So for the mild preamble, in spring Geronimo is called by his old History professor Robert Burrata (after having the world’s least relaxing totally-relaxing morning ever) to the Chocolate Hills in the Philippines to help with a mystery he’s caught in the middle of. Yes, the professor is paying Geronimo’s ticket… And yes, Hercule has been dragged along for the ride.

And now they book a flight to the Philippines and so they land in Panglao International Airport on the aforementioned Panglao Island off the cost of Boho--

i’m sorry what am i looking at

Yeah uh, the book cites the island of Catanduanes as the place where the famous Chocolate Hills are at. Now uh, as a certified Pipino with certified completion of mandatory Pipino fourth grade geography in Social Studies class, I can confirm that this is absolutely incorrect :D

The Chocolate Hills are known very clearly to be in Bohol, an island in the Central Visayas Region (actually map-wise it’s just above Mindanao, the big island down south on a map of the Philippines); while Catanduanes is an island in the Bicol Region, and is considered part of Luzon, which is the big island up north. This is a peak "I should've taken that left turn at Albuquerque" moment

And I think I know why they took this liberty, and I do mean “took this liberty” instead of “made this mistake”. I will get into it later on in this post, but for the time being, I will refer to the island Geronimo goes to in this book as Bohol or Bohol-Catanduanes interchangeably (depends on which is funnier at the time). Just know that the Chocolate Hills are in Bohol, if you look up Bohol you will straight-up get the Chocolate Hills, those two are inseparable in terms of geography and tourism. Tho I will say Catanduanes’s also trying to step up its tourism game and it is a pretty place, so both are good :D

Anyway so Geronimo and Hercule experience some turbulence on the way down onto the Bohol-Catanduanes-Tanglao Airport, which is to be expected because they arrive in early spring, which is around the eve of wet season in the Philippines, which I imagine causes some turbulence. Once Geronimo is able to manfail his way through the airport, he and Hercule find their tour guide Olivia Colby, who is very cute and very much dressed like a bona fide Bisaya probinsyana (province girl)— simple t-shirt up top, a cute modernly-patterned patadyong or traditional Bisayan wraparound skirt, and blue gemstone dangle earrings and necklace pendant to let people know that that tour guide salary is paying you good (/j). She’s cute, literally just down to vibe and help the boys get around, and in both instances where I read the book to Filipino friends on vc, they took a second to gush over how cute Olivia was haha.

First vehicle in the Philippines is a—

Ahhh, I see the localizing crew in Treasure Seekers 3 was also the same team in charge of localizing this book. Yeah uh, so this has absolutely happened before, but for some reason the current writing team really wants to make sure that people who aren’t knowledgeable of the culture really understand what a thing means, in the “nothing beats a jelly donut” kinda way. So uh, they’ve localized all the Filipino terms, which I have mixed feelings on, but at least it’s not entirely a jelly donut situation, like with Treasure Seekers 3’s description of a hakama, geta and kimono. (It’s just really weird because they have pictures to illustrate what the thing means and we in the Philippines already use English terms for these things, but I guess they insist on calling them something else?? Might be a localization telephone from the original Italian trying to localize English terms and then Scholastic having to deal with that, though don’t quote me on that— I don’t have access to the original Italian book.)

So first vehicle in the Philippines is what they call a “minibus”, but it’s actually called a jeepney. And lemme just say, this is the cushiest double-decker jeepney I’ve ever seen in my life. Like, a railing and implied seats on the roof?? Goddamn those jeepney drivers are comfortable with the tourism money they’re getting /j

This is an unbelievably posh jeepney for someone like me, a city kid from a mainly local-inhabited area that doesn’t really have to glam up for tourists, but from what little research I’ve done the proper railings on the roof is absolutely a thing, mainly for luggage storage, but tbh I’ve seen locals work with so much less on the roof. If it even remotely has two firmly grabbable things on either side that won’t creak off its bolts, you can bet your ass people are gonna make a second floor out of that roof with roof luggage/jeepney cargo and grip strength alone. Other than that, though, everything they said is in fact accurate— you pick the jeep based on the route it’s going (where the jeep is going is painted on the front or side of the vehicle), and make note of when it’s passing by your area. Then you tell the driver to stop when he passes by your area, you pay him the fare, and you hop off.

Which is why the joke about Geronimo wanting to get off in this book is so, so funny to me. That’s genuinely how you stop a jeepney, so the poor poor manong behind the wheel stopped thinking that this was someone’s stop when Geronimo was just having an anxious meltdown, and I probably would’ve shriveled up and died of embarrassment if I were in Olivia’s position and had to explain that it was a false alarm haha.

