MALAPASCUA ADVENTURES
The Arbert was riding six- to seven-foot crests, its heavy bow rising and crashing mightily with every wave. The seawater would occasionally wash over us sitting in the open deck, even as the rain flew straight into our faces. The roiling sea underneath, white rain from above: these times remind you that the world is mostly water.
Sure, this was not a smooth boat ride, but then again—this entire trip is about adventure, no? We had braved the unseasonably rough passage because we were there to swim with sharks, hunt manta rays, look for shipwrecks. Not for nothing was the resort we were headed to called Malapascua Exotic Dive Resort.
The crew of the Arbert were grinning, perched on the outriggers and holding on to the masts. They would occasionally whoop when their ship rode high, pointing to the island in our sights. Caloy, cool as a cucumber, leaned over and said calmly, “Malapascua doesn’t look like it’s getting any nearer, is it?”
THINGS STARTED TO LOOK UP AS SOON AS WE ARRIVED. Malapascua, an hour away by boat from Maya town, north of the Cebu mainland, was at the tail-end of a weeklong spate of bad weather. The amihan—the northeastern monsoon—was blowing in, heightened by the La Niña weather phenomenon. And yet, as the Arbert’s dinghy pulled in to Malapascua’s long beach, the status of the island as a veritable beach paradise seemed safe.
Even in the gloomy weather, Malapascua was abundantly beautiful. The wide expanse of white sand on Bounty Beach remained clean and uncrowded, even as there are a good number of cottages and resorts up and down the beachfront. The red-and-white international symbol for divers can be found everywhere, but it bears remembering that the first resort on the island, the Bounty Beach Cocobana Resort, wasn’t a dive resort. Between the fine white sand, the clear tropical waters, and the colorful coral reefs just off the shore, the original appeal of Malapascua remains easily seen.
Diving became a full-fledged industry with the entry of Malapascua Exotic Dive and Beach Resort in 1997. Dik and Deoscora de Boer, owners of Exotic and the two people who may have well be responsible for discovering and developing Malapascua’s potential as a world-class dive resort, are still around. Just ten short years ago, they had come to Malapascua as tourists, diving the waters around the island and asking the local fishermen for tips.
They were pointed to a nondescript site, 45 minutes away by boat from Malapascua, where the fish were teeming, and the occasional shark could be seen jumping—jumping!—on the surface. Dik and his friend Mikael Persson dove the site, now known as Monad Shoal, and discovered something that put Malapascua indelibly on the map: a site to spot the amazing and rare thresher shark.
Today, thresher sharks can be seen everywhere on the island—on t-shirts, on all kinds of signage, painted on the sides of boats, on postcards, on logos. Malapascua and Monad Shoal have been featured on National Geographic, precisely because of the thresher sharks.
Threshers are so rarely seen because they are shy deep-water creatures, easily spooked and not interested in coming close to humans. It is the extremely long upper lobe of their tail fin—a unique, whip-like structure which grows up to a third of their full body length—that distinguishes the thresher shark. (See sidebar for more information on the thresher sharks.)
Most divers have a checklist of underwater creatures they want to see during their lives, and at the top of mine for many years is the manta ray. With wingspans of up to 30 feet, mantas must be awe-inspiring to see underwater, gracefully flying like prehistoric birds in the blue. Luckily for me, Malapascua is also known for manta sightings—in the same spot as threshers, in fact.
Threshers only come up to the top of Monad Shoal in the early morning, so it was off to bed before 9pm. Towards the middle of Bounty Beach are other dive resorts and more bars, for divers and tourists who want more nighttime action. Exotic, however, was nicely located near the end of Bounty Beach, just ten minutes’ walk from the center, but also far enough away to afford seclusion and quiet when you want. And so, a good meal and a warming shot of Goldschlager later, and it was off to a deep and peaceful slumber.
I woke up six hours later, realizing with a start that I’d nearly missed the 5am wakeup call for the early thresher shark dive. Some say that it’s the divers first boat of the day that gets the threshers, but the well-researched literature from Exotic maintains that this is not true. There is never any guarantee for thresher shark sightings, but if there’s any dive resort who knows how to get you there, it’s Exotic. They’ve played host to many professional documentary filmmakers, in fact, including Emmy Award-winning National Geographic filmmaker Jonathan Bird, whose Sharks of the Ocean Desert and Jonathan Bird’s Blue World were partly shot at Malapascua Exotic, and British television personality Monty Hall, who featured both threshers and Exotic’s house reef project on Monty Hall’s Great Ocean Adventures, shown on Animal Planet.
The sea has calmed down a little, although it is still cold, and there is a light drizzle as we set out. There are five determined divers on this dive—two women, three men; British, Swedish, Belgian, Japanese, Filipino; ranging in age from early 20s to late 40s. Diving is a democratic pursuit, not discriminating among age, race, or sex.
