There was this one point during our weekend on Sicogon Island that I remember. I was lying in bed feeling completely sorry for myself and staring up at the beautiful design of the pitched roof with its thatched ceiling. The design was perfection with hard bold lines of dark beams, delicate brown weave and stark white walls, and I thought ‘you know, at least I have this beautiful room to be in, a super comfy bed to sleep in, and this beautiful ceiling to look at‘. And that’s basically what I did look at for most our time on Sicogon Island.

 

I was going to name this post When Holidays Go Wrong Part 2 (Part one being a washed-out Disneyland Adventure), but then I thought that is not quite fair. It wasn’t a total disaster, only three quarters a disaster, everyone else had a great time.

The weekend after Holy week was a long weekend. You have to love that about the Philippines – the constant public holidays. We wanted to go somewhere out of the way, somewhere new, uncrowded (ha!) and somewhere relatively untouched by tourism. So, we went to Sicogon Island.

Where is Sicogon Island?

Well, that is an excellent question and I am very glad you asked…

Sicogon Island sits just off Panay Island, which sits in the Western Visayas here in the Philippines. You may have heard of Iloilo – the Heart of the Philippines, named for its central location in the middle of the islands, yeah, just off that big island that Iloilo sits on.

Getting there takes a bit of patience as there is travel involved. Fly Cebu Air to Iloilo Airport and then drive up the island to Estancia Port, then catch a banka to Sicogon Island.

Here is how we did it:

We flew on Friday afternoon into Iloilo and stayed the night at the Sheridan Boutique Resort – which was gorgeous and really comfortable, thankfully…I will get to that part soon.

We organised a car through the resort we were staying at on Sicogon Island – Balay Kogon. The driver picked us up around 8am the Saturday morning and we drove up to Estancia Port, about 2-3 hours. I slept most of it…again, I will get to that shortly.

We bartered for a banka and the ride took about 40 minutes right to the resort on Sicogon Island.

The horror begins…

So, Friday about two hours before leaving for the airport I developed stomach cramps, and started feeling a bit ‘off’. Nothing out of the ordinary, probably just stress from being home only five days from Easter at Tablas Island and having to organise this trip, plus be packing the house to leave the country in June, all in between day to day life…

Driving to the airport I’m starting to feel really crappy and unwell. I thought perhaps I was being a drama queen (I expect gasps of NOOOOOO not you!!! to be heard here).

At the airport we get through check-in and try to find an early dinner out of the very few choices available. Whatever we ordered was vile and inedible. My stomach lurched and I suddenly felt nauseous. It was around this time I alerted SB to the fact I was feeling this way. We arrived at our lounge to find the flight was delayed by about 2 hours. Good old Cebu Air. One thing is reliable – that they aren’t. The kids were exhausted and cranky so we just let them bury themselves in my iPad. I lay down on seats, shivering in the cold air con and feeling progressively sicker.

Finally we are on the plane and after the seatbelt sign goes off half the travellers line up for the loo. Finally it’s my time. I return to my seat and whisper to SB that I am not okay, that we need to get to the hotel ASAP, and how fast is the ride there? About 20 minutes he says.

The plane landed and I could not get off fast enough. We grabbed our luggage and got a very expensive taxi (see my notes at the end) and headed to the resort. We had to ‘check in’ which felt like the longest check-in in history, but the staff were so lovely and friendly. We finally made it to our room which was gorgeous. Sitting on a man-made lake with super comfy beds and gorgeous fitout. Thankfully it had a really lovely bathroom because I spent the entire night in there….ENTIRE NIGHT. I am not going to get graphic but I was so sick. SO SICK. I had the shivers, my skin was stinging and tender with the effects of gastro, and I spent the night running scenarios through my head of how this would work. I would either just die, or perhaps I would be left in this room while SB takes the kids to the island and has a lovely holiday without me, and I’ll just hide here until I die…and my body will be found being eaten by Alsatians two days later because there was no one brave enough to come and take care of me…either way, I was doomed to die…and quite frankly in that moment, death would have been a glorious reprieve.

