Cebu to Tacloban on scheduled boats — Bohol's interior, Siquijor's ring road, a marine sanctuary the village has run since the early 1980s, the sardine shoal you can reach from a beach at Moalboal, and a bridge built in 1973 that turned two islands into one road.
Cebu City
The Spanish settled here in 1565, six years before Legazpi moved the capital to Manila, and the old city is still where the country's Catholicism starts. The Santo Niño in the basilica is the image left with Rajah Humabon's household in 1521 and is the oldest Christian relic in the Philippines. Fort San Pedro, a triangular bastion begun the same century and rebuilt in stone in the 1700s, is the smallest fort in the country and takes half an hour.
Carbon market and Mactan
Carbon is the oldest and largest public market in the city and the argument over redeveloping it has been running for years; go early, before the fish stops being interesting. Then across the bridges to Punta Engaño, where Magellan was killed on 27 April 1521. Two monuments face each other on the same patch of shore, one raised to Magellan and one to Lapulapu, and the wording on each tells you who put it there.
Across to Bohol
The fast craft leave from Pier 1 several times a day and the crossing is flat unless the amihan is blowing. Panglao is the base — a small island joined to Bohol by two causeways, with the province's international airport on it since 2018 and a beach strip that has grown faster than its drainage.
The interior
Inland to Carmen for the Chocolate Hills, which are more than a thousand limestone cones on a plain and are protected as a national geological monument — a status that did not stop a resort being built inside the landscape, to national outrage, in 2024. On the way back, the tarsier sanctuary at Corella, where the animals sit in forest and are not handled; the roadside operations that let you hold one are the ones to skip. Baclayon church, 1727, lost its façade, portico and belfry in the magnitude-7.2 earthquake of 15 October 2013 and has been put back stone by numbered stone.
Balicasag
A small island forty minutes offshore with a wall that drops away from the reef edge, turtles that sit on it, and a daily cap on boats and snorkellers imposed by the municipality after the site was being sold to everyone who turned up. That means booking the night before rather than negotiating on the beach in the morning, which is the whole point of the cap.
To Siquijor
South-west across the Bohol Sea. The Spanish called it Isla del Fuego for the light in the trees, and the island has kept a reputation for mananambal — healers who work with oils and prayers, and whose Holy Week gathering to make the medicine is the one week the island is fully booked. About a hundred thousand people live here and nothing is more than an hour from anything else.
The ring road
Seventy-two kilometres round the island on a scooter, which takes a morning if you do not stop and a day if you do. Cambugahay Falls above Lazi, the old balete tree with the fish pool at its foot, and the convent at Lazi — an 1891 timber building on coral stone, one of the largest in the country, facing an 1884 church that is a declared National Cultural Treasure and is falling apart at a rate the funding does not match.
Dumaguete
An hour across to Negros. Silliman was founded here in 1901 by Presbyterian missionaries as a boys' school — the first American private school in the country and in Asia — and became a university in 1938; its marine laboratory is why the reefs south of the city are studied as closely as they are. Rizal Boulevard at dusk, and the tempura stalls along it, which sell battered fish paste on a bamboo stick with vinegar to dip it in and nothing a Japanese cook would recognise, feeding a city of 130,000 with four universities in it.
Apo Island
Twenty-five kilometres down the coast to Malatapay, then out by banca. The villagers closed part of their own reef to fishing in the early 1980s, working with Silliman's marine lab, and held the closure through the years when it cost them catch. It is now one of the most studied community-managed marine reserves anywhere, the fish came back, and the rules are strict: no touching, no standing on coral, no fins over the sanctuary in some sections.
Back to Cebu island
The shortest crossing of the trip: a flat-bottomed barge from Sibulan over the Tañon Strait to Liloan at the southern tip of Cebu, half an hour, motorbikes and a lorry loaded on with you. Then a bus ninety-odd kilometres up the west coast to Moalboal — three hours with the stops — where the reason to stop is a resident shoal of sardines that hangs a few metres off the shore at Panagsama and can be swum to from the steps.
