Despite the fact that we didn’t have that heavy an itinerary on Day 01 – we were just arriving from Singapore, checking into the hotel then figuring out dinner – all of us were so doggoned tired after the first day that we all slept like the dead. And the general humidity of Cebu is all too familiar for us Singaporeans, one thing wasn’t and it became immediately apparent on Day 02 morning: sunrise was at 5:22AM, and by the time it was 6AM, the sun was already up. Our 11th floor room was roughly facing the north-easterly direction, and the sun’s full-on morning blast shone directly into the room.
In our prep work for this trip, we observed that many of the 3D2N Whale Watching and Canyoneering trips would typically leave Cebu city early in the morning to make the journey down south with a lunch stop in between. Our customised tour kept things simpler though: we’d head out only at 11AM, which meant we had plenty of time for a leisurely morning at the Radisson Blu Cebu. Not that we finally did anything useful with those additional hours: we packed, tidied up the room, and the kids basically watched TV while I blogged. LOL.
Our first stop as we made the long drive south was the The Monastery of the Holy Eucharist, or more commonly called Simala Shrine. This shrine was built in 1998 and is one of the important pilgrimage sites for Roman Catholics in the region.
The drive from Cebu main city normally takes about 90 minutes: we took 2 hrs 15 minutes! The general area was very congested, and traffic at various points slowed to a crawl as thousands of locals were making Sunday visits, alongside the numerous bustling streets of hawker fare and small retail establishments. The weather was also sunny, and while the overall humidity wasn’t as bad as what we experienced in Hanoi, it still made for a visit to the shrine less pleasant than it might had been.
The shrine itself is quite lovely, and there were throngs of locals making the trip too – which resulted in long snaking queues to enter the inner sanctums and that formed for a few hundred meters. We were already running fairly late, so decided not to join in that queue and were contended to gawk at the compound from the outside.
Pro-Tips: ladies especially need to be decently covered. The daughter and wife were wearing shorts or berms respectively, and were told at the entrance to rent a sarong from one of the hawkers plying wares just outside the entrance. Both the son and myself were also in berms, but we were waved through.
We stayed just 25 minutes in the shrine, then decided to head back to our waiting vehicle to continue down south to Osmena Peak. Continued in the next post!