At 6.30am the worst had passed but I was exhausted and my body was wrecked. SB put me to bed to try and get at least one hour of sleep. At breakfast I sipped weak black tea and when it was time to go we told the driver to find a drugstore ASAP where we loaded up on Imodium and electrolytes, oh and hand sanitiser to douse the kids in so they did not catch this off me. I slept most of the drive up the island to Estancia Port.

The port was busy, the waters filled with bankas. The smell of fish was strong and really made me gag.  I was so weak and exhausted still, I could hardly move and my stomach was doing acrobatics, but the children were hungry so I walked them to a bakery I had seen close by and brought freshly cooked doughnuts and some peanut bread to keep them going a while longer.

I wobbled my way across the gangplank onto the banka, which was a big beast of a boat. Not as noisy as smaller boats, really tough and sturdy, and thank goodness because you go out onto open waters and crash through waves to get to the island. The fresh air actually helped me feel better and the ride was so beautiful. The green rolling hills of the surrounding islands was spectacular. Sicodon Island is known as the ‘crocodile island’ because it looks like a crocodile, and it really does. The kids had a great time on the boat standing up as it flew over waves, the wind blowing their hair all around. They counted giant jellyfish as we sped past them.

We arrived at the resort and it was gorgeous. A lovely beach with little whitewash huts sat further up the sand ensconced in lush gardens. The restaurant sits on a hill of rocks and you climb stairs to get there. I could hardly make it, I was so weak from being so ill. We arrived at lunchtime and this place is known for its seafood, so as we sat and ‘checked-in’ again (the next longest check-in ever in my mind) platters of seafood were brought out for the other guests. The smell…oh god…I asked if we could hurry things along, and eventually, they showed us to our little hut. It was so beautiful. We dropped our stuff and SB convinced me to try to have lunch. I dragged my sorry body back up those stairs, sat down, had one mouthful of pasta, and the smell of seafood in the air hung over me like a wet blanket, and I was done. I excused myself and made a hasty retreat to bed, where I stayed and slept until I was woken after 6pm to go for dinner. Please no…not another meal. But I tried…and failed. I managed to eat a couple of French fries and I was done…hasty retreat back for a shower – a blissful, hot, good water pressure shower…and then bed where I briefly contemplated my death again in this paradise, and how to get my body back home, before I fell into a deep slumber.

SB wanted to go island hopping the next day, and I had already said I’m out. He could take the kids, or he could leave the kids, but I was in no shape to cope with it. However, when I woke the next morning I felt rather okay…until of course I wasn’t. Anyway, I said I could do island hopping, hoping badly it wasn’t an entire day out. We set off and the weather had come in a bit so it was really choppy and the waves splashed on our faces which was refreshing and lovely. We were flying over waves, and the hull of the boat was crashing down in-between. The kids were whooping it up, loving the ‘adventure’ and for a while I was good with it. Then my delicate system decided it wasn’t so cool after all. So part way through our morning I was really over it and desperate to return to the sanctity of my bed.

For the island hopping, we visited the Gigantes Islands, which is Spanish for ‘Islands of Giants’. They are a remote cluster of islands, and our resort on Sicogon is right there next to them. There are about ten islands all up with two big ones known as Gigantes Norte (North) and Gigantes Sur (South).

Unfortunately it was busy – very busy and really super touristy, being a long weekend and all. In retrospect we would not have done the tour, we would have found something less touristy to focus our time (and money) on (for me staying in bed dying a slow and agonising death was right up there with my choices). However, the first stop was at Cabugao Gamay Island, a sweet little island offering a two-sided beach. The line to climb to the top of a rocky croft to a view deck for a photo op was ridiculous, I mean seriously… Needless to say, we didn’t line up. Personally, I am not interested in photographs with a bunch of strange people in it and I do not queue up unless absolutely necessary. Anyway, we admired the cairns (manmade stone piles) people had created around the place, a nice little touch I thought, and walked up and around the island to an isolated beach area. We sat here for a while enjoying the fresh air. It was too choppy and rough for the kids to swim but SB went snorkelling. He returned pretty quickly having met a shark while out there. A reef shark, but a shark nonetheless. We told our boat captain and he laughed and said ‘there are no sharks here’ to which SB exclaimed ‘umm…yes there are, I just met one…’ and the captain laughed us off and said ‘come on time to go…’ so we did.

