Tarsier hunt

28 October 2018

The road that leads to our resort is the single worst road on Bohol. It’s a mixture of rough dirt track, patched of old tarmac, potholes, shattered old concrete, a narrow section with a 2ft drop on the side, and then the actual resort driveway twists and turns at a gradient of about 45 degrees (it feels like). Roads around the rest of Bohol are generally fine, only occasionally reverting to dirt track for a mysterious few hundred metres. Other drivers are various degrees of nuts, but certainly no more so than any other part of Asia. The usual rule applies: do whatever you like, but at a sensible speed so that everyone comes out in one piece.

It’s colourful driving, because apart from the usual low-cc motorbikes and vans, there are also jeepnies and habel-habels to contend with. The former is a kind of shonky minibus with a front more like an old style jeep and an open back so that people can jump on and off (or just cling on) easily. They are garishly decorated. The habel-habel is a low-cc motorbike fitted with a chassis that covers the rider and the accompanying sidecar so that one motorcyclist can carry 5+ passengers in comfort. Well, actually in no comfort at all by the look of it.

Today our driving took us back up into the hills to go on a night safari to look for tarsiers. We prepared for this in the morning by visiting the Philippine Tarsier Sanctuary first, where they have some 100 or so in an enclosure. Tourists were being trundled around almost on a conveyor belt to dutifully gawp and d’awwww at 5 tarsiers that could be found resting on very low branches conveniently close to the entrance of the enclosure. Glued in place? Maybe. Anyway, we d’awwww’d. And now we knew what we’d be looking for in the forest at night.
We’d told the folks at Habitat Bohol that we’d been recommended their guide Julius for the best chance of finding them. And boy did he go all-out. The first bit of fun was both of us being driven to the forest on the back of Julius’ motorbike. Cling on tight! We progressed from proper road to narrow lane to dirt track to dirt path and eventually we were just trundling across an open field until we stopped, almost dusk, on the edge of rice paddies.

The narrow walls that separate paddies are amazing – only about six inches wide, and yet maybe 3 ft high and solid enough to walk along. Which is what we had to do. The tawny mud in the paddies looked like it would swallow your leg and suck your shoe right off. Then we had to cross two scary bridges of bamboo poles tied together with string. Then wade through knee-high riverbank vegetation with our thoughts turning to leeches. Then squeeze under a nicely rusted barbed wire fence. And then we were in the forest. All of this was much slipperier in reverse, when it was pitch dark and everything was soaking wet. Yes, we also suffered a torrential downpour while we were in the forest. That was after about 2 hours, which turned out to be nearly the halfway point; Julius clearly wasn’t going to let us go without success and we were actually squelching about the forest for 4 hours start to finish (rather than the 1.5 hours we thought we’d signed up for!).

So it was rather lucky that Maureen found us two tarsiers in the trees. And later on, a palm civet as a bonus. Otherwise I have no idea quite how dejected and annoyed we would have been, rather than merely knackered!

And of course, at 9pm the chances of finding food anywhere were slim. Luckily the pizza place in Loboc plaza was still open when we got there at 9:30! The lady did explain that she had let the pizza oven fire go out, which meant it would take 30 mins to stoke it up and make more pizzas. Were we sure we wanted to wait? Yes, yes we were very sure. It was a surly pizza lady who served us 2 very gratefully received pizzas half an hour later. And in defiance of all expectation, really rather good pizzas with thin and crisp bases that a Neopolitan might be proud of! I left a nice tip.

PS – I do just want to mention Raja Sikatuna, a tiny verdant oasis in the middle of rainforest hills where macaques are easily seen and where you can also see colugos, aka flying lemurs, if you ask the local guides. Colugos are bonkers; their heads look like lemurs, or perhaps small bug-eyed whippets, but they have wings between their arms and legs like a flying squirrel and glide through the trees in search of juicy leaves.

Related Images:

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 4th, 2018 at 3:05 pm and is filed under The Philippines. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.