San Agustin is a small town on the northeast corner of Tablas Island, the largest of the islands in the Romblon Group in the central Visayas. It is about 25 miles long north to south. We’d visited in 2016 and 2018. (You’ll find posts from those visits at the end of this one.) We returned with our friends Bert and Danny to reunite with Nonong, an old friend from our time working together at the Philippine Refugee Processing Center. The photos below were taken on February 23 and 24.
San Agustin is a sleepy town except when the ferries pull in, which can be during the day or at any time during the night. Then there is a bustle of offloading of passengers and freight, and boarding of other passengers and freight, until the ferry pulls out and quiet returns.
Several piers jut out into the water and large ferries dock there. The pump boat or bangka described in the last post below can pull right up to the quay along the port.
The new port terminal has clearly modeled itself on the Sydney Opera House!
A number of lodges advertise that they are open 24 hours for the convenience of the passengers who may need a room for a few hours. The carinderia (small local diner) we eat at is also open at all hours.
San Agustin is colorful!
The church now has solar panels. This is the building where we took photos of Palm Sunday in 2016.
The post “Two Rides” shows you Moreno Beach in 2018, when it was deserted. It is busy on the Sunday we visited.
The house below was quite dilapidated six years ago. It has now been repaired and is open some of the time (but not when we were there) as part of a family resort, one of several along the beach.
Shorebock’s was closed, alas!
Lina measures herself against a stalk of bananas. Many hundreds of bananas are growing in this extraordinary cluster. Do you see the spiral patterns? I’m sure they follow the Fibonacci sequence: https://clevelanddesign.com/insights/the-nature-of-design-the-fibonacci-sequence-and-the-golden-ratio/
We left Tablas from Looc to Caticlan, the same ride described in 2018.
Journeys 