Bantayan bliss

The plan started out as a simple one: fly straight to Cebu from Singapore, then hop on a bus and a ferry to Bantayan. After the last two beach destinations being the highly developed (but still gorgeous) Boracay and Bohol, I was in the mood for a rustic getaway and was totally up for three hours on a bus and an hour and a half on the ro-ro.

Then this whole brouhaha with the Dutch work visa requirements happened, and we suddenly had to fly off to Manila to careening around in various taxis for the greater part of a week. Bantayan became a place to while away time while the Dutch embassy took their sweet three days rubber-stamping our documents. And so by the time we hauled our tired asses to Cebu, I had had just about enough of public transport, city-hopping, and adventure.

So imagine my relief upon arriving at Bantayan and beholding the rustic luxury of our room at the Bamboo Oriental. I consider myself fairly low maintenance (no stranger to the kubo and kulambo here), but after a week of running ourselves ragged, I gave myself a huge pat on the back for deciding not to go the backpacker route with our accommodations this time around.

As my friend Susie would say: "Sah-weet Jeeeesus!"

I knew Bantayan was a little bit out of the way (even Kate's sweet grandma living in Cebu asked us, "Why are you going all the way there?") but I was more than a little surprised at how deserted it was. After Boracay and Bohol, it seemed positively desolate.

Little town, it's a quiet village...

Bantayan is a long and narrow island, and we were too harrowed by the aforementioned careening to go and explore further than we needed to go for food, water and the occasional bag of V-Cut. (Imagine our surprise when one of the store owners told us to wait for the ro-ro to arrive with the V-Cut and mangoes.) Our tip of the isle, near the Santa Fe port, had one sleepy but impressively clean main thoroughfare with a handful of restaurants and bars (the most colorfully named being the Hard Kock Kafe) and a small market. We tourists were far outnumbered by the locals for sure. 

 

But hitting the beach I stopped being unnerved by the lack of humanity. You realize you have this tranquil stretch of golden sand and turquoise shallows pretty much all to yourself, and you just melt. 

Some of the most blissful parts of it all were the two mornings we got up at daybreak to take photos. There was something hypnotic about the reflection of the sunrise on the shallows, in the contrast of silken waters with rough sands.

Even if it rained on two out of the three afternoons we were there, I'd still say the weather was perfect. Having baked in the sun all morning and well past lunchtime, we'd cool off on the veranda watching the storm clouds roll in from the ocean. It was wonderful to just feast my eyes on the wide expanses of dove grays and navy blues, to actually see rich, mesmerizingly moody colors occurring somewhere other than a retail environment and labeled the latest fall/winter "must-have."

On the one afternoon it didn't rain, we just holed up in the room when it got too hot, watching the sunlight stream in through the cheesecloth curtains and painting everything with a light liquid sheen of gold.

Nights were cool with a stiff breeze, and we spent hours just watching the clouds swirl, the stars move and the moon set the ocean on fire with silvery light.

And on our last morning, Bantayan bid us a very memorable farewell with not just one massive rainbow slicing through the sky and plunging into the horizon. As in I looked up from my book and almost dropped my book, it was so huge. 

Of course, just one rainbow wouldn't be special enough to remember Bantayan by; it had to reflect faintly against the clouds, so that it looked like there were two or three rainbows in the sky at any given time. And though my camera didn't capture the three rainbows distinctly, my mind will always remember them. 

Thank you, Bantayan, for the break we so very badly needed!