Three Days in South Cebu

South Cebu is a loop, not a line, and most people do it as an out-and-back from Cebu City in a single exhausting day. Three days lets you go down the east coast, cross to the west, and come back up the other side — same distance, half the driving, and you sleep somewhere worth sleeping.

Day one: down the east coast

Leave early enough to be in Oslob before seven. The whale shark interaction runs in the first hours of the day and the queue after seven is a real queue. Half an hour in the water, then Tumalog Falls fifteen minutes up the hill, which is quiet at nine in the morning and full by eleven.

Sumilon is the afternoon: a boat out to the sandbar, which moves with the season and is never in the same place twice. Stay on the island if the budget allows; otherwise Oslob town has rooms.

Day two: cross to the west coast

The road across the middle of the island through Santander and up the west side is the best driving in Cebu and nobody does it. Kawasan Falls is the target — get there before the canyoneering groups do, which means before nine.

Day three: north, slowly

Moalboal is forty minutes north of Kawasan and the sardine run is a ten-metre swim from the shore, which makes it the least logistically demanding remarkable thing in the province. Then the coast road back to the city.

• Book Oslob for the first night, not Cebu City
• Cash for everything south of Carcar
• The west coast road has no reliable fuel after Badian
• Reef-safe sunscreen or none at all

Doing it in two days instead

Drop Kawasan. It is the one that needs a morning of its own, and a rushed Kawasan is a car park and a queue.