Day 08 and our heaviest day, itinerary-wise, of this 11 day trip. Early morning, we’d be checking out of our resort at Alona Beach, then go on a road trip that’d take us across the breadth of Bohol island, then turn back to board the 5:20PM ferry at Tagbilaran port that’d bring us back to Cebu City where our Cebu city driver would pick us up for the short journey back to Radisson Blu Cebu – all hopefully all before 9PM.
Our first stop was the Cadapdapan Rice Terraces. I had mixed feelings during itinerary planning about including this spot in the itinerary. Specifically, Cadapdapan is well out of the way for most visitors. It’s located on the western side of the island and a 3 hour drive – at least – from we were starting from at Panglao island. Including it in our Cebu vacation itinerary would basically mean almost an entire day would be spent just getting to the rice terraces and returning, unless we wrap other spots in Bohol around it. In a sense, I guess I was compensating for the fact that in January this year, we decided to holiday in Cebu instead of Bali and had been really wanting to capture the famed Jatiluwih rice terraces from the air.
So, in a word or two, is a visit to the Cadapdapan Rice Terraces worth the trouble? Well… it depends. The rice terraces in Cadapdapan are unlike compared to what I remember from Bali: the latter benefited from hilly terrain. The Jatiluwih rice terraces are dramatically multi-tiered. The Cadapdapan Rice Terraces expand a fair bit across the horizon but does not have very significant elevation. So, if you’ve visited the rice fields in Bali, I reckon you might find making the trip to Cadapdapan not worth the trouble. The rice fields had also not been planted yet at our day of visit – we were told that would be only in the next month or two.
Still, I came out of the visit with great aerial videos, and the wife was also in her usual form: spotting all kinds of interesting flora and fauna.
Further-on notes: there is a small visitation fee: we paid 30p per person. We were also assigned a guide who walked with us through the fields, and in particular, bring us to a vantage point that sits on top of a small hill and presenting a gorgeous unimpeded 360 degree of the entire area. The walk through the fields to get to this hill takes just 10 minutes and is quite manageable, though if the area has been raining, some spots of where you’d be trekking through would be muddy. A tip for the guide is also recommended. We were assigned a young girl who looked like she was high school or college-going, and most interestingly, spoke very good English for a Bohol local.
We left the rice terraces in the late morning, stopped by for a quick lunch at an eatery in a town we went past – the lunch cost just 390p for a variety of fan-cai type dishes, and which the wife said was one of the best meals she had and super value for money – before turning back eastwards for the Chocolate Hills.