The following day we had to tear ourselves away from our awesome Balai, so it was back into the deep countryside of Bohol, this time to the North. It is visually rich driving throughout the provinces, as it is interesting seeing a primarily agrarian culture.

Rice fields are everywhere in the flats, farming of which is done all by hand, figuratively and literally as ecologically “green” as can be. Cows are used to till the grounds by hand, and all harvesting is also manually done.

Deep interior roads are frequently made of steamrolled crushed limestone, and every few miles you will see off to the side a giant pile of tan colored limestone gravel waiting to be used. All throughout the countryside roads you will see plastic tarps on the paved road edges with rice being sun dried. And yes, you do have to weave a little to avoid them. Also shown below is some bizarre fruit being harvested by local farmers that could probably be used as a weapon in a last ditch effort.

Bohol Rice Drying.jpgBohol Strange Fruit Harvesting.jpg

Speaking of avoidance, there are peoples dogs and goats and some sheep everywhere. I watched other local drivers that do not stop or slow down at all. Local drivers are just that way. Although our Eskaya driver was quite conscientious of Western sensibilities, if you run into this, whether from a tour operator or taxi driver, just politely explain to them that your trip would be totally ruined if he hit a dog or an animal, and to please slow way down when approaching, and how much Americans appreciate that, even if the animals are experts at avoiding cars, which most are.

After a 90 minute scenic drive with a few stops for cold cokes and to say hello to locals, we finally arrived at the Dagahoy Caves in Danao, about 2.5 hours north of Panglao island.

Now I always enjoy the story behind the nature spectacle, and the Dagahoy Caves in Danao does not disappoint!

The Dagohoy Rebellion was one of two significant revolts that occurred in Bohol, Philippines during the Spanish Era.

Francisco Dagohoy led the longest revolt against the Spaniards in Philippine history. The revolt took the Spaniards 85 years (1744–1829) to quell. Forced labor was one of the causes of the revolt. But what triggered the decision to rise up in arms against the Spanish authorities in Bohol was the refusal of a Jesuit priest to give a Christian burial to Dagohoy's brother.

These strings of events led Dagohoy to make a vow to correct the wrong done to his brother. In the process, he stopped paying tribute to the Spaniards and refused to render the required "forced" labor. He also called upon his relatives, friends and the other residents to do the same and fight for their freedom.

Being so infuriated with the priest, he instigated the people to rise in arms. The ground was fertile for Dagohoy's call. Around 3,000 Boholanos rallied to his call and joined him in a revolt against Spanish injustice and tyranny. Together with other leading members of the Tagbilaran, Baclayon and Dauis principalia, Dagohoy proclaimed the "Independence of Bohol" in the mountains of Talibon and Inabanga.

Dagohoy defeated the Spanish-Filipino forces sent against him and established a free government in the mountains, and had 3,000 followers, which subsequently increased to 20,000. The patriots remained unsubdued in their mountains stronghold, and, even after Dagohoy's death, continued to defy Spanish power.

Up there in the mountains, the revolutionaries established their headquarters, which they fortified with trenches of big rocks, just like the way some upland farmers pile up big rocks on top of one another in their farms. They also built dwellings for their families and cleared up some of the forest areas so that they can plant crops for their subsistence. Since Dagohoy has experience in leading a community being a cabeza de barangay, it is safe to assume that he set some rules and norms to maintain peace and order in the new community. When the other Boholanos heard about the revolt, they expressed their sympathy by joining the revolutionaries or by supplying them with arms and money.

The Francisco Dagohoy Cave in the town of Danao was the headquarters of Dagohoy. One of the many crystal-studded passages within Dagohoy's cave has an underwater route leading to dry land, and it is said that every time Spaniards would search the cave, Dagohoy would swim underwater through this passage to hide in the breathing space.

We weren't going to be doing any underwater swimming, but we sure had a plan to check out the Dagahoy Caves!

