The end of the 1,710-km journey

On the way to discovering beaches and spectacular sunsets, we drive into a 400-year-old town named Carcar, about 40 kilometers from Cebu City. Allow more than an hour to get to this town as the traffic condition from Talisay, Cebu City's next door neighbor, to Naga is rather heavy. Also, be sure to be patient during this short drive; the public utility vehicles claim the road - even if that is for the oncoming traffic.

Carcar, a 400-year-old town

A simple arch claiming that it is a “Quadricentennial town”, welcomes you to Carcar. As you drive into the town, you will see old wooden houses (late 1800s to 1900s architecture). If you’re doing this cross country drive, you will be reminded of the scenes along the road of Sariaya in Quezon province, where such architecture still stands.

Carcar’s charm is not only being the oldest town in the island. Most people know the name as the source of the original chicharon (with a lot of pork fat under the skin), and the sweet rice cracker known as ampao. Stalls selling these stuff line the roads, especially along the rotunda where you will find the landmark colonial kiosk.

Carcar (population: 80,000) is also known as the “Marikina of the South” because it has a bustling shoe-making industry which has worked up a good reputation in the cities.

We did not know anything about Carcar before we drove into its town center, so we went to the Mayor’s Office looking for a tourism desk. A clerk led us to the desk of Ricardo “Bop” Alcordia, the budget officer who is also the town’s unofficial tourism officer. Despite a desk load of paper work, Bop offered to bring us around the town and answered our questions about its history.

Beside the municipal building, you will not fail to notice a charming wooden building whose eaves and walls have dainty cutwork designs. This is the town’s dispensary and clinic.

Standing next to it is the St. Catherine’s College with a main building reflecting a colonial air, and life-size statues of the saints guarding the courtyard. Carcar is the only third class municipality which has a school offering nursery to the tertiary level of education. Bop also pointed out that Carcar’s literary rate for the population above ten years old is relatively high with an average of 89 percent.

The parish church, constructed in 1876, stands within this cluster. It is dedicated to the town’s patron saint, St. Catherine.

The church is not the oldest structure in this town; it is the Balay na Tisa, built in 1859 and owned by the Valencia and Noel families. But since this is located along a sidestreet, it has not become the landmark of travelers. A colonial-inspired gazebo, which stands in the rotunda where streets leading out of town converge, is the landmark structure that travelers use as a reference point.

It was midmorning when we drove into Carcar where we originally planned to have a good breakfast. We could not find a restaurant along the main highway, so we settled for another “roadside cafe” of a higher standard than the one we chose in Danao. This one offered cooked food, rice, and cola. Countryside hospitality allowed us to open some canned sausage and pork and beans to add to our breakfast. They also provided hot water for our three-in-one coffee. Our bill: R80.

Moalboal: Diver’s haven

The meal allowed us to continue the drive 50 kms. southwest, to Moalboal. The drive took us about an hour and a half over gravel roads, most of them under repair but with no workers in sight. From the silhouette of the Bohol island which occupies the east side of Carcar, we now catch a view of Negros island which lies accross the Tañon Strait separating Cebu and Negros islands.

Moalboal is a diver’s haven. Scuba divers from around the world, most of them from Europe, have visited the place, some of them even staying semi-permanently. A few have married local girls and have built diving resorts. Others have just built large vacation houses within the village of resorts known as the Panagsama Beach.

Panagsama Beach is about four kilometers of gravel road from the town hall of Moalboal. A cluster of Mediterranean-style cottages are sprawled around a small area as resorts. The largest of the resorts is the Quo Vadis Beach Resort which has about 28 rooms, eight cottages, a dive shop, an Italian restaurant and a swimming pool. It is owned by a German national, Jurgen Ost, and his wife Lingling, who is a local girl. Both used to work for a dive shop as divemasters and later set up their own bar and restaurant, then a dive shop which expanded into Quo Vadis resort.

The other resorts with modern facilities are also owned by foreigners. The one nearest Quo Vadis is owned by a Swiss married to a local lass; the other farther away is owned by a German, also married to a cousin of Lingling.

If you’ve been to Boracay, the layout of this village of resorts and restaurants will be familiar to you. A winding road which at first looks like a trail is actually a road which can fit exactly only an SUV, the Trooper.

Lingling guided us through that narrow trail, which showed us an interesting landscape: a row of large houses too big for vacation houses and too modern for the rural village, some of them still in the process of construction. One of those houses being built is hers and Jurgen’s. It has six rooms, two designed as guest rooms.

The trail leads to the main road, a strip of concrete too narrow to accommodate two SUVs. There is no road shoulder, only a drop of about eight inches into the old gravel road.

We had a full 12-hour stop in Moalboal. Except for Aris who had prepared for a dive, Anjo and I felt a little strange being away from the Trooper.

After two hours, we drove off to the town with Lingling as our guide. She led us to the Orchid Gallery, the home of town councilor Felix Pocong Jr., which displays thousands of orchid varieties. Felix, who told us he worked in the circulation department of the Manila Bulletin in the eighties, is not only an orchid collector, he cross-breeds varieties. One of his special, but still unnamed breed is a yellow Cattleya. -to be continued