Siquijor Travelog III: "Under and Over Siquijor - Caves and Cliffs"

Siquijor Travelog III: “Under and Over Siquijor - Caves and Cliffs”

Please bear with the heading, that is as creative as I can get.

Okay. Today marks the day that our delayed co-tourists would arrive, which would also mark the official start of our adventure (official, since three out of seven already had their pre-adventure adventure :D )

Their ferry sailing from Dumaguete will dock at Siquijor Port by 9 AM, so we, the early-bird party fetched them 9am sharp. When the squad was finally complete, we rented three scooters at a shop near the port. The rental fee would be Php 350/24 hours and Php30 for every succeeding hour. And of course the renter would pay for the gasoline. Still worth it anyway. Now we have the squad, we have the scooters, it’s time to achieve those #squadgoals. 

 

The itinerary for today only contains two destinations, Cantabon Cave and Triad Coffee Shop.

It took us approximately 30 minutes to get to Cantabon Cave from our house. It was an uphill ride. I was thinking it would be near the seaside or by the river, somewhere in the lowlands, and to my surprise we are taking the road to the mountains. Silly me. Anyway, when we arrived at the entrance, a sign in there says that we are not allowed to enter  the cave unless with the company of tour guides. It says we must go to the barangay hall first. So we did. In there a clerk asked us to write our name in their logbook as well as pay for the entrance fee, tour guide fee and equipment fee which includes a hard hat and a headlamp. Their policy says that a tour guide would accompany at most 3 persons, and there are 7 of us so we need to hire 3 of them. The fees go as follows:

          Tour Guide              Php 300 each.

          Entrance Fee          Php 10.00 for Filipinos and Php 30.00 for foreigners.

          Equipment              Php 30.00

All in all we paid Php 1,180.00. You can do the math.

We left our scooters in the barangay hall which is 450 meters away from the cave entrance - I did the math :) I read the signs. But wait, the arc is actually not the real cave entrance Lol. We still need to walk a little distance, maybe 143 meters (there were no signs, I actually estimated this one). Entering the actual cave entrance was hard, like those in end-of-the-world-movies-hard. Inside you would feel as if you instantly became claustrophobic, like the space is becoming narrower and the air becoming thinner, and life is crawling out of your skin. Trust me everybody felt that drama.

The cave measures at a length of 30 meters and a width of 10 meters. The inside is a dark room that highlights a huge range of glittering icicle-like stalactites and stalagmites hanging from the cave’s ceiling and formed by continuously dripping water that contains calcium carbonate. The cave also boasts of its perfectly undisturbed body of water running along the way that people dub as a ‘natural pool’. http://siquijortour.com/blog/tourist-spots/cantabon-cave-of-siquijor/

The main tour guide was doing his job well. He was explaining the what's and what's not of spelunking (look it up) and the history of the cave. For all I know the cave served as a refuge for locals during the war from Spanish and Japanese warriors, it was opened to tourists 30 years ago and the rest is textbook. We are enjoying the view of stalactites and stalagmites and the random rock formations shaping into something familiar to our sight – some looked like monks praying, some like altars, some like faces and etc – "imagination mo ang limit". Even the caretakers of the cave named some of these peculiar formations as Fairy’s Bathtub, Mini Pool, Mini Falls, Shower Bell, Picture Frame and King’s Bed.

It took us 90 minutes to reach the end of the cave, that is why I doubt the info I found on the web, some said it it was 30 meters, some also 800 meters, sorry but I can’t estimate it since we took some time to stop in some of the attractions. The last attraction would be the King’s Bed, fitting for the random elegant formations seen throughout the cave. The guide said that it is our prerogative to proceed to the deeper parts of the cave, but they discourage it, so we decided not to. Going out was faster than going in since we need not to stop by the attractions.

I will post a photo diary soon, but trust me, the photos fall far short from the real beauty of the cave. Anyway the experience was encoded in our brains in HD.

Next stop: Triad Coffee Shop. A 30-minute drive from Cantabon Cave, located in Larena, a municipality in Siquijor.

As the name suggests, it’s a coffee shop. So what’s the fuss about. Apparently, the coffee shop is located on top of a hill, or should I say on a cliff, overlooking the long shore line of Siquijor and the green trees and grassland below. It was a magnificent sight, breath-taking as one would describe, and soul-calming, as the clouds are telling you to just let go, relax and breathe (ps. don’t bring your suicidal friends, else they might literally let go, relax and breathe jumping over the cliff). Too bad when we came to visit the coffee shop it was closed exclusively for a wedding reception. So we took tons of photos- may it be wide-angle, 360 selfies and “pinablagir” shots. And that ends our itinerary for day 1 – or so we thought. 

Who would’ve imagined that spontaneity is our squad’s cup of tea? We could never let our day in the island go by without going to the beach. We headed to Siquijor public market to purchase ingredients to cook for our dinner.

After that we immediately went to the seaside near our house where the Php 25.00-entrance fee resort was in, the one I talked about in the previous post. Instead of going to the resort, we chose to pursue intimacy and have our dinner by the beach under the moonlight in the heat of burning drift woods. Unfortunately the tide was low, but that never stopped us from getting wet - we sat in the shallow waters as the waves grew bigger and bigger trying to swallow us, but it made us wet, and it gave us joy. We ended the night with a truth game of 3-6-9, revealing secrets and shattering walls to strengthen the squad. And what secret revealed in Siquijor stays in Siquijor.

To be continued in Siquijor Travelog IV: “Misfit and Misfortune in Different Waters.”