That and uh, thankfully Geronimo isn’t claustrophobic, because jeepneys on the inside are super-cramped and don’t have enough space to justify putting railings to separate passengers. Him accidentally ending up on someone’s lap, as cartoonish as it is, is something I can imagine happening in the Filipino GS universe here because yeah no, people have to squeeze in pretty tight in a jeepney— you’re basically thigh-to-thigh.

The one thing I don’t find realistic (/lh) tho is the fact that everyone in that jeepney had instant ops with Geronimo, I like to think that the moment he’s out of earshot they’re gossiping about him like “oh my god that poor guy barely survived the road just now and that was one of the smoother ones” “bro I heard he’s riding the tricycle next” “OMG WITH THE ROAD UP AHEAD HE’S GONNA HURL POOR GUY LMAO”

Speaking of the road ahead, the next mode of transport is the “smaller minibus with a sidecar”, or the “motorcycle with a sidecar”, or the Filipino tricycle. If you hear that word and think of the toy, fair, but also consider: a motorcycle MacGyvered such it has an extra wheel and a passenger carriage. Say hello to the tricycle, one of the most common modes of public transport in the country! I will say that the one Geronimo rides in is incredibly posh, like four wheels? Fully cushioned seats? That carriage? The full roof and windshield for that motorcycle?? Holy hell, that is posh. Like normally over where I lived in the Philippines, tricycles mainly look functional enough to do their thing without crumbling like a house of cards (though it may feel like it sometimes with the lack of suspension in the passenger carriage), the seats are either barely cushioned or look like a pack of rats got to the seat linings, and you just hop in and hold onto something with nary a seatbelt at the ready.

BUT first of all that’s a rental tricycle, which is very explicitly for tourists and is thus absolutely glammed up for their pleasure and Instagram reels

And second, a bestie of mine who lives in Visayas (hi @loreaccuratemice :D) did bring to my attention that regional variants of tricycle designs are a thing, and lo and behold, the pictures I’ve found of Bohol tricycles are a really close match to what we see in the book! :D

(Bohol tricycle is the center image, NCR/Metro Manila tricycle is the rightmost image)

So hell yeah cultural accuracy :D (still think the four-wheel design is a bit sketch tho)

But now we come to the part of the story that I have mixed feelings on: Professor Robert Burrata’s camp. Don’t get me wrong, I get the idea of him camping out, and camping out here makes sense! What I do have a problem with when it comes to the concept is the fact that because they’re in a campsite in the middle of Chocolate Hills proper, it means that besides Olivia, Geronimo doesn’t have to get fully involved in Filipino culture. 80% of culture is the people who were raised in and live it, so the fact that he doesn’t have to interact with locals (again, besides Olivia) means he misses out on most of Filipino culture! And he’s an introvert so you know that man’s missing OUT!!

Like okay walk with me for a second here. Imagine if instead of a campsite, Geronimo got to be accommodated by someone in town. Maybe it’s a rental house, or the professor knows a guy who knows a guy who knows a guy in town who is kindly offering his place or a place he owns for Geronimo to stay in. For one, it’s a roof over his head that’s made of more than just tarp, but also it means that he ends up having to interact with the people in town! Majority of Filipinos know English, and the odds of people being fluent in English is directly proportional to tourist influx.

Safe to assume that basically all the people there can speak English besides the older folks, but it means that Geronimo gets to see how Filipinos are as a people :D and this would be the chance for the book to subject the reader to 500ccs of Filipino culture (compared to the generous 25ccs one gets from a tourism brochure and the 30ccs the book contains /hj)! Can you imagine this man manfailing his way through the palengke (marketplace) and accidentally endearing himself to all the nagtitinda (stall/shopkeepers)? Can you imagine all the lolas (grannies) gushing over him and spoiling him with our very goated Filipino cuisine and specifically pastries? Can you imagine him getting ice cream from the sorbetero (ice cream vendor) to cool off and learning about the beautiful world of dirty ice cream (not actually dirty, it just means homemade) and ube and keso ice cream? We don’t need him to have a whole chapter that’s just loaded with culture, it can just be offhanded little mentions of him getting them as he’s going about the plot and we Filipinos would literally die happy.

I guess it’s kinda justified because of the professor sending Hercule and G out as incognito tourists, but eeehhhhhh,,, it just feels like it’s awfully convenient for the rest of the plot.

