We had a pretty light day on Day 07: the morning was free for us to sleep in – the missus and kids at least for sure as I got up early to do the aerial videos of Alona Beach at sunrise – followed by a leisurely breakfast at the resort. Our driver for Days 07 and 08 turned out to be a different chap indeed, and he was an experienced guide who ran his own tour business and also was did independent gigs. He was familiar with the rich history of Bohol and the involvement of the Spanish with it, and shared many insights of places we drove past on our way to the only activity we had on Day 07’s itinerary: a Loboc River cruise with Rio Verde Floating Restaurant.
The start point of the cruise was about a 45 minute drive that took us out of Panglao island onto the main island of Bohol itself, and the drive was a smooth one with relatively low traffic in the late morning. I’d initially thought that the river cruise only sails a few times every day during lunch hours, but the company apparently runs what looks like at least half a dozen boats, and they leave and return, disembark the group of guests, restock, then board the next group, with each roundabout cruise taking about 1 hr or so.
Prior to the cruise, we read on Google reviews glowing praises for the cruise, with many commenting how smooth the operation is, that the food was sumptuous and more than what guests can finish, the great live music by onboard musicians, and the beautiful view of the mangrove forest on either side of the river.
Well, our evaluation after the cruise is: it’s a smooth operation, the food was passable and certainly plentiful, the live music was mostly in the background with few apparently listening consciously to it, and the full beauty of the mangrove forest is hard to see from the boat [unless you get an aerial view, and more on that in a sec!].
The thing is: all things considered, it’s an OK activity to do if you’re in Bohol on account that it’s not too pricey, the location you start from is accessible and easy to get to, and it’s a chop-chop operation that runs like clockwork. But I think you’d really only want to do this cruise if it’s convenient for you to do so and/or part of your itinerary package with a tour operator. The cruise is not finally involving something you can’t see or experience elsewhere.
And as for the aerial part: I really wanted to try to get some aerial videos of Loboc river, but this was going to be difficult at best, if not outright impossible since the boat would be constantly moving: excepting a very small around 8 minute window in which the boat will stop by a traditional village where the villagers would be doing a tribal dance. That was the only window I would get to try to get some aerial videos.
As it turned out, I had substantially less than 8 minutes as guests took their time to disembark and several stayed on board for pictures at the small open air deck – the only area I had to launch the drone from. So, in five minutes, I started up the drone, gauged lighting and mounted the correct ND filter, connected the RC-N2 controller, confirmed safety and camera settings, took off from a small 0.7m by 0.6m launch area at the front of the ship, immediately cleared the take-off deck, got to height, took two short aerial videos totaling about 2 minutes, then navigated back to land – whilst trying to have sufficient clearance from people on the deck still jockeying to take photos/wefies. This was the fastest start-up + launch + fly + return + land back I’d ever done. I’m definitely not going to try this again!
Continued in the next post onto Day 08!