Danao River Gorge.jpg

The entire area has been turned into an adventure nature park, with zip lines, scenic overlooks to the river below as shown, and there is white water rafting too, but we wanted to see where the Philippine National Resistance Hero and his men hid from the Spanish invaders.

The Dagahoy Caves are not for the physically timid, there is much climbing to do inside, and it is slippery. Unlike the U.S., if you slip and hurt yourself, there will not be an ambulance chasing lawyer waiting outside with a retainer agreement who will blame everyone but you.

The Caves are full of all sorts of unusual limestone formations that are in really excellent shape.

Danao Caves 2.jpgDanao Caves 3.jpgDanao Caves 4.jpg

The caves are humid, and full of thousands and thousands of bats, and a host of bizarre insects. I could often feel the woosh of wind go right by my head from bats escaping our piercing lights. I asked our professional guides if the bats ever fly into anyone, and they said never, their sonar is too good.

If you look closely at the below photo, you can see a bat in mid-flight. Also shown are some of the bizarre insects to be found inside, including a bat dung eating beetle, a blind cave dwelling cricket, and this bizarre cave dwelling spider, which was huge and spindly.

Danao Cave Bat Mid-Flight.jpgDanao Cave Dwelling Cricket.jpgDanao Cave Bat Dung Beetle.jpgDanoa Cave Dwelling Spider.jpg

The spider was as still as can be, but when I touched it's leg, it had no shortage of speed!

Some of the Dagahoy Caves take hours to explore, some can be done in an hour. Some you will get wet up to your neck, but the one we were in kept us out of the water. Upon our exit, a rain had started and it was dark, so we stopped to take a photo of our expert cave guides, and once we started off again, I noticed this huge, fat millipede that was about as big around as my thumb, so a quick photo and we talked about the Boholano names for the bizarre we insects we saw.

Danao Cave Guides.jpgDanao Huge Millipede.jpg

Eventually we returned back at Eskaya in the late afternoon. Dinner was served up, this time some huge barbecued garlic shrimp, my favorite before retiring to watching the Discovery Channel in on the flat panel TV.

The next morning it was off to Alona beach via Eskayas aircon van for some diving! Gear was loaded up by Bohol Divers staff, and off we went to see what all the ruckus was about Bohol diving!

Most of Alona Beach is shallows out to at least a 100 yards, where at the end you may be in only 20 feet of water. The waters are so clear it seems like 10 feet deep. There one normally descends down a fairly steep wall to the bottom which is about at 70-90 feet in depth. There are lots of finger crevices along the way, and like most Philippines dive destinations, the wall was just covered with an incredible variety of hard and soft corals, invertebrates, crustaceans, fish, etc.

The dives along Alona Beach’s wall finish up in the shallow end of the reef where it meets the wall, and you can do your safety stop while diving, something I always find cool. Here we ran into a mooring line that was about 1.5” in diameter. I spied a huge black frogfish up about 5 feet off the bottom on the line, and I placed my had near him without touching him. He decided to leave his perch and descend down to the bottom sand that is interspersed with reef. I backed swam away in a big circle and fiddle a bit with my videocamera settings, and her come Frankie the Frogfish, waddling along the bottom straight towards me. I was already kneeling on the sand, and he swam right up to my knees, then rotated skywards and swam up to my chest, where he promptly settled on my chest facing towards my chin. I guess I was the coolest black around he or she could find, and there it sat, in all its glory. For humor I made petting motions as if I were stroking its back like a cat...Now how often do you get to do a safety stop along with a huge frogfish on your chest?!

After lunch, we headed back out to a dive spot that had a large bangka wreck at about 100 feet in depth. Just to the east of it is a flat area with garden eels everywhere. For the life of me I cannot get close to these guys with my video HID lights on. So since my videocam is slightly negatively buoyant, I set it down in the sand right in front of the previously exposed garden eels, then swam away.