Speaking of which, The Plot

… it’s mid ngl -m- Like as a mystery it’s shit because the culprit is not the mystery so much as the motive and the method, but no one likes screaming at their medium of choice about “IT’S THIS CHARACTER YOU DUMBASS”. The mystery revolves around the local legend of the Chocolate Hills’ creation (which has a lot of versions but the one in the book is right about the general strokes :D) and the fact that the giants who threw hands and accidentally made the Chocolate Hills in their scuffle miiiiggghhttt be squaring up to throw hands again, judging from the giant footprints and the sudden destruction of patches of jungle that’s freaking out the poor local tarsier. Ignoring how that rumor is probably gonna confuse the hell outa the people who grew up hearing that the giants’ battle ended in a double kill, there are rumors of giant sightings going around, and the professor’s enlisted Geronimo and Hercule to figure out the truth behind the giant sightings since his assistants have been trying to figure it out and uh

Yeeaaaahhhhh I trust them about as far as I can throw them, and I’m pretty sure I can’t throw the big guy very far at all.

So G and Hercule do a bit of tourist spywork (an elaborate excuse to speedrun doing tourist-y things in Bohol-Catanduanes), plot shenanigans happen and eventually they find out that, shock of all shocks, the culprit has been the totally-not-suspicious research assistants this whole time! Who could’ve seen this coming???

And of course Rocky Monterrey, the very trusted assistant of the professor, is actually a businessman disguising himself as a research assistant so he can sabotage the professor’s research and the local tourist industry with the giant rumor, which would hypothetically unnerve the Filipino government enough about Chocolate Hills to sell it to him, so he can build his SM City Cebu Megamall competitor in Bohol-Catanduanes with the Chocolate Hills as scenery to flex. Again, let’s ignore the legal impossibility and environmental abomination this Ayala wannabe is attempting to pull off, and look at how uh, this would not work :D

For one, Rocky you’re clearly too broke to bribe the very corrupt Filipino government into giving you a bit of Chocolate Hill land, skill issue /j; but mainly, “supernatural” sightings are happening all the time. Filipino manananggal sightings (the local equivalent of Bigfoot sightings) make their rounds enough that sometimes the news covers it and that’s basically the end of that. Yeah it spooks the locals, but with the scale, there’s a good chance it’ll show up on GMA News and TV Patrol, maybe international news, and next thing you know, reporters will be flocking over to see what’s up (which will be easy for them considering a good handful of Bohol’s revenue is tourism and we’re firmly in the era of influencer tourists (for better or for worse)), so wouldn’t this whole giant sighting thing just backfire on the endgame plan? More people will be coming to the Chocolate Hills to DIY Mousefeed Unsolved the weird giant sightings, and if finding the machine Rocky used to make the footprints was easy enough to find that Geronimo literally stumbled upon it, then how much easier would it be for random tourists (or even locals whose mobile data passed the skill check) trying to get close-up shots of the footprints to find the truck and the other little clues Geronimo and squad found? I haven’t even gotten into the fact that all of Bohol is a UNESCO Global Geopark and is on the tentative list of World Heritage Sites, which means UNESCO is actively working with the local governments to keep Bohol environmentally preserved, thus reducing the odds of being able to bribe the government for it! The plan is already falling apart Rocky ,’:|

So they catch Monterrey and his goons, and it escalates into Geronimo and Olivia having to chase him via tricycle, which when I first read, I wasn’t sure about. As I said before, tricycles are modified motorcycles, but tricycles can’t go all that fast and aren’t designed to. They gave up those speed skill points in exchange for an extra passenger and storage compartment, so while I get it being the closest vehicle on hand, you’d better be hoping that Rocky isn’t able to hitch a ride on literally anything else. That and uh, you don’t wanna push the limits of a MacGyvered machine you’re entrusting your life with.

And that’s when the book pulled the rug out from under me, in a good way :D

Earlier I mentioned how sketchy it is to try to make a tricycle go very fast, and how sketchy the four-wheeled tricycle feels (it’s unnecessary at best and an engineer’s headache at worst), and turns out that was not a throwaway detail, but in fact a Chekov’s sketchy tricycle

Because the tricycle’s passenger compartment comes loose mid-chase with Geronimo in it :D

Fortunately Geronimo’s not hurt, and neither is Rocky, who wound up in it as it was tumbling down the hills, but goddamn talk about living my worst tricycle nightmare on the absolute worst terrain it could possibly have been lived in amirite :D at the very least I can get behind this tricycle design liberty, because it actually came into play when it counted. We love intentional creative liberties that come into play in the narrative ^^

Tho speaking of intentional creative liberties, Bohol-Catanduanes.

