Location: Daanlungsod, Cebu, Philippines

I wish I could say the day started at 4:30 am but in fact it started with a rooster crowing at 3 AM and me yelling “you’re wrong!!” out the window at him.

Max somehow slept through all of that and when Allan showed up around 4:30 we were ready to go- I was wide awake. First off I just need to say:

WE’RE SWIMMING WITH WHALE SHARKS TODAY!!!

Now that I got that announcement out of the way… we came out of the alley into pounding rain, and saw Allan on a motorbike. I expected when we booked a tour we would join a bus of people maybe or even get in a van but nope. A motorbike it’s gonna be! It honestly wasn’t so bad – we were absolutely soaked from head to toe when we arrived, but we laughed a lot on the way there about the fact that both of us just piled onto this tiny motorbike in the rain, in the dark, in the middle of the night, with a total stranger who had like four teeth and barely understood a word we said and oh my god.

After a debriefing about the rules on swimming with whale sharks, we were ushered into a little boat with life jackets, a snorkel mask and about 10 other people. The boatmen started paddling towards an area where there seemed to be single person Filipino kayaks with guys throwing little bits of meat out into the water.

Before I go any further I would just like to note that Max has been incredibly nervous the last couple days about this. It’s been a lot of me placatingly reading him articles about how whale sharks don’t want to eat people, and even if they wanted to they couldn’t! That didn’t help much as he was pretty stuck on the fact that they were 45-60 foot long sharks that ‘yes, could theoretically could fit you in their mouths if they wanted to!’

As soon as we approached the area I pointed out the whale sharks mouths poking up, with water whirl-pooling into them as they opened wide. Max was totally silent but when it was time to jump in he got excited and quickly realized all was totally fine. For about half an hour we dove down to get a good look (with strict rules about how close you could get) at the gentle giants. They were MASSIVE. Broad flat heads with a wide mouth bobbed from side to side all around us. Their dark blue and white spotted backs passed by underneath us silently, coming up to filter feed on the little bits of meat the kayakers were throwing into the water. At one point I was looking at one and out of nowhere another one swims like two feet from my left side and it took all of my effort not to choke on my snorkel. I did ingest a lot of water anyway… I think Max played it way cooler than me when we were actually swimming!

We caught another boat, still in the pouring rain out to Sumilon Island, which is this insanely gorgeous little hill with a long fine white sand bar right off the front. Despite the rain we played in the ocean for a couple of hours, not really wanting to get out since the air was colder than the water! I found out here that Max has never swam in a tropical ocean before today, and was expecting it to be as freezing as the North Pacific! The clear teal water was warm, and we floated around finding ‘hot-pockets’ to rest in. We explored the rock a bit but it was pretty miserable in the rain, so we stuck to the warm water.

Eventually we caught a boat back, to find Allan waiting for us to take us home. We had so much day left, since it was barely noon and we’d already been up for 8 hours! We explored the town a little bit and found some ruins that were completely made of coral stone. A large blue windowed church (circa 1879) stood behind the ruins, while half a guard tower rose up at the front. There was a statue of Fr.Julian Bermejo, a priest and military captain, standing looking out over the water holding a cross up. I stopped to look at it for awhile, kind of in awe.

Max started feeling unwell, so we returned to the house where he had a long nap and I watched a few shows and spent a little time by the water when it wasn’t raining. He woke up feeling much better and we visited on the porch, deciding to grab some local food for dinner down the road. Max even tried the local favourite dessert ‘halo halo’ – the weirdest combination of things ever. Think purple yam ice cream, bananas, mangos, iced coconut milk, and clear jello cubes. It’s almost like they picked every sweet thing available and mixed it all together… and then added red beans also. So weird in fact that Max didn’t even finish it, and grabbed a pack of skittles on the way home to mask the taste in his mouth.

What an amazing day.

Sav

P.S. When I was describing the part in this post about the sharks to Max he just sighed curtly and said “biggest. f***ing. mouths.”