Now there is a certain leap of faith with leaving $20,000 worth of underwater video gear at 100 feet and swimming away 50 feet, but apparently the garden eels had my number, and Randel my assistant cameraman just shook his head watching my antics from afar. You should see his garden eel footage.

Early evening we did a night dive along the same wall, and this is my favorite. Right away I noticed there were these small red gorgonians about 1-2 feet tall, and most had a commensal crab on it that had the same polyps on its body as the gorgonian. Now these weren’t just camouflage mimicry, these tiny crabs actually remove live polyps from the gorgonian and place them permanently on their shell, where they continue to thrive.

I got some great HD macro video footage of these characters. Once while videotaping one, I noticed something odd in the viewfinder slink its right by, but it was just a fleeting glimpse and I didn’t catch what it was as I was doing some really tight macro on one of these unusual crabs. A minute or two later, this thing reappears and gets stuck right on the gorgonian. I pulled my eye away from the viewfinder and here was this meter long colonial salp about the diameter of a pencil, where each one of the individual salps come together in a colony and rythmicly pulsate as a means of rather aimless locomotion. it looks like a long string of clear jelly with 50 dark brown dots in the center of each individual clear linked animal. You can see the tiny rows of cilia on each salp as it pulsates them to propel the colony. My previous reaction would have been to try to free it from being caught up in the gorgonian, but salps and ctenophores have almost no structural integrity and would be damaged or killed if touched, so I let it do its thing while videotaping it, and within 30 seconds it had freed itself.

There were numerous other types of gorgonians that were less polyp laden, and looked more lattice-like in nature. 1 our of every 5 had this crab that looked sort of like a cross between an arrow crab, but with a proportionally much smaller body. Some were the size of a large coin.

I also ran into this bizarre looking crab with jagged legs about the size of a half dollar piece. The poor guy had a flat piece of dead gorgonian stuck on his body as he walked along the reef. Always one to pick up even worms and bugs that may get stepped on, I held my videocam housing off the the side with one hand, and with the other, tried to remove the dead piece of seafan stuck to the crab. It was quite difficult as it seemed really stuck, but I finally removed and placed it about a foot away. Now I zoomed in to get some good macro footage of this bizarre stilt-legged crab, and what does he do? He runs straight over the the dead piece of seafan and he has the thing hoisted back over the top of him in 2 seconds flat! I looked close and it used its two rear legs which seemed to be strangely pointed upwards with two hooked ends to hang onto it.

Off it scurried, and I now realized it wasn’t stuck, it was deliberately holding this latticed dead seafan piece over the top of its body like some sort of Aquatic Roman Gladiator shield. How cool! I have since learned they are called carrier crabs, who will grab all sorts of objects and hold them over tis body, from spiny sea urchins, anemones, stinging jellyfish held upside down, etc.

On one night dive I forgot to full charge my dive lights, and they went dead after about 45 minutes. I indicated to our dive guide and Randel my buddy to continue the dive, and I just hung out close and watched them looking for suitable critters to shoot. As I got further from them, and when their lights were not pointed towards me, as my eyes adjusted I could actually see fairly decent just from the moonlight penetrating through the clear Alona waters. Since I make a habit of never crowding other divers, especially the ones with enough brains to fully charge their lights, I amused my self for the next 15 minutes swatting the water in front of me and watching all the phosphorescent animals put on a green light show.

Alona Beach Seafood.jpg

After our guide and Randel made their obligatory safety stop, it was back to Philippine Island Divers where we had some cold drinks and dinner like my dish above available at many of the Alona Beach al-fresco diners while Randel and I shared stories of the days worth of diving till Randel headed off to his accommodations at a different resort owned by his friends.

Back at our Eskaya Balai, one can just grab a cold drink, throw all your clothes in the laundry bag, and after a quick shower, go through the sliding patio door and go for a cool night swim in your own completely private pool, where only the occasional and similarly nude bullfrogs will stare.