The Philippines Part 2

The Visayas

10 - 17 June 2009

Hi again, Ben here in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam, just getting my act together and writing about the rest of our Filipino adventure.

In the last episode, we were in Manila searching for yellow folders and poker games (none were found). What we did find was traffic, nice food, rain and a very interesting city to wander around in. Since we had a deadline because we had to book an onward flight out of here for immigration, we decided to skip the 66 hour return ferry ride to Cebu and took a $30 1 hour flight instead. Here is a bottle of rice wine next to a beer bottle. The rice wine we carried all the way from Banaue, a pick-me-up for the long bus ride to Manila.

Cebu was the old capital of the Philippines and is much further south in The Visayas. It is a good launching point for many of the other islands in the area which we were after. We spent the night there and got a ferry the next morning to Tagbilaran on the island of Bohol. Security on the ferry was tight. There was a giant X-ray machine (I think the operator was asleep). There was a man with a drum stick poking around in our bags as well (I don't think he was looking) and there was even a sniffer dog! (I think he was stolen from the pound)

We stayed in Alona Beach, a short tricycle ride from Tagbilaran and had some beach time. Taren was getting massaged by a lady within about 3 minutes of laying down. The water is warm and very salty here, so much so that when I went diving I had to carry almost double the weight I usually do to stay down. The beaches are nice enough, but they are no better than any Adelaide suburban beach.

The cute little furry fellas are called Tarsiers, called the world's smallest monkey they are actually a nocturnal member of the lemur family. While I went diving, Taren went of a trip to the Tarsier sanctuary. They look a bit like Gollum I think. You could fit two in the palm of your hand!

I went on a couple of dives here and saw some amazing coral and a lot of your typical tropical fish. There was a big school of jackfish swimming in a tornado formation, lionfish, clownfish etc etc. but the highlight was all the colourful corals. The dive trip was me and a family of 7 Americans from North Carolina, one of the women had a brand new digital camera she wanted to use. And boy did she use it...to give herself an excuse to kneel all over the beautiful colourful corals (and even a lionfish! Yes she knelt on a fish!) and knock at least 5 big chunks off, decades of growth. And that was just when I was looking! I felt like throwing her overboard on the way back, but she probably would have just stepped on something else, so I let her stay on the boat.

After Alona Beach we had one of those travelling days: 40 minute tricycle ride to Tagbilaran dock, 1 3/4 hour ferry trip to Cebu City, 10 minute taxi ride to the bus station, 4 hour bus ride to Maya on the north tip of Cebu island, 30 minute banca (a local-style boat) to Malapascua Island and then a 20 minute walk or so to BB's Guesthouse, where we deservedly had a King beer.

Malapascua is a small island with no cars (just motorbikes) only 2 km by 1 km in size. There were some nicer beaches here, in the main part of the island there was the 'tourist' beach, which was nice enough, and then the 'local' beach, which was covered in rubbish. I don't know why they can't just have a little bit more pride in their island and clean the whole thing up! Here is a picture of a man training up his chicken for cock fighting we presume. They list the two national sports here as basketball and cock fighting in the Lonely Planet.

I did a couple more dives here, saw a 4m Thresher shark (quite a rare shark I hear) on a dive at 6am, then later that day went on a second dive where I saw a whole buch of cool stuff: 4 frogfish (a fish that can walk and swim, dating back to prehistoric times - pictured) pipefish, pygmy seahorses and spotted shrimp, no turtles unfortunately, and no clumsy divers destroying everything either.

Taren and I spent 3 nights here, one of which saw Taren get bitten by a mosquito (more about that in the next post). This was a nice little quiet island, I'm sure it gets a bit busier in the high season. They say it will be the next Boracay, which is an island closer to Manila with more tourism and a party scene.

Later on we flew back to Manila and got caught in a real downpour, ankle deep water over road intersections, bags getting soaked. The next day I think we went to the movies (saw Drag Me To Hell - it was good), and at about 11pm the got on a plane to Ho Chi Minh City, where I write this post from.

Thanks for reading, see you next post!

Ben

The Phillipenes, or is it Philipines, or Phillippines... oh whatever Part 1

Northern Luzon

1 - 10 June 2009

It's been a while since the last blog entry, I know. We've been on the move around the Philippines (that is the correct spelling) flat chat. I'll limit this entry to our travels in the North.

Our first few hours in Clark and Dau bus station were bewildering to say the least. They drive these brightly painted jeepneys everywhere as minibuses. The traffic was appalling and it doesn't help that they all use their horns to express their feelings toward the traffic.

