Tuesday in Bohol

We woke early in the morning to catch a fast ferry to Bohol.  These ships are much smaller but much faster than the ferries we used to take the last time I was here.  They are primarily for passenger traffic.  Instead of going to sleep in one port and waking up in the next, you only have a 2-3 hour trip between ports.  I spent the time with the youth teaching and playing Bang with them.  Bang is a western card game that has you trying to kill each other and drinking beer or whiskey to recover your life points.  A great game for teenagers.    Our game was also challenged by our lack of a table which made things interesting.

Our first stop in Bohol was to see the self-sustaining livelihood projects that Dennis Drake oversees.  Mr. Drake came over as a peace corp volunteer to work with the deaf.  He set up schools for the deaf.  He however noticed that they had a difficult time finding work after they finished their schooling.  Not many people wanted to hire deaf employees.  He then started businesses that were manned by a predominantly deaf staff.  He also saw the need for these businesses to be able to pay for themselves and help subsidize the schools.  He has setup 2 hotels, 3 restaurants, laundry service catering to hotels, fishing lure manufacturing for export, etc.  He is constantly looking for new ideas.  He had an awesome idea to setup a fish massage spa at the hotel we were staying at.  You dip your feet in and the fish peck at them, cleaning them and giving you a massage.  He spent the morning with us and showed us the different facilities.  What a wonderful ministry.  It got us all thinking about what possibilities there were for LCW/LCP.

From there we went to a place to have a special Bohol lunch.  It was a dinner cruise with Filipino food.  I ate it up.  They also had a singer who constantly sang boat, sailing or river tunes.  During the cruise they had a stop at one of the communities where they sang and danced the tinikling.  It was great seeing it again.  We left the cruise then proceeded to a habitat for one of the strangest monkeys I have ever seen.  It has the eyes of an owl, body of a monkey, feet of a frog and tail of a rat.  Sounds like a monster.  It however only grows to the size of your hand and the babies are the size of your thumb.

We also visited a butterfly sanctuary before proceeding to one of the symbols of Bohol, the Chocolate Hills. They were beautiful.  No one knows how they were formed.  Unfortunately it has been raining quite a bit and the hills were kind of green.  One of the few times you don't want greenery right?

Afterward we rushed to a zoo that contained a 20 foot Philippine Boa Constrictor and a number of smaller creatures.  The thing was huge with a bulge in the middle that held the remains of a goat it ate a few days ago.  The cage also contained a monkey called George, 2 Philippine eagles and some other bird.  After we stood there admiring the snake for a few minutes we were all astonished to be invited into the cage.  Of course I was the first to enter.  It was a little scary when the cage was shut with only myself and the guide.  I figured that if the snake was hungry it would probably go for the smaller of us (which wasn't me).  I touched the snake then had George look for lice in my hair.  Thankfully he found none.  Kind of tickled though.

We then went back to the hotel for a late dinner and a game of bang before calling it a night.  I checked off halo halo from my list of things I needed to eat at dinner.

Back to Dumaguete tomorrow.