On the pre-dive briefing on the boat, the divemaster tells us that Monad Shoal is a “sunken island,” an underwater plateau about 19m (60 feet) on top, with its sides that drop off to at least 250m down. Thresher sharks come up from the deep water to the plateau, not to hunt or feed, but to get themselves cleaned by wrasse fish that live in those shallower depths. We were to dive straight down to the plateau, find a good, quiet spot to settle, and then wait for the sharks. Forty-five minutes on the bottom (over an hour for the nitrox divers), then up we go.
It takes a while for it to sink in: in no other place on earth is this possible. Thresher sharks have been spotted all over the world, but so far, this is the only spot identified where divers can watch for them with some regularity.
We descended slowly, found our spot not too far from near the edge of the shoal, and watched. The water was a little silty from the past week’s rains, but otherwise everything was calm and easy. We each stared out into the blue beyond, hoping that each dark shape would materialize into a shark.
When it happened, I thought it was a dream. First a blur in the blue-gray water, a silhouette that came closer and closer, until the shape became a shark. The bubbles from our tanks suddenly came out in trickles, everyone breathing slowly so as not to frighten it away. The thresher came straight at us, fluidly and gracefully, before taking a slow turn to follow a path right in front of us.
This thresher was about two meters from nose to tail, its long caudal fin swishing behind it. Usually it would use that fin to stun its prey or to propel itself out of the water like a dolphin, but right then the thresher was peacefully swimming while the cleaner wrasse kept up underneath and at its tail. The thresher wasn’t fearsome at all—it had a blunt nose, more like a dolphin than other sharks; and a small mouth—but it was still completely awe-inspiring. You never forget your first sighting of a thresher, I was told, and it was true. This whole underwater scene was surreal—nothing I’ve ever seen before, and nothing like it in the world.
We spotted the same thresher twice, swimming back and forth with the wrasses, before our divemaster signaled us to come and position ourselves on another point on Monad, in the hopes of sighting another one.
It was a busy day on the shoal—five minutes in and another shark, larger this time, also came in from the edge of the shoal. It was a little bit more shy, and disappeared quickly back into the blue after its initial parade in front of us.
After waiting in vain for it to return, our divemaster decided to bring us back to our original position, to see if we could push our luck and spot any more sharks. We settled down nearer the edge of the shoal, where the pull of the current was a little stronger. I let my knee down near where a lobster was looking at me suspiciously with its eyes. I was still looking down at it when my dive buddy tugged at my BCD urgently. There! Look!
It was the thresher we’d spotted before, still swimming following its well-documented triangular pattern over the shoal. If it saw us, it didn’t seem to mind. This thresher swam back and forth a few more times before our divemaster signaled that it was time to surface.
The wind had picked up again while we were underwater, and it was somewhat of a challenge getting back on the heaving boat. We were all shivering by the time we all scuttled back into the safety of the cabin, but everyone’s spirits were running high. “That makes up for the six dives I had without sighting any sharks!” said Richard, A British man who had been in Malapascua for the past two weeks. This was his second time to spot threshers, after a weeklong drought. Tanaka, from Japan, was scheduled to leave the island right after breakfast, and he had just squeezed in this dive. He was grinning from ear to ear as he sat, stoically, in a t-shirt and shorts as the rest of us tried to bridge the language gaps through our chattering teeth. Nothing like a shared experience of wonder to bring everyone together.
“THRESHER SHARK DIVING EVERY MORNING.” a dive instructor would tell me later when I asked him for his picture of an ideal diving vacation in Malapascua. But besides Monad Shoal, there are a wealth of diving sites to explore around Malapascua and its surrounding islands.
My next dive would be with Cora de Boer, the gracious owner of Malapascua Exotic, who offered to show me their award-winning house reef. The weather by then had eased up, and the sun finally came out. The sea was flat, and up and down the shore, you could see dive groups setting out.
Just a short five-minute ride away from shore, the Exotic house reef has won awards for the diverse marine life it hosts. There are a number of steel structures submerged to serve as artificial reefs, providing both shelter for the fish, and as a point around which new corals will form. A “photographer’s paradise,” this was called, and true enough, two of the divers with us brought along cameras. The site was also only about 12m at its deepest, so there was plenty of light to allow us to enjoy the color and the life the reef had to offer.
This site was a veritable playground for divers of all skill levels. Hardly any current, and lots of things to see—among them a jeepney, now settled on the bottom as a jaunty, very Pinoy artificial reef. Look inside, and instead of people seated shoulder-to-shoulder, we saw glass fish and a huge school of colorful cardinal fish, resting in the quiet of the jeep’s interior, and looking at the passing divers with little concern.
