Sumilon Island and the Sausage Guy

Towards the end of my time on Cebu Island, my aunt took me and my cousin Kim to Sumilon Island - a small resort island of the southern coast of Cebu.

In order to get there, you have to pass a series of towns along the coast and mountain side. My aunt said that the best time to beat the traffic through the towns was to go at the crack of dawn. I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination so this blog posting will not include details of each town 'cause really, I slept "gracefully" throughout the majority of the ride.

At the end of our car journey, we parked on a private docking site for the island where we were greeted with welcome drinks and a smile from the security guard that apparently doubled as the concierge.

After a short wait time, our boat finally arrived and we were on our way. The waves were pretty choppy so there were a couple of times I felt like I was going to go overboard. It also didn't help I picked the seat beside the edge.

When we arrived at Sumilon, we automatically felt like VIPs. More staff were at the docks waiting to greet us and lead us to gas-powered golf carts to take us through the jungle forest to the resort check-in situated on a high lookout point overlooking the sea.

The check-in looked like a large open concept hut that also housed the dining area. From the dining area, you could also see a series of mini-resting huts and a pool at the edge of the cliff that seemed to flow into the three coloured sea.

I've never seen the sea three different colours of blue in person in my life. The water closest to the white sands was a light green-ish blue. The water then transitioned into a deep turquoise that then quickly transitioned into a deep navy blue. Needless to say after watching the water intently, I really wanted to jump in and get snorkeling.

Because the water was still choppy, we had to snorkel on the other side of the island. It sounds like it would have been a long walk but it wasn't. The island is so small that you could probably walk it in a morning. Fortunately for us, the resort was that customer service focused that they caught us walking and just drove us to the snorkeling drop off point.

To be perfectly honest, I'm still deciding on whether or not I actually enjoyed my snorkeling experience. Don't get me wrong - I'm a complete water baby and loved floating around in the sea but I absolutely hated getting seawater up the nose. Yes, I know you're not supposed to get seawater up the nose when you're snorkeling but I had to keep adjusting my mask every-so-often as I was floating around that it just happened. I then proceeded to accidently drink it and then gagged multiple times. If it weren't for the tropical fish floating around under the sea, snorkeling would have been a futile activity.

After a long day of snorkeling and sea kayaking on a small lagoon (another activity where I wound up drinking sea water after getting capsized...bah), we headed back to the main island so that we could start driving back to Cebu city before dark and stop by to visit my aunt's friend - a sausage-making guy.


Screw Ship-making - what I really want to do is make sausage
Stefan is a transplanted islander by way of Germany. He started out as a nautical engineer but later realized he loved the artform of sausage-making over building boats so he took the artform he learned from his father to the Philippines and married a Filipina (Note: this is more or less a common story for the many German guys that live here. Man wants to live on island. Man finds island to inhabit. Man finds nice Filipino lady to marry. True story.)

Stefan's place of business is probably not what you would expect for a sausage-making facility - a house looking over the sea. Even more random than the location of the sausage-making place are the inhabitants. Where one would expect to find some pigs roaming the grounds, all I saw were massive geese and turkeys, supplemented by native chickens and their chicks. I even saw a couple chickens by the small monument to the blessed Virgin Mary that was by the driveway. It kind of looked like they were praying to her. (Hey now, the Philippines is an uber-Catholic country so it's perfectly natural to have random monuments on property grounds. As for the chicks, maybe they were praying not to get butchered??)

Anyhow, in his thick accent, he explained his sausage making process and gave us a little tour of his fridge with his other meat products - a series of hanging meat logs with names I don't even remember how to pronounce. Then came the main event - food sampling!

His wife prepared a sample spread for us: drinks, german bread and some smoked ham. Best. Ham. Ever. I'm not a huge ham-eating person but the smoked ham he made us was soo good. It was thinly sliced, similar to the consistency of the smoked salmon you would find in grocery stores in North America. As soon as you placed the ham in your mouth, it seemed to just melt on your tongue. I could have easily eaten an entire row but I figured it might have been inappropriate. Also, the ride back was going to be bumpy because of random pot holes and people running back and forth on the streets. Avoiding barfing in the car seemed like a good strategy as well.

After about an hour of chatting and eating, we headed back to the city. As expected, we hit many pot holes and everyone and their goats seemed to pop out of the darkness onto the streets. I proud to say, however, my ham stayed where it was supposed to be: in my tummy.

That's it for now, I'm back in Manila now...time is flying!!! Next Update, my mini-Amazing Race drama-rama at the Cebu airport.

xoxo

C