Blogs from Cebu, Philippines, Asia - page 9

We arrived in Bantayan after a 4-hour bus ride and an hour-long ferry, which were both extremely cheap and well-organized, and the porters were easy to dissuade and no one tried to steal our luggage from the bays under the bus (you fearmongering travel bloggers, please stop writing useless advice!). We were picked up by a driver from our resort (this sounds much fancier than it is, though it did involve a printed! A4 sheet with our names on it) and soon realised that in our haste to get a nice place to stay that was not fully booked we had forgotten to check which side of the island we were on. However, it ended up being totally worth it, even though there was no beach to speak of really, and most of the time the ... read more

As the title of the blog suggests, Malapascua is a place that we both fell in love with – However up until about an hour before we left, we almost cut-it from our itinerary completely due to all the bad weather forecasts we were reading online and the fact that to get there we would have to contend with a fairly long journey from Cebu. We decided to go with our gut instincts and try it out and if the weather was that bad, we could always move on. We first needed to make our way early to the northern bus terminal on the outskirts of town and board a yellow Ceres bus heading to Maya. This journey took around 4 hours but passed some spectacular scenery along the way, we then had to negotiate getting ... read more

After taking our first plane for what seems like an eternity, we landed at Mactan-Cebu Island Airport just outside of Cebu City at 1.30am – This is located in the Visaya’s region of the Philippines where we had chosen to spend most of our time for the next 3 weeks. We quickly breezed through immigration and collected our bags before exiting the airport and after passing the tourists taxi’s which charge in the region of 3-4 times the price of local taxi’s we managed to find a nice driver who was willing to take us to our hotel in Uptown Cebu for the metered price. As we would be arriving fairly late and after not having a hot shower for a little over 2 weeks, we decided to push the boat out and stay in a ... read more

Sunday, 28th October 2012 Our Tiger Airways flight was scheduled at 1810hrs in the evening. So we basically had the whole day to rot ourselves away at our favourite Starbucks outlet. For lunch, we opted for pizza at Da Vinci's which strangely exuded among other things an American Old Town feel rather than Italian. To sum up my Philippines experience from a Singaporean perspective:- - The Philippines is not a shopping destination even though there are numerous modern malls within the metropolitan area of Manila. The average visitor should however go back with a couple of packs of dried mangoes which made great souvenirs given the nice prices. The best prices were found within Cebu island itself where the snack originated. Metro Supermarket @ Ayala Center seemed to offer the best prices after comparing prices from ... read more

Friday, 26th October 2012 After breakfast at the Bayleaf Hotel this morning, we took our last look at Intramuros before heading to the airport in the afternoon. This morning, we covered our final bit of itinerary at Fort Santiago, located along the western edge of the city. Our early afternoon flight meant that we didn't have much time to enter the grounds of the fort to take a good look of the place. All we could manage were a couple of shots and a quick stopover at one of the souvenirs shop along the street. We finally came to an end of our trip in Manila as we made our way to the airport. Personally over the past two days, I had developed a love-hate affair with this city. I loved the friendliness of the service ... read more