Western Visayas Food Trip: Bantayan Island's Dried Fish

Early the next day, I asked to arrange (through the caretaker at my resort) for a tricycle drop-off and pick-up in Santa Fe town proper, where most of the resorts on Bantayan Island’s southeast coast are located. Since I pretty much went straight my lodgings after getting off the ferry, I wanted to wander around town and check out the local market.

I certainly found quite a variety of dried fish! I would have loved to be decent with Cebuano, enough to ask someone at the market about the kinds of fish they had for sale, and how they liked to cook them. Things to get better at next time!

Back at the resort, I sat down for breakfast. What more could I ask for?

I wanted to visit Bantayan Island because here, dried seafood products were caught, processed and packed for Balangay's Best. I learned about the social enterprise behind Balangay's Best - an organization called Fishers and Changemakers Inc. - in early 2017, when I first met its co-founder Dhang Tecson at a trade show in Manila.

Learning about the challenges faced by the communities that Fishers and Changemakers Inc. worked with, led me to writing an article that changed the way I think about storytelling (read “Breakfast at risk” here). I knew I had to make my way to where their story began.

On the island, I met Jet Ong, whose husband picked me up to visit the community they lived in. I learned that Jet came to the island after working with a group of volunteers who headed to Bantayan following Typhoon Haiyan, which left many coastal fishing communities in the eastern Visayas region with few (if any) remaining infrastructures by the end of 2013. On the island, many families earned a living from the sea, and with their boats missing or badly damaged, homes destroyed, and local food processing and storage facilities in unusable condition - Jet, with a few others, opted to stay and help the community rebuild.

I learned so much from this short visit, and lunch with Jet's family is one I won't forget. Daghang salamat po!