Why the Philippines???????

This leg of the journey did not get off to a good start when we flew into Clark (Manilla) Airport only to find that it was not Manilla as the internet had implied. Manilla was a two hour drive south!!. This was a minor airport above Manilla. It used to be the American airbase until a volcano had erupted and covered it in two feet of ash. The Philippino army was based there and the security was something else!!! When I asked if we could go into the airport to buy an ongoing ticket I was told that I had to go into the town. I could not believe it. We would miss any outgoing flights by doing this. We were overcharged for the taxi and found ourselves in sleaseville. It had obviously been the place where the American military went to relieve their tensions!!!! It was wall-to-wall girlie bars, unaccompanied women were banned.

We went to the hotel to get a ticket out of there, but we were not sure exactly where we wanted to go. A travel agent said that she would help so we followed her in our taxi, to her office on slease street. She tried to convince us that it would cost two hundred and fifty pounds to get out of there by going to Manilla then out to Cebu. We were used to paying 30 for an internal flight so we walked out of there. This did not look like any place that we would want to stay, and the blatant rip-off attitude of the travel agent and arrogance of the airport security posed quite a problem. As we walked past an internet place Lee asked a european guy if he knew anywhere that we could stay and it turned out that he owned a hotel! It was called, The Anchorage, and he was the Aussie owner. What luck. It was basic and clean, and, apart from the mirrors along the headboard wall (!!!), seemed acceptable, under the circumstances. It had a bar and a type of transport cafe. There were one or two ex-pats around too. Lee had his best pork meal ever later, and got talking to Paddy Lynch, who travelled extensively in the Philippines. He assured us that we could get out of there for about 25 pounds. We were beginning to relax. He suggested a place to stay in Cebu, he even recommended some islands that we might like to visit and wrote it all down. A plan was beginning to shape itself. I went and had another beer where I watched on elderly doddery old man being persued by two young girls, with their tea of meat in skewers clutched in a plastic bag in their hands. His hand was shaking so much that he was spilling his beer. I think it was an illness, not the girls. Sometime later he meandered away from them and to the safety of his bed. They left. I smiled to myself.

We set out at 10am to the travel agent around the corner next morning to book a flight to Cebu. It was 25 pound and left at 12. We shot back to the hotel via a 24hr cafe with petite girls in halter neck dresses as waitresses. We picked our tickets up and grabbed a jeepney and returned to this bloody awful airport. The driver was a bit harrassed at the checkpoints by over zealous guards and I was getting irritated by the time delays. We pais our money and a guard asked me what we paid the driver. I said that it was my business. He waved his security badge and said it was his adding that they were just concerned that we were not overcharged. I quickly retorted, "Like your official airport taxi's yesterday that overcharged us. We left it at that. I was so glad to leave.

At Cebu we got a taxi to Kiwi Lodge recommended by Paddy. It was full but they got us a room around the corner. This had a huge cockroach hiding under the shower curtain. I squealed and Lee sprang into action, venting his anger on the said creature. My hero!

The next morning we flagged down a taxi at 7.30. The driver did not speak a word of English and 'pier 4' and 'ferry port' were hard to act out. We drew a boat, with no response so we left it and headed back to The Kiwi Lodge, (God Bless Paddy Lynch,) where the boy called a cab and told him where we wanted to go. The ferry took two hours to deliver us to Bohol and a taxi delivered us to a smaller island, joined by road, off the south coast, called Panglao. We headed to Alanaland. We paid off the taxi and then found out that it was full! We booked in next door, Bananaland. By now it was beginning to feel like Lalaland. We stayed two days. It was beautiful but empty. The beach, accessed through a rather grander resort was white but there were no sunbeds that did not belong to the hotel, and they were right up near people's bungalows. I did not feel comfortable. There was nowhere to leave your clothes and nowhere for Lee to sit comfortably in the shade. The sea was tourquoise but had quite strong waves, so swimming was difficult. We were unsettled and left. We did not go back. Despite the beauty this was not our kind of place. We moved to a little place on the mainnroasd where there were other people and got talking to a couple who went there to dive. We left two days later.

The taxi took us to the port. The boat took two hours. Another taxi took us to Cebu airport. The first plane took us to Manilla then we had to get a taxi from the domestic terminal to the international terminal, for our flight to Jakarta, Indonesia. We were glad to leave the Philippines. It had been an expensive, waring waste of time! It is easily, the worst place that we have been to, seedy, dirty, very, very poor and quite forlorn, I felt, though the people seemed pleasant and resigned to the fact thast they would work for very small money and just 'get-by'. It just made me feel sad.