Palawan Village Hotel offered good value and the price of a spacious room for the night was a mere P800 but this was with a fan although AC was available at extra cost.

We arrived In Cebu early evening after flying in from Puerto Princesa and the plan was to reach Bogo City before 10pm where we had pre-arranged a night’s stay by telephone a week or so earlier at a Pension House.
Bogo was only around 15 mins from Hagnaya Port where the ferry sails to Bantayan Island but the ferries stop early evening so we wouldn’t have made the crossing in time. It took between 3 and 4 hours to reach our destination and it was really cheap on the Ceres Liner bus - less than P200.

Bogo City is an interesting place. The bus station is some way out in an area that reminded me of the Wild West for some reason. The town itself (not really a city) is different and has similarities to towns I’ve been to in the UK with a neat manicured garden with benches. It’s very clean here and I witnessed in excess of twenty students adorned in green t-shirts sweeping and cleaning up the town centre on the morning of the next day.

We arrived on Bantayan Island by around lunchtime and headed for our resort namely Beach Placid on Alice Beach for a 4 night stint. There are two main beaches on Bantayan at Santa Fe with Alice being one of them. Both are spacious both in length and width with nice sand and an inviting aqua coloured ocean. The only downside was that the water was too shallow to swim.

There’s not a great deal to see or do here. Virgin Island (not to be confused with the one in Bohol that bears the same name) is one attraction, although I would describe it more as a tourist trap. The island is nice enough but it’s no great shakes and doesn’t warrant the P500 entrance fee for a party of two. For seating additional fees apply on top of the short crossing from Bantayan which was P600.

After our four nights here, we had three spare before our last night in Manila. I was thinking of doing both Malapascua Island and Camotes Islands but realistically it had to be a choice of one or the other and the former got the nod. I had decided on choosing a resort with a swimming pool this time and I had been eyeing up Thresher Cove Resort. The website states in excess of P5000 for a standard room but I noticed that the price on Agoda was slightly below P3000 when I was surfing the net on Aimee’s phone. I didn’t book it until the day before leaving Bantayan but this was at a new much reduced price - P1100. Unfortunately this price only covered two nights but after arriving we liked Thresher Cove so much I haggled for a third night which set me back P2000.