I think I know why they took this liberty, and I do mean “took this liberty”. See, I genuinely don’t think the people in the writing team could’ve possibly made such an obvious mistake in the year of our lord 2018, when this book was first written in Italy. Looking up and verifying information is just way too advanced and not-AI-tainted for anyone to look up “Chocolate Hills” and scroll down for two seconds without seeing Bohol on there. Bohol not only has its own ethnic group to its island name, but it also has so much tourism going into it that the Bohol-Panglao International Airport was built and opened in 2018 to replace the Tagbilaran Airport so they could better accommodate the tourists coming into that area… wait a minute.

Coincidence? I think NOT--

(Italian GS and TS are actually very up-to-date with current events irl and tend to make books in correlation to something happening on the international scale (i.e. Ghost of the Shipwreck releasing the same month the Beijing National Center of Performing Arts opened with a production of Turandot, and Race for the Gold (whose plot involves Olympic tryouts) releasing a few months before the Rio de Janeiro Olympics in 2016 took place), I'm just saying that with news as big as Panglao International's opening especially for Bohol's tourism game, it's not entirely unrealistic that they thought to release this book around the time the airport would've released :}c)

Anyway, in comparison to Bohol, ngl Catanduanes doesn’t really have much going for it. I mean don’t get me wrong, it’s got a lot of nice sights to see and its tourism game is growing pretty quickly, but it’s only got 200k-ish people living there (steep contrast to Bohol’s population of 1.2 million), you need to land in Bicol Airport and then take a boat to get there, and when you compare it to Bohol Chocolate Hills, it’s a lot more niche in comparison. I kid you not, I asked my dad what he knows about Catanduanes, and literally the only thing he could recall about it on the spot was that there was one time a snake crossing a road held up traffic there for 45 minutes straight. (I can’t find evidence of a news story of that anywhere, so uh hopefully other more knowledgeable Pipinos can either confirm or deny this story’s validity). You may be wondering why they didn't move the snake instead, but I’ll leave you to ponder the implication of a snake crossing a road taking 45 minutes before traffic could resume while we move on to my point of why I think the Bohol-Catanduanes mix-up happened.

Simply put, it’s one of the things Catanduanes is known for: it’s known for being “The Happy Island”. Now, look me in the eyes and tell me that that’s not the most kids’ book setting name in the literal world. Ignoring the fact that they got that nickname because the people there are tough as balls and still able to live happy lives despite typhoons kicking their asses a lot for a country consistently getting its ass kicked by typhoons (hence the island’s older nickname, “Land of the Howling Winds”), I can only imagine that while looking up possible setting ideas for a Filipino adventure, the writers bumped into the underrated but still very tourist-y island of Catanduanes, saw “Happy Island”, got excited but then realized that they didn’t really have a Very Relevant Tourist Place to anchor things together, then turned to the Chocolate Hills (also a very kids’ book-sounding place, sounds straight out of Willy Wonka) and were like “hey what if we had our cake and ate it too? :3c”, hence them deciding to have the book set in Bohol disguised as Catanduanes, so they could have the “Happy Island” bit but also have a central narrative piece for people to root for the preservation of and then look it up and see that it’s super-famous actually and really easy to go to (literally just take a flight there).

... ignoring the fact that unless the kid does some research first they're gonna end up in an "I shoulda taken that left turn at Albuquerque" situation and the actual Catanduanes might end up disappointing them since the funny mouse man book said there were hills that looked like mounds of choccy but there's no mounds of choccy here it's just old buildings and clean lakes-- (no offense to Catanduanes ofc I'm just saying)

ANYWAY enough of that, yippee case solved, the stupid Ayala Malls founder wannabe gets arrested, and if nothing else about his trip to the Philippines, Geronimo does remember to get pasalubong (souvenirs) for his family back at home.

So that’s Legend of the Chocolate Hills :D Was it very good? Not really, for the reasons I mentioned above. But did I like it? Oh yeah you can bet your ass I did it if just to nerd out about Filipino things and be lovingly pedantic about my home country. G managed to go to the Philippines, and while I feel more could’ve been done with the idea, I am very happy :}

Besides the representation of Filipino food, like wdym Geronimo only eats pancit canton during his stay in the Philippines . . , like what do you MEAN Olivia didn't serve him some adobo at some point like whuh Olivia girlypop what’re you doing what do you mean you didn’t have Geronimo try adobo that’s like going to the US and never having a single American burger wtf I can understand no pandesal or taho or bico but girl get AWN with that my man can’t leave the country without trying adobo my sister in Crust come O--