It’s a wrap, another great year of travelling, seasons greetings from the Philippines

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We spent exactly the 60 days in Indonesia that our visa allowed us, yet still we feel we have only scratched the surface of this huge country and we could have stayed and travelled to so many other islands for at least another few months. So we will just have to come back sometime. After spending a wonderful short week at Bunaken island where the diving and snorkelling were great, we hopped on a short flight from Manado across the Celebes Sea to Davao City in Mindanao, Philippines, because this was the closest country we could get to and we had planned to spend Christmas and New Year at the Philippines anyway.

Philippines is again a huge country with more than 7000 islands and we hope to visit at least a few of the best ones. We spent half a day in Davao City before continuing to Manila where we immerse ourselves in the good city life with good food and nice drinks, shopping malls and all the other perks. In Manila we bring our passports to the agent of the Indian Embassy to apply for a tourist visa. Leaving our passports here means we cannot really go too far away because we have to come back to pay for the visa and then some time later we have to return again to pick it all up.

We decide to travel north from the capital, into Northern Luzon, a region mostly not on the to-do-list of tourists. We first spend a few days in Baguio, in the mountains, a bit higher elevation and therefore a little cooler than Manila. Baguio is a student city and there is a lot of entertainment. Next we continue to Sagada, even higher in elevation, so we have to unpack all our warm clothes and we get to enjoy a nice dinner, sipping red wine, next to a burning fireplace. Feeling a bit autumny/wintery, it is quite a different side of the Philippines than you normally experience. As we had been following the news about a typhoon landing in the Philippines while we were there, we decide to wait the typhoon out in Sagada. The weather is rather bad, mainly very rainy and windy, but luckily we are far away from the regions where the typhoon really hits hard. We visit the sacred caves and hanging coffins and go for walks in the surroundings with views through the clouds of the rice terraces.

After the typhoon has passed, and we are yet to hear from the Indian Embassy, we continue down to the west coast to the surfers’ paradise San Juan, La Union. The waves after the typhoon are massive, so as we are absolute beginners there is no way that we can get into the water, but as we are there the South East Asia (SEA) Games are on with the surfing competition, which is spectacular with all regional surfer heroes showing their skills and right in front of our place. San Juan is crowded with students in the weekend and extra so because of the SEA Games and we join the locals and visitors in their celebration of the weekend with a lot of drinking, some singing and dancing.

No news from the Indian Embassy, so we continue up north along the coast to Vigan. Vigan is not only one of the oldest towns built by the Spaniards, it is also one of the few towns in the Philippines that is not bombed by the Americans during the WW-II Japanese occupation and therefore it’s like an open air museum, but one with people actually living in it. Many cobbled streets are full with modern Filipino tricycles, but sometimes they have to swerve around an old horse carriage. As this is a Unesco Heritage place all the old buildings in the town centre are kept in the original state and a lot of them have been renovated or restored. Some of the buildings are open for visitors as a museum and one of the buildings is actually the place where we spend the nights because it’s now a guesthouse. It’s one of the most beautiful villas and we feel like royalties. Vigan is well known for its empanadas and every day we taste them in different places and we love them. We visit one of the few craft beer breweries in the Philippines and enjoy the first good IPA since a long time.

We find out that the agency working for the Indian Embassy is not used to deal with tourists (only processing working visa for the many Filipinos) and totally incapable to process our application and at the end, after fruitless attempts of communication from our side, and it’s dawning on us that they have not been able to do anything with our visa application, we decide to cancel the application after two weeks without passports. We return to Manila to pick up our passports without the desired visa and the next day we decide to hop on a bus and boat to Mindoro island for a few days at the beach. Most of the beaches are quite crowded with Filipino families and we find our perfect place to relax at the far end of one of the outer beaches of Puerto Galera. We do spend Saturday night among the locals drinking buckets of beer and eating barbecued chicken but the rest of the days and nights are spent relaxing and mixing our G&T’s with the dirt cheap Ginebra San Miguel.

We return to Manila for the third time, we are really starting to get the hang of the city and we know our way to the places (restaurants) we like. The next day we fly to Puerto Princesa on the island of Palawan. First we spend about a week in the rather unexplored south of Palawan. We find a nice place to stay with great bungalows under the palmtrees of an old plantation but there is absolutely nothing to do and we just spend our days reading.

Slowly our ideas of what 2020 will look like for us are becoming a bit clearer. We will most probably spend most of it at the sunny side of the world, hopefully in beautiful places again and as you could have guessed we will be going back to India as we have now easily organised a one year multi entry visa online with a few clicks (if only we knew before ...).

Now we returned to Puerto Princesa where we will spend a few days relaxing and waiting for our friends Mariska and Riemke to join us and Joyce and Maarten with their son Duuk for a few weeks of holidaying in Palawan. We are happily looking forward to spend Christmas and New Years Eve with friends and we wish you all, friends and family back home and all the beautiful people we have met on this trip an amazing end of the year with festivities, family and friends.

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Comments

[Google SMS]

I ‘d mention that most of us visitors are endowed to exist in a fabulous place with very many wonderful individuals with very helpful things. Happy Makar Sakranti Wishes in Hindi

[Dancing Dave]

What a year you have had
May you stay safe in 2020 and your travels fulfil your aspirational dreams!