, Philippines
The main destination for our trip was Cebu, which is one of the large islands that makes up the Philippines. We had heard about it from a co-worker of Lindsay’s who is also a diver and diving was our original reason for the trip (diving with whale sharks).
We didn’t make it into Cebu City until very late and slept near the airport on night one. In the morning we arranged a driver to take us the considerable distance (hours) from Cebu City to our final destination of Moalboal.
I’m not entirely certain how to describe Cebu in a way that’s accurate and fair and not totally ignorant. Every time I visit a new country I tend to sort the experience into a bucket (in my mind) as I work on developing an opinion. The buckets are from my formative travel experiences and so are pretty broad. “Is this a Eastern Europe country, or a Mexico country, or a South East Asia country, or a Japan country?” etc. To me, for almost no great reason, I was reminded of SE Asia with a bit of the Caribbean while driving to our accommodation.
Anyway, this is where we stayed:
We rented a scooter to get around the area and I honestly think that was part of what we loved so much about the trip. There is something pretty amazing about being free to explore a new area with the wind in your face.
The next morning we did our main planned activity for the trip which was going diving with whale sharks. I think we left around 4AM or something terribly early, took a LONG 3-ish hour trip across the island and then did two shore dives with these whale sharks. A highlight was (accidentally) getting hit in the head by one of these shark’s tail.
To be honest I would give this experience a 6/10. I assumed they probably had a feeling pattern, or possibly were fed, but when you arrive to the dive site, even at 7AM or whatever, it’s FILLED with tons of people snorkeling, and the water is cloudy with all of the krill or shrimp or whatever they are feeding these things with. To be fair they aren’t enclosed or anything like that, so I suppose at least they are free to leave if they want (and perhaps they naturally do depending on the time of day), but yeah, it was pretty packed.
Lindsay also had a mask that didn’t fit well and kept leaking and so fogging up for the first dive (the dive from the video), the second dive was a lot better and more chill but still a bajillion people. The video doesn’t make it look so bad, but that’s because I’m fairly certain the diver who took the video of us was an expert and avoiding the throngs of people probably just behind us in the video.
I just realized I forgot that we actually did a second day of diving, which was actually amazing. We did the sardine dive which was fine, but then also dove around Pescador Island which was 100% the best part of the entire diving experience. If I went back to Cebu I’d just ask to go there a bunch of times, a really nice drift dive with tons of schools of fish and overall really great. I can’t believe I almost forgot about this.
The other MAIN thing we did, which was 100% the best part of the trip, was just spend 3 or 4 days hanging out at a local beach in this one particular beach bar. There was a woman working there, Anna, who we hung out / chatted with. It was just really nice and slow, and the water was beautiful, the weather was perfect, not too hot or humid but warm in the sun.
This really was the perfect thing for us at the time, it wasn’t fancy or anything, the area felt just as much of a locals thing than a tourist thing (depending on the day), and Anna was really nice to hang out and talk with, just a really nice person.
We also ate at Jollibee, which I felt like was something I had to do while in the country.
Not pictured but there was a nice French cafe near our lodging which we went to a few times to get cake and coffee and for Lindsay to do some work. This was a big indulgence to be honest, and certainly not a “local food” sort of place, but it was very good and I think we appreciated it enough that we felt no guilt about eating carrot cake and coffee or whatever several days in a row.
Pretty much every night we took the scooter into the more tourstic area of Moalboal along the coast to the West and walked around, ate dinner, etc. This area was more of the tourist party area vibe but relatively speaking (compared to Koh Phangan in Thailand or Bali or something) it was very chill and quite tame. We did our best to try various Filipino food and were mainly successful though I’ll be honest I was sort of in the “eat whatever I’m feeling like, even if it’s carrot cake every day.”
I guess the final thing we did was go on a cannon tour. This was something I wasn’t super excited about to be honest but Lindsay wanted to do but in the end it turned out to be pretty nice. The photos don’t do it justice at all (also side note: the worst part by far WAS the photos because we (Lindsay!) gave them our phones and they proceeded to take a million photos you could tell they’d taken a million times. But it was basically constant, “jump up on this rock, stand in front of this water fall”, etc).
Anyway the photos aside it was really pretty and I’m very happy we went.
And that’s about it! That was our trip. I should mention again that accounting for all of our hours and time a good chunk of time was just spent riding around on our scooter, going back and forth to the beach and our hotel, etc. We also went to a number of larger grocery stores to check out what sorts of interesting things we noticed (good baked goods with coconut and a shocking amount of ultra processed ultra salty/sugary snack food unfortunately).
I would recommend somebody looking for a chill vacation that is less “in your face” than Bali or similar go to Cebu for sure.
China I would also really like to spend a lot more time traveling in. Who knows if it’ll get prioritized to the point of actually doing it, but I think it would be well worth spending a few months at least if I could.
OK, 10/10 trip, 6.5/10 blog post (sorry!)
<3