Manila - Boracay

I thought I better update you all as to what happened in our second week in the Philippines.

After the slowest commute of my life that was scheduled to take around 3hrs took 4.5hrs. It was just congestion and there is just so very little to get around it. I have never seen anything like it in my life and I have been to Tokyo, Sydney and even driven in Chicago in peak hour traffic. Manila won hands down. They have this interesting system where they have taken a lot of traffic lights out because they only slow things down. To replace them they have this little zones where you can do u-turns into oncoming traffic. The first time you do one you are petrified but as usual the speed is quite low and everyone is used to it anyway.

We got to our hotel which had run out of the room type we booked with a separate bedroom so Max could sleep and we could stay awake. So they downgraded us!! We eventually convinced them that we should in fact get an upgrade and then he expected us to pay for it! So that was not the start in Manila by ourselves that we needed. Once it was sorted we went to the nearby Mall of Asia (MOA) and got some nappies for the rest of the week and ate at a beautiful little Japanese restaurant. Max enjoyed his ripe mango shake and ate gyoza and his own rice and off our plates as well. He also enjoyed watching the fish in the tank and watching the Chef make sushi.

Early the next day we went to the Domestic airport for our flight to Boracay. It is a very basic airport but the new airport has been built for a couple of years but due to some legal wrangling and corruption accusations is not in use. The domestic airport did have a newstand/christian bookstore which is handy really. They also have bakeries so you can take pasulubong (small gifts) to where ever you are going. These range from small wrapped biscuits to like 3 ft long swiss rolls. They even had a cinnabon stand but seeing we had a packed breakfast from the hotel I resisted the urge. Max played in the playground and we also watched the local cartoons together. Some were Japanese dubbed in english or Japanese and dubbed in Tagalog. We also watched Jollitown together. Jollibee is a fast food outlet that is everywhere and there version of Ronald McDonald is a bee. He has friends and they have a bunch of adventures with kids. Sorta like Barney and all of the ads funnily enough are for Jollibee or Chowking which happens to be owned by you guessed it Jollibee. The other ad we saw a lot for was the Nestle milk drink called Chuckie. Which with our australian sense of humour thought it was strange to drink something called Chuckie.

We were on a 32 seater for our 35 minute flight which had been delayed 45 minutes. But Max did really well considering he was sitting on our laps the whole time. He also got given extra peanuts and juice from the cabin crew. He really got a taste for the peanuts with like a biscuit coating.

Once we got to the small rural airport we found that there was no one to pick us up. Thankfully our airline had free transfers to the island. Which basically meant they drove us the 500m to the ferry. We caught a trike up to the hotel which was to be our home for the next week.

They saw that we want you to be like Family. Not only did they upgrade us to the executive suite which had 4 beds and 2.5 bedrooms but they also sat us down and explained the outline of the island and briefed us on how to get breakfast delivered to our balcony every morning and how to get a free shuttle to where all the action happens.

There was a 1yr old having her birthday party which we got invited to with a great cake and a whole pig. Max had a wonderful time with the kids. We felt bad that we had no gifts and remembered we had brought about 30 of those small clip on koalas to give out if such a occasion arose. They went down so well.

that night we went down to Station 2 where a lot of the shops and restaurants are checked things out. We ended up at a small greek restaurant. It was here that Max decided to fill his nappy with the bad stuff. Of course we didn't think we would neep a nappy while ducking out for dinner. You can buy 2 nappies for under a buck at the pharmacy which are plentiful and some wipes for about 3 bucks so we got out of that mess nicely and they fitted in my camera bag so we had no more surprises.