We walked to Hung Hom train station in Hong Kong to catch a train to Guangzhou. The train was very good and fast at 2 hours in length but was quite expensive. At some point in the journey we crossed from Hong Kong to Mainland China...we guessed we were in China by the change of building type (ie large grey high rises containing hundreds of apartments) and only Chinese characters on buildings were evident. Guangzhou is not a large city by Chinese standards but with a population of 3.24 million it was no surprise that it had a brand new - but complex - metro system which we had to use to get to our hostel near the river. We had a bit of a problem when buying the metro tickets as they were not tickets ... read more

Before we start this blog, we'd like to draw your attention to our updated profile section, which we decided to update to reflect our experience of travelling after one year! It all started to go wrong stepping off our flight at Manila airport, we couldn't get to our luggage because there was so many people crowding around the conveyor belt, Donna got her ankles rammed by a woman trying to push in to the exit queue (yes, the exit queue!) and the taxi driver we got decided to take the piss. Every time we get to Manila, it all goes a bit wrong! So the taxi driver decided to drop us off where it was easier for him, he pretended not to speak English and dumped us in a random place which was convenient for him ... read more

We realise that we've been going on about our transport experiences over the last few of our blogs, but this is because travelling is all we've seemed to have done over the last couple of weeks. To be brief, the non air-con bus got us to the port town of Maya on record time owing to another determined speed demon driver (see the videos)! If anyone is interested the buses leave from 5am onwards from Cebu's Northern bus terminal, not something that is easy to find out! You have to leave Cebu early so you reach Maya around 9-10am so you can join a shared boat to Malapascua island (30 minutes, 40 pesos and 10p for the paddle boat to take you to the big boat). Malapascua is not a big island, you can probably walk ... read more

...yes, we'll explain the blog title a little later. Our ferry ride to the island of Siquijor made approximately 70% of passengers and crew vomit. We played on the knowledge that Filipinos don't really like to sit next to Westerners (on all other journeys we have been avoided like the plague!) and took a bench each to lie down and sleep through the rough ride! Hee hee how awful are we? Siquijor is a volcanic and lush tropical island surrounded by superstition and intrigue as it is supposedly home to healers/witches with magical powers. Obviously this is bullshit, but we were told that the Filipinos are a very superstitious people and who are we to argue if they think Harry Potter and Sabrina live on the island?! Recently we even saw a Filipino made horror ... read more

The journey to El Nido We were up bright and early for our journey to El Nido, and only worried slightly when we put our backpacks on the jeepney an hour before we were due to leave and the driver promptly drove off with our bags still in the vehicle, leaving us in the street wondering if he was going to come back! Deciding not to worry we headed to Judy's and had some breakfast, and were relieved to see the jeepney drive past us back to it's starting location. We decided to stop off at the local shop to buy some supplies for the journey ahead of us and were introduced to a boy who made strange shrieking monkey noises and liked to stroke our arms! Sadly, it turns out that the boy had been ... read more