Surigao has a good reputation for being one of the friendliest ports in the Philippines. We sent our pre arrival notice to a few dozen email addresses and were told to meet a lady from the tourism office who would take us to all the offices. We did and everybody was very friendly indeed, but it took the whole day. Partly because it took the officers at custom’s one and a half hours to copy by hand all the documents I had filled in twice before (and yes, there are several copy machines at the office), but mainly because the tourism lady took us to a restaurant on the opposite side of town from the officials for lunch 
It was pouring down all day, but going with a noisily stuttering tricycle (they are the main means of public transport) we saw basically the whole town (several times).
The next day we went for some shopping and were positively surprised about the range in the supermarkets. The market has great, fresh produce and we had an array of little dishes for lunch (for just 2 euros!) at a little stall. Surigao is noisy and it was wet and muddy while we were there (so not a great subjective impression), but there’s not much trash on the roads and we even saw recycling containers for different materials 
