With­out a doubt Bora­cay is the most famous beach in the Philip­pines, usu­ally ranked among the top ten in the world. It is a place where sun wor­ship­pers flock en masse each year, with accom­mo­da­tion cater­ing to the bud­get trav­eler and resort tourists aplenty and sev­eral water activ­i­ties avail­able to enter­tain every­one. This means how­ever that the beach can get crowded, and besides swim­ming and lay­ing in the sun there is not much more to do. Thus we chose another beach which has all that (maybe is not as long) and more: Alona beach in Panglao island, Bohol.

Get­ting to Alona beach from Cebu is easy: a 1.5 hr ferry to Tag­bi­la­ran (550p/p) and a tryci­cle to the beach (200 p) which wil take an addi­tional 30 min­utes. Cheap accom­mo­da­tion is scarce, so if you are tavel­ling alone you might want to head else­where. For 800 pesos you can find a room at Bohol Divers Resort ( no frills) and for 1400 or there abouts you have a lot to choose from– good bar­gain­ing can make the prices drop about 40%.

Myself hard at work

We vis­ited sev­eral options as sug­gest by our tryci­cle dri­ver, and even­tu­ally chose Bohol Sea Breeze– a big cot­tage with 2 lev­els, cable, AC, clean, excel­lent staff and Hank being the man­ager you would like to find everywhere.

Alona beach is about 800 m long, with palm trees, white sand and turquoise water. It is one of those pic­ture per­fect beaches. Snorkelling is not very good but can keep you busy if you wish and there is plenty of div­ing, but prices are higher than any­where else in the Philippines.

It is also a good place from which to visit the Choco­late Hills and Bohol’s Tar­sier, a pri­mate that is an enden­gared species and endemic to these islands. There are sev­eral options to do the trip, but we chose to rent a scooter (450 p) for 24 hrs and stay overnight some­where in Loboc, the clos­est town to the Choco­late hills.

UNESCO’s World Her­itage Choco­late Hills

Alona beach is about 800 m long, with palm trees, white sand and turquoise water. It is one of those pic­ture per­fect beaches.

The ride to Loboc is about 1 hour from Alona, where acco­mo­da­tion is easy to find in Nuts Huts or Cot­tage Hills, both offer­ing stun­ning views. We stayed at Cot­tage Hills because it wasn’t as secluded and get­ting to town was eas­ier. We made friends with Jani, a Finnish solo trav­eller with whom we would hook up the fol­low­ing day to ride to the hills. The 2 motor­bike con­voy rode smoothly through spec­tac­u­lar scenery, spot­ting places that you usu­ally only see in Nat Geo or Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel. The Hills are an inter­est­ing site, but I would say that rid­ing the motor­bike and stop­ping along the way to take pic­tures and chat with locals is the best part of it all.

Field work

After vis­it­ing the Choco­late Hills we went to the Bohol Tar­sier Sanc­tu­ary to see the Tar­sier, an endan­gered pri­mate with two species one of which can only be seen in Bohol. The sanc­tu­ary is rel­a­tively well funded (dona­tions) and is one of a kind in the world, and the keep­ers make a big effort to pre­serve this sleepy lit­tle ani­mal.  There are other places where you can see Tar­siers near Loboc, but these lit­tle crea­tures are very ner­vous by nature and stress out eas­ily, many of them dying in the hands of the own­ers who do not care about them being endan­gered and only about the money they make when show­ing them to tourists– it is up to you to decide where you want to see it.

Tar­sier

The fol­low­ing day we expected to hop on a ferry on our way to Min­danao and even­tu­ally reach Cloud 9 in Siar­gao, but were sur­prised to learn that com­mu­ni­ca­tion prob­lems had us in the wrong side of the island at depar­ture time. We made it to Jagna a day later where the ferry now departs from, and I rented a scooter again to get lost  some­where in the moun­tains– a won­der­ful expe­ri­ence yet again, spot­ting  Kawasan falls but not being able to jump in the emer­ald col­ored water because it was get­ting dark and I had to make it back to town.  If you have to sleep here do so at Idea Pen­sion House and Gar­den Cafe, a sim­ple guest­house run by deaf peo­ple who will go out of their way to make your stay as con­fort­able as it can be.

I believe that choos­ing Alona beach ver­sus Bora­cay was the best deci­sion we could have made. We spent sev­eral days at the beach relax­ing and enjoy­ing the fine sand and weather and once we wanted to see some­thing new we made our way to the Choco­late Hills and Tar­sier Sanc­tu­ary. The motor­cy­cle rides accross the island are superb, the area is safe and despite Alona not being the cheap­est of beaches the  place  is very well worth vis­it­ing.  Will I be back some day?

Have you seen the Choco­late Hills? Were they brown when you were there?  How about Alona beach, did you make it there? It was fas­ci­nat­ing to see the Tar­sier as well, don’t you think? Please share this post if you liked it!