Worst Kept Secrets

On our third day on Boracay, we got up surprisingly early and went out for a swim and then breakfast (I had that omelette again). Then we headed down the beach looking for a guy selling dune buggy rides, since Leif and Lily had a blast doing that while they were there. The nice thing about White Beach is that whatever you want to do, you only have to walk about six feet before you find someone who wants to sell it to you. Sure enough, we found a guy advertising bug cars, ATVs, and the like, and we followed him to the main road and into a tricycle. Then after a brief ride, we jumped in our dune buggy and away we went.

Chris drove us up and down the mountain because I was too afraid to do it (I did drive on the pavement eventually and it was fun). Chris was an awesome driver, too – just bumpy enough to be fun but not scary. So we headed up into the jungle in our red dune buggy, which was a hoss and a half – those things just roll right over ANYTHING – until we got to a really nice lookout point, complete with monkeys and parrots and anacondas in cages. After that, we went back down and followed our guide over to a butterfly farm. I was really happy about that – I’d seen it on the map and wanted to go, but wasn’t sure that it was worth spending time on when there were so many other things we wanted to do.

We walked inside, and there were butterflies everywhere, which was nice. But what was really nice was the enormous fruit bat hanging from a low branch. So I squealed for a while over that, and our guide came over and grinned and said, “butterflies and BAT!” We found a little cluster of them and were oohing and ahhing over them when the guide disappeared and returned with a freaking fruit bat hanging from his arm, which we got to touch and hold. It was such a sweet little flying puppy, too – it had soft fur and smart little red eyes, and was totally mellow about us. I was a little worried that it was traumatized rather than friendly, but it was grooming itself while we were holding it and going about what appeared to be normal bat business. I didn’t think that my day was going to get any better after that (it did).

We wrapped up our dune buggy trip and were served some glasses of iced tea while we paid and wiped off all the sweat, and then we went looking for another beach. There was a big empty beach on the map called Lapus Lapus Beach, and so we asked a tricycle driver to take us there. Instead, he took us to a diving school on White Beach with the same name, so we walked over to Bulabong Beach. We didn’t stay there long – Bulabong is the place to go if you’re a kiteboarder, wind surfer, or otherwise hardcore watersporter, and we felt a little out of place. There were no restaurants there – we found one sign for one, but a guy on a motorcycle drove past and told us that it was closed. So we headed back to familiar ground and had lunch at Café del Mar.

We ate outside, and after some delicious mahi mahi and a killer apple butterscotch crepe, we realized that it was close to dusk, and it might be a good time to head up to Bat Cave to watch the fruit bats come out for the evening. We were thinking that Bat Cave would be like everywhere else we’d been on the island – a tricycle ride up to the entrance, and then we could camp out and watch the bats spiral out into the twilight with all the other tourists. We’d had a long day and were in the mood for something easy and relaxing.

So we walked to the main road and found a tricycle – an ancient beast of a thing, and took off across the island. After a while, we turned onto a dirt road that went up a mountain at an angle entirely too close to ninety degrees. The poor driver’s bike was screaming in protest, and he was driving like a champ, missing all the holes and huge rocks and trucks coming the opposite direction. We offered to get out and walk the rest of the way, but it had become a matter of pride for the poor man. We struggled onward and upward and sometimes terrifyingly downward, and I was incredibly scared that the whole thing was going to end in tragedy.

Then three teenagers popped out of the jungle to help. They pushed us up the last big hill, and then asked if we were going to Bat Cave. Then they told us they would be our guides and told the driver to follow them. We drove until we came to a little village, where everyone was starting to cook dinner. All of the houses had outdoor kitchens and dining rooms, and there were pigs, goats, and chickens wandering around. It didn’t look poverty-stricken at all, like some of the places we saw in Manila – it looked like a completely comfortable jungle home. We paid our tricycle driver (with a huge tip), and followed the three teenagers straight into the jungle. Which looked like an honest to god jungle. I guess that shouldn’t have surprised me, since I was on a tropical island, but it was still an extremely delicious shock to be walking through something that I suspected only existed in movies.