Next stop was Tangke Saltwater Lagoon. This is an enclosed lagoon inside tall rocky cliffs. The water is shallow and calm and you can swim. It is quite pretty and SB and the kids climbed down to it, I was just too weak and ill at this point to do anything but the bare minimum, so I stood at the top of the rocks looking down, wondering if I plunged, if that would hasten the death I was clearly going to experience at some point this weekend.

This was followed by a trip to Bantigue Island, a sandbar which changes shape depending on the current. It was so crowded we couldn’t even dock our boat. The captain tried to tell us we’d have lunch there and we said no, we aren’t even getting off the boat. We wanted to go to the most well-known island in this group – Antonio Beach…

Antonio Beach is where you go for your seafood fix, where you pay just 1 peso (AUS 0.25c) per scallop. I might just add this was not for my Benefit. FB and I had lunches packed up for us, not that I could actually eat anything. The boys were hell-bent on eating every living creature – bar the shark – in the ocean around us. As were every other tourist around, and there were a lot of people…a lot. As we pulled up to the beach it started to bucket down with rain – seriously bucket down. It felt like a typhoon was swooping past with the winds and the crazy rain blowing every which way. It was just insane, and I was feeling most unwell and just wanted to go home.

The rain passed and we got off our boat by crawling across another boat docked in front of us. We walked past the yert style tents on this side of the beach we docked at, and SB put in his order for a basket of scallops and a basket of rock oysters which were 2 pesos each (minimum orders are 100p for scallops and 200p for rock oysters). We walked past the bench tables with massive groups feasting, and SB found a little table and carried it under a tree on the beach on the other side of the island, where the waters were rougher and large waves crashed on the shore. SB found some bench seats and I sat there for a while feeling sorry for myself while SB downed beer and the kids had a marvellous time running around exploring and collecting old oyster shells, which are so pretty and shiny.

I finally felt recovered enough to take a walk, and watched the seafood being cooked in great vats of water over open fire. The smoke and heat burned my eyes, and I had to keep turning away as the cook tipped the boiling water out into baskets, water spilling everywhere and steam rising with a force that almost knocked you to the ground. It was great! I met a young chap whose family owned this business. He lived on another island and came over with his mum to help out when it was busy. He said he really liked the rock oysters best, and he had wonderful manners which impressed me very much.

I found the tub of fresh scallops awaiting their fate sitting under the shade at the side of the sari-sari selling beers and soft drinks. Great juicy purple, green and pink lips smacking together at me. They would skim themselves across the water snapping their juicy lips together, like in a cartoon, then spit a thin stream of water out in an attempt to protect themselves. I’d put my finger in gaping mouths and they’d bite down making me squeal in delight. I felt like I was a child again. I quickly grabbed the kids to show them, but they didn’t seem to enjoy having fingers nipped by angry scallops quite the way I did…

The seafood arrived and the boys got super busy eating their way through these baskets filled to the brim. I tasted one scallop and one oyster and understood why that young man said he preferred the oysters. The scallops were really salty and heavy tasting. The oysters were more delicate in flavour. I couldn’t manage more than that small taste and in the end it was all too much for SB to finish on his own so I carried the leftovers to one of the large tables feasting on their own baskets, along with the other foods they had brought across with them – rice, spaghetti, fish, and fruit. They insisted on a trade and handed me fresh mango and watermelon which the children loved. SB told me how this area was known for its mangoes. The colour of it was bright orange, and the flavour of it was intense and rich, more so than the mangoes back on the mainland.