Kawasan
Twenty minutes south at Badian, a limestone river running out of the hills in a series of pools. The canyoneering route down it became an industry faster than it became regulated; the local government now requires accredited guides, helmets and life jackets, and it did not always. Go at opening or late afternoon — the middle of the day is a queue.
North to the city
Back up the coast road. With the afternoon in Cebu, take the Cebu–Cordova Link Expressway: 8.9 kilometres opened in 2022, the longest bridge in the country, with a view deck at the toll plaza. It is the expensive answer to the same problem every ferry on this route is the cheap answer to, and seeing them a day apart is worth the detour.
Over to Leyte
East across the Camotes Sea to Ormoc, then a van over the island. Ormoc has its own reason to be careful with water: flash floods off the deforested hills above the town killed thousands in November 1991, and the reforestation programme that followed is visible from the road. Tacloban is two hours on, at the head of a bay shaped like a funnel.
San Juanico
The bridge opened in 1973 and runs 2.16 kilometres across the strait to Samar, and for forty-nine years, until the Cebu–Cordova bridge opened, it was the longest in the country. Below it is the coast that Haiyan came over on 8 November 2013, when a storm surge several metres high pushed into the funnel of the bay and the national toll passed six thousand three hundred. A cargo ship carried inland at Anibong is still where it stopped, kept as a memorial with houses rebuilt around it. Fly out of Tacloban.
Good to know
Most nationalities — EU, UK, US, Canadian, Australian, Japanese among them — enter visa-free for 30 days, extendable in person at a Bureau of Immigration office (there is one in Cebu City); proof of onward travel is enforced by the airline at check-in rather than by immigration on arrival, and it is enforced. Everyone arriving must file the free eTravel registration online within 72 hours of the flight — do it before you leave for the airport, because the desk that fixes it for you is the slow queue. Nothing on this route needs a permit, and none of it is in the areas covered by the standing advisories, which apply to western Mindanao and the Sulu Sea and are several hundred kilometres south of Siquijor. Fast craft — OceanJet, Lite Ferries, Montenegro, 2GO — sell online, but the pier charges a terminal fee separately and in cash, and your name goes on a manifest checked against photo ID, so carry your passport rather than a photograph of it. Boarding closes when the manifest closes, which is earlier than the departure time; be at the pier an hour ahead. The Coast Guard suspends sailings by vessel class whenever PAGASA raises a wind signal, small outriggers first and fast craft next, and the suspension is a legal order rather than a recommendation — around twenty tropical cyclones enter Philippine waters in a normal year, the season runs roughly June to December, and Leyte and Samar are the most exposed coast in the country. Between December and February the amihan, the north-east monsoon, builds through the day, so morning crossings of the Bohol and Tañon straits are markedly calmer than afternoon ones. Leave a spare day before any international flight. Book two weeks ahead for Holy Week and the fortnight before Christmas, when every boat and bus in the Visayas is full, and avoid Cebu entirely in the week of Sinulog in mid-January unless that is why you came. Marine sanctuary and environmental fees are collected in cash at each site; ATMs are reliable in Cebu, Tagbilaran, Dumaguete and Tacloban, Siquijor has a handful in Siquijor town and Larena that run dry over long weekends, and Apo Island has no bank, no machine and no card terminal at all. Tacloban flies only to Manila and Cebu, so leaving the country from here is a domestic hop first.
Shorter or longer?
Cross the bridge and carry on: the Sohoton caves at Basey, the surf beaches on Calicoan, and the Pacific coast at Borongan. Four or five more days on vans and jeepneys, on the wettest and most cyclone-exposed seaboard in the country.
Cebu, Bohol and Siquijor, flying out of Dumaguete. Keeps every crossing worth making and cuts the Cebu south coast and the whole Leyte leg.