The Sumilon Sand Bar sits on the south-eastern end of Cebu and is usually an accompanying activity that visitors might include if they’re already in the Oslob area for the whale shark watching activity. The point where boats ferry visitors to the sand bar and back is a short five-minute vehicle journey from the whale shark watching spot. For us though, the activity turned out to be, in a word, disappointing.
Comments and tips:
The sand bar is only actually accessible at low tide, which apparently starts in the early afternoon. We were there in the late morning, which meant there was no actual sand bar to begin with. Rather, the stretch had been swallowed up by the sea. If you’re coming here specifically for the white powdery stretch of beach, you’d need to come in the afternoon.
The place was pretty congested. The sand bar is apparently a very popular spot for locals, and there were many groups swimming along the jagged rock formation. What I think really made things tough was that the actual ground area for people to rest, get changed, or chill is really small, so things were not better out of the water either. The area for people to rest, relax, or chill was a small patch of jagged rocks and a few seating places, with just some trees for shade. In front of that was a narrow pathway for people trying to move about.
I guess our expectations had been unrealistic, since the only other sand bar we’d experienced was during our Maldives trip. On that occasion, there was only one other group besides us, so there was plenty of space for everyone.
There was no coral life immediately accessible from the sand bar. To get to what we guessed or observed other groups were visiting, you’d need to swim a fair distance out.
Drone flying is not permitted on the sand bar: there is a rules signboard before getting on the boat to the island that makes that clear. It’s possible, however, to fly if you buy the necessary permit, which I did — for 2,500 pesos. Ouch. And I realised that I’d wasted my money on this permit as soon as our ferry boat approached the island and I saw that there was nothing particularly interesting about Sumilon Island for drone videography. Taking off and landing was also a real problem given the tight spaces everyone was navigating about, but I managed to do both successfully.
We didn’t stay long at Sumilon Island seeing how busy the area was: we were back on the mainland within an hour. Our next itinerary activity was a visit to the nearby Tumalog Falls, but that got dropped as our driver said the place was closed for a couple of months. So we began the long two-hour journey around the southern coast to Moalboal for an early end to the day.
A quick and dirty compilation of the drone video I took over Sumilon Island:
Continuing onto Day 04 tomorrow next!