We were the only Westerners around, despite the crowds, and so the local kids on the island were fascinated by us. They kept edging closer to BB and FB and staring with occasional smiles then embarrassed giggles and they’d run off a little, then return and start all over. BB took a broken bench seat and played at trying to fix it. I suggested he ask the kids watching him with interest to help. I’m not sure what was going on, but it seemed common ground was found in playing with timber beams and rusty nails.

It was finally time to head off back to our resort. I was feeling okay but tired. It was when we were about twenty minutes from the resort I started to feel really seasick and I was ready to hang over the edge and feed the fish as we pulled up. I almost fell out of the boat in haste, went straight into that glorious hot shower, then fell straight into bed where I stayed, pretty much until we left the following day. I got up for dinner, a small walk around, breakfast on our last day and to pack our bags. The rest of the time I was in bed, staring up at the beautiful ceiling.  

The drive back to Iloilo was good – I was awake for it, so I could see the countryside and learn a bit more about this island. The main products farmed are corn, rice and sugar cane. Trucks filled to the brim with freshly cut cane drove past us constantly and sheets of rice drying in the sun lay roadside. As we moved through the rice fields with distant green rolling hills, our driver told us how this entire area was decimated by Super Typhoon Yolanda back in 2013. He said the hills were covered in trees and now they are bare because they were destroyed.

We stopped at one of the ancient churches in Iloilo, the Santa Barbara Church for a photograph, and made it to the airport in time, and the flight left on time too! While we waited we discovered one of the local delicacies – butterscotch!! But not the fudge type, it is a cake type and comes in all sorts of flavours. I bought bags of the stuff and it is delicious!

So, despite wishing death to take me away from the trauma several times over the weekend, I made it home alive, the family were all okay and not one of them caught the gastro from hell. It has taken several weeks to actually recover and SB just pointed out it would definitely have killed a lesser woman – but I feel he was just taking the piss out of my drama queen personality. I can safely say however, that I never ever EVER want to go travelling with gastro again. Not Ever!

Right, let’s get down to business

What did I think overall of Sicogan Island and Ayala’s Balay Kogon Resort?

It is a gorgeous spot, the staff are wonderful and I do think it is worth the travel to go and visit. What a wonderful hidden gem!

The resort sits alongside a ‘campground’ or ‘backpacker area’ and there is a local village nearby which means – the odd rooster and music streaming until 4am. But, our room was really quite soundproof, the music wasn’t so bad I had to complain, I was however passed out quite deeply a lot of the time. SB mentioned how annoying it was during the night. I did ask out of interest about it and was told they have no jurisdiction over the barangay and therefore are not allowed to request music be turned down.

The food at the resort was average. If you love seafood you will love it. If like me, you are not a huge fan, you will survive but don’t expect gourmet on a remote island, go for the charm of the place because it really is lovely. There is limited alcohol – no gin for me, which could have helped kill the gastro bug, but I will never know. Just beer and wine and soft drinks…I lived on water and the odd mouthful of Sprite.

Be Careful!: This was an expensive trip. Being the only westerners in sight we were viewed as moneybags and it got tried on.

Cost Breakdown

Taxi from airport to Sheridan – 700 peso – that was using GRAB and was just crazy expensive. We were told some sob story about taxes or tariffs or some such nonsense. I was trying not to vomit during negotiations so wasn’t really paying attention.

Car hire to drive us to the port and collect us to return to the airport in Iloilo: 3500 round trip, in an air-conditioned car and van with wonderful friendly drivers.

Banka ride from the Port to Sicogan Island: We paid 2000p for the ride across. The captain first told us 4000p, then it went down to 2500 and SB negotiated 2000. We found out we should not have paid more than 1500p, which is what it cost coming back, because it was booked through the resort.  

Island Hopping: 4000p for a half day. We left around 9am and returned at 2.30pm.

There are environmental and entrance fees at every stop which vary between 20p and 50p per person.