Sweeper fish, filefish, lion fish, and even large soles hiding on the sandy bottom, even a rare sighting of a ghost pipefish hiding near the entrance of one of the structures; and there was coral, too, of course. An easy dive, and those lucky enough to take their Open Water certification dives here would be rewarded by an easy but very interesting dive.
Matthew Rutherford, the resident dive instructor at Bantigue Cove Resort, raves about some of the sites open to divers from Malapascua. The perfect three-day vacation, he says, would start off at 5am every day with a dive at Monad Shoal. On Day 1, this would be followed by a dive off the Bantigue house reef, a trip out to the Galliano site, and then capped off by a night dive at the Lighthouse. Day 2 would include a day’s excursion out to the Doña Marilyn shipwreck, a stop at Gato Island, and perhaps a stop back at Monad to watch for manta rays. Then take it easy on the third day: diving and picnics at Calanggaman, and then a night dive at Bantigue.
Matt and his wife Juliet, who manages Bantigue Cove, have lived in Malapascua for about two years now—and plan, they say, to stay at least three years more. Even in their short time here, they’ve managed to acquire some unforgettable stories, just from their dive trips: there was someone who asked him to take footage of the Doña Marilyn wreck, because one of his parents had died in the 1988 tragedy that took hundreds of lives. Wreck dives are creepy up to a point—to see something familiar now underwater, hallways now topsy-turvy, leading up to nowhere—but to be asked to film a parent’s death trap…well.
The polar opposite of this tragic story happened just last January, on Monad. A man proposed to his fiancée underwater, and Matt was there to record the happy event. He showed us a copy of the video, and there it is, a silent underwater movie: the man getting down on one knee on the sandy shoal, interrupted by the arrival of a manta ray. The camera follows the manta’s flight, before focusing again on the happy couple. The man shifts his weight to his other knee, before signing, “I love you.” He pulls out a platinum ring with three diamonds, wrapped in fishing net to keep it from floating away. She reacts as if she were on the surface, hands flying to her mouth before she cocks her head to one side in astonishment and joy. She takes the ring, nods her assent, and they pull the regulators out of their mouths and kiss.
YOU CAN DIVE ALL DAY, IF YOU LIKE. But there are limits to the amount of nitrogen your tissues can absorb. Fortunately, however, Malapascua has lots to offer the beach-lover, so that the surface interval was not the chore it could normally be.
After any dive, you can take your boat to circle the island, which, only about 2.5 km long and 1 km wide, can be circumnavigated in less than half an hour on an outrigger. Take it on foot, and it will take only two hours to get back to where you started.
Bounty Beach is the island’s busiest stretch, along the southeastern shore of Malapascua. There are a number of resorts on the beach, to cater to every stripe of tourist. Among these are the Cocobana Beach Resort, owned by Freddy Krummenmacher, which was the first to open shop in 1992. That, along with the Blue Water resort, which followed it a few years later, are the island’s pioneering resorts. They still remain favorites among the burgeoning number of resorts on the island, testament to their commitment to good service.
Travelers looking for top-of-the-line amenities can go to the unique Mangrove Oriental, tucked away in a cove fifteen minutes away from Bounty Beach. To hear her tell it, owner Josephine Macazo put up the resort almost by accident, at the behest of her children. “First they said they wanted a beach house to relax in…and that’s where it all started,” Josephine says, mock-seriously. Only in its fourth season of serving guests, today the Mangrove Oriental is the island’s most luxurious resort, with eight beach cottages and of course, three themed hillside villas: the island-themed Banyan cottage; the Kasbah, a Moroccan-inspired honeymoon suite; and the African-influenced Safari family cottage. As of this writing, there is a dormitory building being finished up, to accommodate large groups.
But then, it’s almost beside the point to book at the Mangrove Oriental and not stay in one of the sumptuous villas. The Kasbah is probably the most popular, made up to be a honeymooners’ private getaway. The high-ceilinged cottage is done up in cool terracotta shades inside and out, with the intricately designed dark wooden furniture from Mindanao. Most importantly, however, there is a private roofdeck from which one can peek out at the sea or look out to the stars.
If your idea of a perfect beach holiday is romantic isolation, then there is Bantigue Cove on the northern side of Malapascua. At least fifteen minutes away by motorcycle from Bounty Beach, Bantigue offers more privacy and more quiet than the resorts on the long beach. Favored by honeymooners and by families, Bantigue is the very essence of a rustic island getaway.
No matter where you stay, though, Malapascua opens opportunities for the same activities for travelers. Diving, of course, and island-hopping, snorkeling, kayaking—or, for the more laid-back beachgoer, simply swimming and sunbathing. Ironically for such a tiny island, there is simply too much to do, too much to fit into a one trip. “You’ll keep coming back,” is often the admonition that meets the first-time visitor, and more often than not, it is true.
The edited version of this story was previously published as the cover story in SEAir's Inflight magazine, April-May 2008 issue
