Philippines scuba diving offers some of the best diving in the world and it can be done on a Shoestring budget if you go at the right time of the year.
There are not too many places in the world where you can do 2 dives for under , but the Philippines offers many places where this is possible, and if you have your own dive gear, and dive more than 5 times, you might even bring the price down lower.
My two favorites while I was there was Puerto Galera and Cebu -Bohol. Both dive areas are very easy to get to. For Puerto Galera I went using local buses and a local ferry an easy cheap trip from either Angeles City where Clark Air base is located and even easier from Manila. Getting to Cebu-Bohol was equally easy and cheap with a few regional airlines like Cebu Pacific and the Philippines national air carrier, Philippines Air offering lots of cheap flights from either Manila or Clark.
The diving at Puerto Galera was a real treat seeing numerous butterfly species including tear drops, saddle backs and lots of different noses including orange nose, blue nose, and hump nose. There were also a lot of angel fish including everyone's favorite the regal and some great pipefish and nudibrachs action as well. Puerto Galera also has some wreck diving, with 3 wrecks doable in one dive at Sabang Beach. These wrecks are shallow enough that open water divers can swim around the outside of them without a advanced open water card or wreck diving specialty rating.
Cebu is one of the larger islands in the Philippines. Bohol is attached to Cebu by a bridge. Alona beach is on Bohol, and is the main jumping off point for Balicasag, which is where the best diving is located, roughly a 25 minute boat ride on the local catamarans from Alona Beach. Shore dives are also possible off of Alona Beach. I was rewarded with a sea snake and a hoard of schooling catfish, as well as some very beautiful pipefish when I first arrived, and did a free diving snorkeling sortie. From the beach it took about 10 minutes to swim too and went down to over 40 meters. The main place for the divers that go to Cebu -Bohol is Balicasag island which is a marine park, while I was there we had some high winds, so were on the lee ward side for two days of wall action that was great!. A highlight of the trip was swimming right into a large group of tunas in 40 meters of water, who swim by close enough for me to see all of the beautiful coloration. Balicasag Island had a few different types of nudibrachs as well that were quite beautiful to behold in their outrageous fluorescent color schemes. There is also some real good shallow reef that held at least 4 different types of clown fish, finding Nemo here is a snap
For all our dives in the Philippines we had local dive masters. I must point out that they were not very good at briefings, and I found it a little disconcerting not getting a boat safety brief, especially when the life preservers were not in sight. English was the language that was spoken mostly on the dive boats that I scuba dived off of. All in all I will go back and dive there as it is a great value in the off season.
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