Painted frogfish, Bohol
BEST FOR The archetypal tropical experience
Philippines:
Cebu and Bohol
What to expect: These resort enclaves in the Visayan Islands offer a comprehensive set of warm water diving experiences. At Moalboal in southern Cebu you have coral walls, caverns, a house-sized school of sardines and nearby whale sharks at Donsol. Then catch a ferry over to Bohol and head for the Anda area, a leading critter destination with plenty of turtles.
Then over on the northern part of Cebu you arrive at Malapascua Island, where you have a bit of everything. The unique selling point here is the gratifyingly predictable presence of thresher sharks at nearby Kimud Shoal. Malapascua is a seemingly innocuous island that just happens to be the best place in the world for diving with oceanic thresher sharks. You may have fleetingly seen them on 40-metre dives in the Red Sea or the southern Maldives, but at Kimud they are pretty much on tap. You find them around a 15-20m sweet spot, where they visit cleaning stations to have parasitic copepods cleaned from their jaws by moon wrasse.
Malapascua has a range of reasonablypriced accommodation. Our best advice is to book with British-owned Thresher Shark Divers and get their up-to-date advice on accommodation. Anda has a few resorts, but is generally quiet. We have experience of Magic Oceans and can recommend it unreservedly. Moalboal in southern Cebu has loads of dive centres and resorts. The town is quite busy but Magic Island runs a resort just outside, so you don’ t have to sleep next to a nightclub. Don’ t leave without... A GoPro or DJI action camera is an excellent way to film thresher sharks, while Olympus TG cameras are ideal for the critters of Anda.
Smugness factor: Whether your resort choice is luxury or basic, it really is more fun in the Philippines. End friendships with your Insta feed!
Emperor shrimp
Clown anemonefish, Malapascua
Giant frogfish, Moalboal
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