Scuba diving in Asia forum

Hi Snowfish

if you are heading to the Philippines after trekking in Vietnam, then you have a big range of options of where to dive from there. South East Asian diving destinations (e.g. Thailand, Indonesia) are not that difficult/expensive to reach from the Philippines so it's more an issue of time. But if you are heading to the Philippines already, you might as well stay there - there is some amazing diving there and frankly the Phils remains one of Asia's best kept secrets for diving.

If you are in Boracay then you are quite near to some of the Phils' best dive areas -- Moalboal and Malapascua Island off Cebu Island, Apo Island at Dumaguete on Negros Island, Sogod Bay at Leyte Island. You can also get a liveaboard from Cebu that explores all these places and more and lets you avoid the hassle of travelling overland to each destination. There is at least a week to two weeks of diving here and plenty of variety.

November is the beginning of the Phils' dry season so you should be fine for the weather too.

Hope this helps

Best
Chris

Well, Malapascua is certainly worthy of consideration if you're in that vicinity. There's more to it than just the thresher sharks. It would be a little unfair to write off the whole area just because they didn't show up on one occasion. They are an incredibly rare species and Malapascua is one of the few places in the world where divers might get to see them.

For what it's worth, when I dived there last November, they turned up as advertised within about 10 minutes of descent. A couple I was diving with had been to Malapascua three times previously and this was the first time they saw them. Them's the breaks ;-)

Unless you are really into karaoke and girly bars, looking at middle aged washed out european men hooking up with underage filipina girls, then puerto galera is really really not what i suggest. plus the diving is inferior to any other place named before by divehappy. most are shore dives which is not a good idea considering the pollution off the beach and the constant boat traffic.
malapascua on the other hand was great - thresher sharks, rays, nudibranches, tons of great stuff. the thresehrs are quite common there, actually (during the 3 days we spent there all groups from the dive club we used saw them), hammer heads are much more rare and its quite a difficult dive. but overall malapascua had truly nice dives and really relaxed atmosphere. coron is also good, depending on what you are looking for - great for wreck dives, also lots of life around the wreks, including turtles.
Panglao off bohol might be another good choice. enough night life, nice beaches, on bohol you get the chocolate hills and waterfalls and trasiers and what not.

basically - the phils are full of great diving!
enjoy

Before I get accused of being negative I'll hasten to add that I did see a nice group of very small fish once on those wee islands a few hundred meters off Bounty Beach.


But only for about five minutes because some fishermen came along and threw nets over them and took them all away.