Tips 👏
- Cebu City is massive, one of the most active city of the country with a lot of IT activities.
- This is the top destination for Korean tourist due to its proximity and lovely weather.
- Some areas of the city are to be avoided.
- Distance a long and traffic is omnipresent.
- There's all the facilities you might need in the city.
🏠 Accommodation
We stayed at Crimson Mactan Resort and Spa and it was delightful. Fairly expensive, but quality was there, including the biggest breakfast buffet we ever witnessed, huge room, private beach and two swimming pools. Also including some rather cringe animations. We managed to organise our tour directly with the reception, but it was over-priced and we should have do the classic WhatsApp hustle.
Only con is it's quite far away from anything, but they offer a free shuttle service to go in the city & malls.
We decided to stay there due to the proximity of the airport and our short time on the island and that was a good call.
🚲 Getting there
The two main international airports of the country are Manila and Cebu. We managed to land directly there from London (via HongKong) with Cathay Pacific, avoiding us the cost and time of another internal flight.
⏱ Duration
We stayed three nights and two full days and felt it was enough (stuck in the resort). If we had more time, we would have stayed in Moalboal instead for 4 days to go explore the surroundings.
Crimson Resort 🏖️
We stayed at the Crimson Resort Mactan during all our time on Cebu and itself was an attraction. While we are not usually resort people, personal circumstances led us to have a well deserved rest and that was the best spot for it (also super close to the airport which is great in case of luggage lost or for quick connections).
The resort was big and small at the same time, composed by two story buildings everywhere, along with a private beach, huge swimming pools and few restaurants. While it gets fairly boring after a bit, if you're looking for a place to spend a day or two doing nothing besides tanning look no further (specially after a long flight trip!).
Alternatively if you're planning to spend more time on Cebu definitely check out Moalboal.
Kawasan Falls & Sardinis 🐟
During our short stay, we still managed to score the two top rated attractions of the island. We organised the tour directly via the concierge at the resort, private and to be picked-up directly at the hotel the next morning. All included the price was 210£/person with the food, transport, guide and activities entrance. That was definitely overpriced and we could have find much cheaper around, but being tired and short on time we went for it.
We got picked up a 6AM (initially scheduled at 5AM but too early for Barbara). We met our guide at the reception, got our generous packed breakfast and started our journey to the south of the island. Tours tend to leave really early to avoid traffic for the long drive.
After 3h of car and some scenic views, we reached the first stop in Moalboal. We changed and got our complementary snorkelling gear, and started our sardini run session of 40 minutes. We spotted a couple of sea turtles and lots of sardini tornado, however far less impressive than what we say online. We're suspecting our guide to have took us to the 'quick and easy' spot reachable by the beach directly instead of taking the boat to go further. The spot was also packed with other tours.
We then gave back our gear and thanked the local guide, before heading to the start of the Kawasan canyon path via another 30 minutes of car. Few waiver signed and gear check after, we were on our way to the start of the adventure.
A huge zipline was waiting for us for an extra 600 PHP (optional but remove a 40 minutes walk) for which we signed-up right away. It looked a bit scary but actually wasn't and was good fun!
Upon arrival, we walked for about 20 minutes and started to follow the river in the water. It took us around 4 hours to make it all the way down, including lots of scenic points, jumps, Tarzan ropes and underwater cave. All those activities were all the time optional (with a side access if needed). Barbara wasn't a fan but I had a great time! Since that was a private tour we had one guide each, which also turned out to be Instagram pro photographers (a bit too much). Note that it was also packed with people.
At the end, we enjoyed a frugal lunch with a view on the last stage of the fall, walked an extra 30 minutes and arrived back at the car to make our journey back to Mactan in 4 hours.
Honestly that was a really fun but packed day, staying in Moalboal would have been much better, and the small town also looked quite cool. Another thing to note is Barbara ended up quite sick few days after once on Coron, and we're suspecting she might have caught a parasite in the canyon (as read online), so keep that in mind!
Hope this was helpful, you can ask us any questions on Instagram.