Malapascua is a small island off the northern tip of Cebu island, that has some unique features to interest divers.

Getting to Malapascua and Where to Stay

You can book trips from the UK (check out the web sites for Ultimate Diving). We booked through Wanderlust Vacations in Hong Kong (www.wanderlust.com) who were very helpful and organised the trip including flights, accomodation and diving.

We flew direct from Hong Kong to Cebu on Cathay Pacific, the alternative is to go via Manila, then on to Cebu. Cebu airport is comfortable and efficient, but is a bit stretched when the larger planes arrive. The airport tax to leave Cebu is 550 pesos (2010 price).

We were met outside the terminal by a representative of the Exotic Island Resort, and transferred to a minibus. The journey to Maya at the northern end of Cebu province takes between 2.5 to 3 hours depending on traffic. Fropm Maya it was an open boat ride (with a sunshade) across to Malapascua, from half to three quarters of an hour, depending on the boat. We were overtaken by a rain storm, so arrived on the island quite wet.

Be warned, it will cost 20 pesos per piece of luggage to transfer to the boat, and at low tide you will take an intermediate small boat out to the ferry that takes you to the island, which will cost up to 200 pesos, so get some small denomination notes before you go.

Exotic Island Dive Resort

Established since 1998, this is the pioneer resort for diving in Malapascua. There are 3 levels of rooms: Twin single beds with a fan, Twin single beds (or a double bed) deluxe with air con, and Twin double beds and air con as super deluxe.

The centre is 5*+ PADI and National Geographic certified and can arrange dive courses from Open Water through to IDC training. There are 5 dive boats available, 4 large capable of journeys of 1 hour + away from the island, and one smaller boat used to visit nearby dive sites.

The Diving at Malapascua Island

Our dive guide was Toto who has 10 years diving experience around Malapascua, and a wonderful eye for spotting the smallest and well camoflaged creatures.

Every resort has a house reef and the one at Exotic is mainly artificial with objects such as dead Jimny's, metal frameworking etc deliberately sunk onto the sand to form a reef, with depths of 8-14m. Corals are now well established over much of the sunken items, and there is a good variety of macro life to look for.

On our visit we dived at:

• East Garden is a marine reserve, so the hard and soft corals are well established and undamaged. The depth is around 12m. There is lots of macro life and we saw several small crustacea living on sponges and corals.
• Monad Shoal is one of Malapascua's unique dive sites This is a sea mount, or sunken island about half the size of Malapascua itself. The depth of the top plateau is between 15-23m, and is surrounded by a sharp drop-off. If you get there early in the morning, there is around a 50% chance is seeing one or more Thresher sharks which come up from the depths to be cleaned at the various cleaning stations around the edge of the plateau.
  We left the resort at 5:00 am, and had a 30 minute boat journey to the shoal. When we got near the first cleaning station a large (12 foot nose to tail) Thresher shark was already there, and which stayed for 25 minutes. There are also Devil rays around to watch and in April the Manta rays return and come for cleaning as well - we saw a juvenile.
• Gato Island is also a marine reserve and is a limestone rock about 1 hour from the resort. It is famous for the numbers of sea snakes in the water around it. On the day we went the water was quite rough, so we moored at the south end in the lea of the island where the water was a bit calmer. Normally divers go half way around the island and get picked up at the other side, allowing a full tour in 2 two dives. Lots of White-tip Reef Sharks resting in the caves which are all around the island. Again excellent hard and soft coral life.
• Kemod Shoal , is a similar shoal to Monad shoal, but smaller in size and further away. The aim is to get here very early (we left at 4:30 am) swim off the plateau at around 10-12m and out into the blue, then drop down to 30m, and fin slowly through the water in hope that the Hammerhead sharks will be about. On the day we went, they were not, but still an interesting diving experience.
• We also dived at North Point - with pigmy seahorses, and frog fish the highlights, and at Pantaw-Pantaw - a relatively new dive site, where we saw 2 frog fish, 2 octopi,2 nudibranchs mating, shrimp and miniature crabs around.
• Timok Island (depth 12 m) - again a 15 minute ride from the centre, excellent for nudibranch spotting.