Yesterday we walked to Larena, the little town about 8 km west along the coast. You walk along the Circumferential, the main island road, but it's pleasant enough: there's little traffic, and there are hard shoulders that double as pedestrian strips most of the way.





We lunched at the Larena Triad, an odd, UFO-like building from whose elevated position you get glorious views over the hills to the back, and the patchwork of sea and islands to the front.






Lonely Planet is sniffy about the food, but our dishes were just fine: really excellent sizzling beef, and very acceptable tofu and vegetable karekare (this is a kind of stew, cooked in a smooth peanut sauce, and accompanied by that salty, spicy, fishy relish called bagoong).

The Triad is a little beyond Larena, coming from our direction. If you don't fancy the extra distance and the slog up the hill after your hot walk from Sandugan, you can take a trike. It's not difficult to walk back down into town once you've lunched.



Larena also boasts a hypermarket, where you can shop for tea, and there are plenty of trikes to take you and your shopping back along the road you walked this morning.

Great day. Very simple. Very enjoyable.

Today, on the other hand, has been one of those days that has not quite gone to plan.

It started well, with a nice breakfast (big, fat omelettes with tomato, onion, ham, and cheese) at Ayan's Local Food. This is a very pleasant little eatery close to our accommodation. We'd visited a couple of times already: once for late lunch/early tea (the banana flower in coconut milk is just delicious, and the fried fish is also nice, though low-carbers need to have a friend to feed the potatoes to); and again for the excellent home-made hot chocolate. (I continue to rave about Philippine drinking chocolate. It is made with cocoa "tablea", and the resulting product is very chocolaty and not at all sweet unless you add sugar, which we don't. Ayan's chocolate is an excellent example.)



Then we took our snorkels for a swim, but recent winds had stirred the seas and raked the bottom, so the water was buffety and unclear.

We walked out down the Larena route again to try a different lunch place, but despite its Facebook claim to be "always open", our target wasn't going to be serving food until the evening.


So we ended up at Molmol, which is very pleasant, but offers only pizza and pasta... By that time we were pretty hungry, and there were no other options nearby, so we plumped for the pasta, wisely or not. It was very tasty, but of course not totally what the other Tern needs these days.

I felt bad about this. I'm the travel-planner and the food-planner, so I kind of feel responsible.

In general it's been much harder to find low-carb choices on Siquijor, so we have to bear this in mind when we map out future jaunts. We need either reasonably sophisticated restaurants (that don't cost too much), or the facilities to self-cater plus access to reasonable shops, or -- ideally -- some combo of the two.

Also giving us pause for thought was the account by the French owner of Molmol of his amazing experience earlier today diving amidst a school of barracuda just off the local coast.

Such things have to be organized, of course, and these days we tend to avoid "organized" trips, both because they are generally expensive (you can do a lot of walking, scooting, and eating for the price of an excursion), and because they tend to take decisions out of your hands, so that if you're not careful, you can end up with an expensive product that isn't entirely what you want.

Generally, I'm really happy with our approach. I figure that in any case you can't do everything, and so we might as well do the low-hanging fruit cheaply, slowly, and under our own steam.

But sometimes -- like today -- I wonder if we're missing out.

So it's been a thought-provoking day. Did we do this bit of the trip optimally? We're still novices at OE-ing, at the end of the day. We're still figuring out how to do it sustainably.

Whether or not we could have done it better, I certainly wouldn't have missed Siquijor. It's such a pretty island, so full of flowers and greenery. It's fabulously situated, with vast, sweeping views out over Cebu, Bohol, and Negros. And it's still very quiet and unspoilt (let's hope that continues). As we sat drying off after our swim, watching the vast quantities of hermit crabs going about their business, and the shades of blue and green constantly shifting in the ocean, it was difficult not to feel that it was all fairly close to idyllic.

This evening, as we again sat down near the little beach, we were also reminded of the degree to which the little concerns I've expressed are ultra-peripheral to the real issues of life...

As the sun set, and a flock of white birds caught the last of its light, glowing eerily then disappearing into the darkness, the fishermen we have observed night after night set out once more to sea. Their craft are tiny. They sail them alone. They probably don't go far offshore, but even so, it's a big, dark sea out there, and tonight lightning was flickering on the horizon.

We were just turning to go when a sea snake skittered up the beach. Yes, the beach we'd been swimming off just a few hours before... Only 3% of sea snake bites are fatal, or so I read. Even so, I'm glad I didn't meet one in the water, and I hope the fishermen don't get any tangled in their nets...