We overnighted in Baguio where our first meal was spaghetti with pesto (very Filipino!) and then snaked our way up into the mountains to Sagada. The weather at the moment is quite wet, being wet season. Spectacular scenery, check out the piccies!

Here's a photo of me shitting my pants climbing through a slippery limestone cave, coated with a film of bat poo at times. Joking aside, it was the best day trip ever! You could never do a trip like this in Australia without signing a mountain of disclaimers first. Some of it was genuinely dangerous. The guide did the whole 3-4 hour caving walk/slide/crawl/wade/rappel/climb with one arm holding the rope or rock and the other hand holding a big-ass lantern on his shoulder, and all the while he was telling us like a Twister spinner to put our left foot here, our right hand here and even at times acting as a stepladder for our clumsy selves.

We went to the town of Banaue (pronounced banner-way), where the blue-ribbon scenery began. These rice terraces are 2000 years old in some cases. The real stunners were a few hours hike away in Batad (pronounced bat-ad). This little village has no road, only a foot trail to get any supplies in. You could really appreciate the isolation. Our hotel room only cost a few dollars and it was the best view of any so far. We walked in with some friends we met in Banaue, Michael and Gisele, and together we walked down a very steep set of steps and through some rice terraces to an amazing waterfall where we swam for a while. All the recent rain made it a real gusher. Then we climbed back up and had pizza and beer for dinner. I wonder what the peasants are doing, eh Dad?!

A couple of days later we headed down to the megopolis of Manila. You couldn't have imagined a bigger contrast between Batad and Manila. The first, with no cars, not even a road, and a population of only 1 or 2 thousand depending on who you asked. The second, one of the world's biggest traffic jams, plenty of roads, even 3 train lines, and over 10 million people.
We hardly slept on the overnight bus on the way, mainly thanks to the bus breaking down at 3am and having to change onto different ones, but we soldiered on without crashing on our hotel beds and saw some of the sights Manila offered. There is the old Spanish-styled suburb of Intramuros with a big stone wall and some old churches and buildings surrounded in a beautifully manicured golf course. We ate handsomely for very little (they have a lot of pork here, a contrast from the mainly Muslim Malaysian Borneo). We sipped a martini from the 28th floor of a fancy hotel at sunset. It was nice enough, but I missed the mountains a little.

The next day we headed to Cebu in the south of the Fyllipeens for some beach time...

Kota Kinabalu, Sabah

The Harvest Festival - May 31, 2009

As mentioned in our last blog entry we left Borneo on 1 June, however I thought I would put up an additional posting on our last night in KK.

It turns out the Harvest Festival was on - an annual event where the local indigenous people celebrate the rice harvest.

We heard about a big party out of KK in an area called Penampang. We hailed a bus for the half-hour trip, concerned that we wouldn't know where to get off our fears were alleviated when we found the place, the Harvest Festival is basically as big as the Royal Adelaide Show only very, very different. No fairy floss and scary rides but plenty of Tiger beer and beauty queens! Yep there's the annual Harvest Festival beauty pageant. We didn't arrive until about 5pm and much to Ben's disappointment we missed the pageant by what seemed like only an hour or so, but he was able to get a pic with this year's beauty queen.

Ben and I had been discussing how handy it would be to have a set of portable speakers to play some tunes, remember this wish.

After the interlude with the beauty queen, we went into a strange portable house from which they were promoting cigarettes for Kent. We had to sign in (presumably to show we were over 18) and then played Ninendo Wii on this big screen, when we finished we got to pull a ping-pong ball out of a hat, the ball corresponded with a prize list on the wall. Here's me with our prizes! At the Harvest Festival wishes come true!

After this windfall we thought it was time to join the locals in some merriment. We headed to the rowdiest tent and bought a bucket of Tiger beer. Unfortunately we were seated in the middle of two karaoke sets, somewhat confusing to the senses.

A guy sitting next to us took a liking to Ben and gave him another Tiger beer. There also were roving magicians from the Sabah Magician's Club with some impressive card tricks. The karoke drew our attention when this bloke belted out a passionate version of Blue Suede Shoes.

When we finally decided to leave the nights festivities all the buses had finished and we negotiated RM20 (about $8 - instead of the usual RM3 - $1) with a bus driver heading the other way to take us back to KK, saving a very long walk. The Harvest Festival proved to be an entertaining way to end our trip to Borneo.