We bid farewell to Pandan Island after 3 days and a good amount of scuba diving and beach bumming. It took almost a full day of traveling to get back to Manila. We spent the night before a quick early morning flight to Dumaguete in the Negros province of the Philippines.

The Philippines has over 7,000 islands which makes a little difficult to get around – our mini van broke down on the roads through Mindoro province.

We arrived in Dumaguete, a neat college town on the water.

We checked in at Harold’s Mansion (more of a hostel really) and rented some motorbikes to go exploring.

Dumaguete had a massive typhoon directly hit it recently and almost a thousand people died. We could see damage to trees, buildings and roads everywhere we went. At a damaged bridge, some nice Filipinos drove our bikes across a narrow makeshift bridge for us.

We went on a sweaty hike with panoramic views of the island.

The popular waterfall (Casaroro) and river area to go to were closed due to damage from the storm but we decided we would just hike it.

If you look closely in the gallery, you can see the damaged walkway and uprooted trees. It was a nice cool down in the water after the humid hike.

Back in Dumaguete and after cleaning up at Harold’s, we went to the seaside promenade for a fantastic seafood dinner of oysters and fish at a restaurant called Lab-as. After dinner we enjoyed some delicious mango daiquiris and live music.