We came around a bend, and BAM, Bat Cave. It had a gaping sort of entrance, and the closer I got to it, the more impossible a descent seemed in my sandals, with five people using one flashlight. But the guys were absolutely incredible. They told us that Felix would be our guide, the younger guy would be our body guard, and the John would be our photographer. These three kids jumped down those rocks barefoot and half the time in total darkness, carrying our crap, keeping my camera out of the water and mud, and taking care of us. It was incredible. And completely stupid and breaking every rule of caving I’ve ever been taught. It was a long, long fall, and we were climbing down jagged rocks which were almost too slick to get a solid foothold on and whose stability was questionable at best, and we were doing it BAREFOOT on the way down, with one flashlight, no helmet, no pads, no ropes, just three guys telling us where to put our feet. It was one of the most fun things I’ve ever done in my life.

And they were sweethearts, too – there was a lot of “Ma’am, ma’am, no! Other foot! Other foot!” But I’ll be damned if they didn’t talk us straight down a dangerous climb that I don’t think either one of us thought we were capable of making. Unfortunately, there was a high spirit of chivalry amongst the guys, and they were all very attentive to me (I had one on each wrist for a long time), leaving poor Chris struggling by himself in near total darkness…. Sorry, friend…

End of story, we made it to the bottom of the cave. It was a big ol’ rocky ballroom cavern area, and then the guys started screaming and shining their light. The entire ceiling was COVERED with bats. Sometimes the flashlight would catch their eyes and they’d light up in an unimaginably freaky way, and whole pieces of the ceiling would explode in movement as they all took off. They made a lot of bat noise, too, so the whole cave was full of movement and chittering and the five of us laughing and yelling.

(all those tiny lights are critter eyes)

After that, Felix told me not to fret, that it wouldn’t bite, before shining the light on a white and black snake coiled up about five feet from us. I finally saw my chance to show some chops, and bounded over to pet it, since I thought he’d said KING snake, not SEA snake, and I know perfectly well that king snakes are harmless (and sea snakes are deadly). I didn’t see the paddle tail until later, when I jumped into a pool of water and the snake came in after me, which didn’t scare me at all at the time, and I was enjoying establishing myself as a Girl Who Is Not Afraid of Snakes, although later I realized that it had more or less come straight at me in a defensive sort of way, and that if I’d known it was one of the most poisonous animals in the world, I probably would have freaked out. Here’s the fact file on that species, if you’re interested. Um, it’s ten times more poisonous than a black mamba, and I was trying to pet the damn thing (although to be fair, sea snakes are incredibly well-tempered snakes, and their mouths are too tiny to be much of a danger to anything but your fingers and toes - they won’t bite you unless you give them a very good reason to, like poking them, for example).

The cave was crawling in snakes, too – we saw several more of the white and black kind, which did make me hesitant to step around without my own flashlight. Felix also found a hermit crab, picked it up, and did one of the most awesome things I’d ever seen in my life. The creature was retracted all the way in its shell when Felix whistled, which caused it to fully reemerge.

The trip up was a lot easier than the trip down, and I got to wear my sandals that time. The guys walked us back to a tricycle, and we got to talk to them for a bit. It turned out that Felix wasn’t exactly a teenager – when we walked past his house, we saw his daughter. When we walked past the roosters, they told Chris (who’s pretty passionate about animal rights) that there was cock fighting every Sunday, very much in the spirit of a couple of guys telling another guy about a thing that they think a guy would interested in. And Chris handled it with all kinds of grace, inquiring of Felix, “Oh, do you have a cock?” which made me nearly choke, but Felix did in fact have a seven month old cock at home.

I was really happy when we wound up arranging a snorkeling trip with those guys for the next day, and Chris and I tricycled back to White Beach, and jumped in the ocean to rinse off all the mud. We went out for dinner on the beach, and I had the best cheese pizza I’ve ever had in my life (bleu cheese, cream cheese, gorgonzola cheese, and a bunch of other cheeses I’ve never even heard of), plus some mango margaritas. Then we walked down to Heaven for a shot, and were a little put off by how noisy that section of the beach is when it’s not raining. The beach was also a lot rockier, for some reason. But Heaven still had a private table for us backed up against the jungle, and we drank our shot and a beer with bats and bugs chirping. Then it started raining really hard, and we had no choice but to hike back to the hotel in it, and upon arrival we passed out. I really do not remember the last time I had that awesome of a day.

Dune buggy trip with giant fruit bats flickr set

Bulabong Beach flickr set

Bat Cave flickr set