The Philippines

This past week saw a group of 8 of us teachers take the short two hour flight down to Manila, Philippines. The plan was to spend a couple of days in Manila, and then head out to a more southern island where we could relax on the beach for a few days before returning to Manila for our flight home. In the end, we stuck to our plan, although we had no idea how difficult that would be...

Phong and I arrived a day after the rest of the group and were greeted by Niko and Jeff at the hostel in Manila around 11pm. We were immediately pulled out to the bars, where we saw what Manila is all about: hookers. Now I'm sure there are women in Manila who are not hookers, but I swear I did not see a single one of them that night. The city itself, or at least the area we were in, was obviously very poor and thus was very dirty. Almost every street had people huddling in a dry corner of a building or lying down on a flat, dry surface. I was surprised by how similar the slums in Manila resembled those in Latin America. I knew that there was Spanish influence here, but if you couldn't hear the language that was being spoken, you would have sworn that you were in the slums of Santo Domingo. Regardless of the state of the city, we had a fun night and got on our 3:30am bus to depart for the town from which the ferry would leave.

Around 5am I was woken up by two things simultaneously. First, I was freezing my ass off. Second, the bus wasn't moving and no one was getting off. The bus had broken down. Of course it had. We were lucky enough to be able to catch a passing Jeepney (flamboyantly decorated taxis made from WW2 jeeps, I believe) and made it to the port with plenty of time for our 8am ferry. When we arrived in a light drizzle, we found that the ferry had been cancelled due to concerns over an approaching typhoon. We were 0/2 with transportation so far. Nearly as soon as we arrived, a man approached us and offered us his personal ferry service to our island. Obviously, we were skeptical, but with no other option, we took him up on his offer. We were driven to a rocky beach about a half hour away from the port and boarded his boat that "could hold 60 people". Yea, sure guy...

About an hour later, tired, wet, and a bit cranky, we made it to the island. A town called Puerto Galera. There a man told us of his cousin's hotel/resort at a town called White Beach. It sounded nice enough, so we decided to check it out. That's how we found the beaches that are in the pictures above. It's the off season now, so we were able to get good rates at the hotel, and were about a 2 minute walk from the beach. Things were looking up.

In the next few days we relaxed on the beach, went hiking to a waterfall in the jungle, and went snorkeling. It was really relaxing and we ended up having a really good time, even if a good portion of the "women" that we saw on the island may not have been born that way...

That's all I have time for, for now. More pictures and updates soon.