Today we begin our first vacation from our vacation. We are off to the island of Siquijor. Our first stop is Dumaguete. It should be a relatively short day. That is not the way it works out!
This is a familiar road to Leroy and Riza. Rather than make the trip to Bacolod to hit the main highway¸ we will take a shortcut from Murcia.and join the highway much further south. We miss the sign telling us the bridge is closed and a new bridge is under construction. We end up having to backtrack and join the highway at Bago. With all the road construction we have still saved some distance but lost time. The good news is Guimaras Island mangos are ripe and fill the stalls at Valadolid. We will be stopping there on the way home!
We pass through Binalbagan where Riza grew up. Her father still has a home there and a cousin runs the family farm on the edge of the city. We don’t have time to stop today. We are heading for a lunch stop at Kabankalan. We stopped at the Zaycoland Resort. We stayed there on our last trip and thoroughly enjoyed it. We were very hot and tired when we pulled in. Lunch was as good as we remembered and the gracious hotel and grounds relaxed us.
We were ready for the next leg of the journey over the mountain to Bais City. It is a rough, winding mountain road with more construction. It is very hot and the open windows bring in as much dust as cool air. We were glad to hit the coast road outside of Bais and be on the last leg to Dumaguete.
Leroy was nervous driving in the unfamiliar city. It was more good luck than good management that we directed him straight to the hotel front door! All four of us were ready for a rest break in the air conditioned comfort of our rooms.
In the late afternoon we were ready to explore and we walked along Street to the ocean front and down to Shakey’s Pizza for a cold drink. The menu offered Root Beer floats but there was no vanilla ice cream today. I could not think of another flavour that would go with root beer, so I decided on root beer alone. The rest shared a pitcher of beer. Leroy had a banana split while the rest of us shared Mojos. Neither the root beer nor the Mojos had a familiar flavour. Cold and wet was good enough! The pitcher of beer was very generous and I think they had trouble finishing it.
We enjoyed our walk back along the promenade. It is a great place for people watching. They seem to have had their own version of the Concordia sinking along the waterfront as well.
We cleaned up and changed for dinner. The hotel restaurant is not serving food at this time. We hailed a tricycle for the ride to Lab-As Seafood restaurant. It is about 2 km away along the waterfront and had good reviews online. The food was good, though we have had much better in Bacolod. The price was double or triple what we are accustomed to paying. No one was really happy with the dinner. We would not go back.
We chose to stay at the J. Obdulia’s Business Inn on Gov. Predices Street right by the Cathedral Bell tower. The hotel is well kept and we had rooms on the fourth floor against the next building so the rooms were relatively quiet. We did hear the cathedral bells clearly at 6:00 PM and again at 6:00 AM. Riza heard the 4:00 AM call to Mass but we missed that one! Our alarm was set for 6:00 AM so it was not inconvenient. We walked up the street for an early breakfast at MacDonald’s. We made arrangements with the hotel to leave the car with them and got a tricycle to the port.
We were in plenty of time to get our tickets and board the Delta III for the trip to Siquijor. It was not what I pictured when I think of FastCat. It was an older well used vessel. The dock was rocking enough to upset me. The boat was worse. When we went below the smell of mold and mildew was so strong, I was sure I was going to have a rough trip. Surprisingly, we settled in just fine. The trip is scheduled to take 45 minutes. I think we were more like an hour and a quarter. Still, we made it safely to Siquijor city where a jitney was waiting with a sign welcoming the Doves. We drove off leaving our fellow travellers behind as they bargained for their rides with the crowd of tricycle drivers clogging the quay.
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