Malapascua Island is only a 30 minute boat ride from Maya but making that short journey means avoiding a couple of tedious scams, which fortunately we'd read about. On arriving at the dock, a guy immediately attempted scam number 1, saying there were only 2 other passengers wanting to go to the island, and the boat wouldn't leave until there were 24 people on board, so maybe we'd like to hire a boat specifically to take us across. We knew this would cost 10 times the correct price, plus a crowd of local people would avail themselves of the opportunity for [View Full Entry]

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Our flight from Manila to Cebu City was uneventful, and a taxi ride took us to a bus terminal from where we caught a bus heading north to Maya. We reached Daanbantayan (near Maya) too late to catch a boat to Malapascua so we overnighted in an extremely pleasant guesthouse owned by an American guy Skip and his Filipino wife, together with their children Chip and Flip. Given his middle-age spread, it was a surprise to discover that Skip had been a student of Bruce Lee's back in the US - a great example of how one shouldn't judge by appearances. [View Full Entry]

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The night buses from Banaue to Manila appealed to neither of us, so we took the daytime option of going to San Jose then changing there. The ticketing system here is interesting - the basic ticket consists of several columns containing the digits 0-9, with groups of columns variously indicating the embarkation point, destination, bus number, and price. The conductor, using a punch that's generally kept in a hip-mounted holster, then punches out holes in the appropriate boxes depending on the details of your journey. Amusingly, there's also a box containing "Thank you", which gets punched too. The journey took us [View Full Entry]

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The village of Batad has no road access whatsoever, meaning that an approach on foot is the only option. We took a jeepney from Banaue to Batad Saddle, on the ridge overlooking the village. The 15km journey took 1.25 hours, with the final stretch up the hill from Batad Junction to Batad Saddle possibly the worst piece of "road" I've ever been on in public transport. It was bad enough for the human passengers but the chickens, trussed up and stuffed under the benches, must have been highly unamused. From the Saddle, we followed a path down into the valley, first [View Full Entry]

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It took 2 uncomfortable jeepney rides to reach Banaue, with the 2nd one made more of a torture courtesy of an English guy sitting next to me who just wouldn't shut up, even when I closed my eyes to indicate I wanted a nap. He subsequently went up on the roof and was replaced by a young woman who chundered copiously after 10 minutes in the jeepney. I caught a faint spray of vomit on my neck. Banaue's claim to fame is that it's the main town in a region whose landscape contains large numbers of rice terraces constructed about 2,000 [View Full Entry]

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LA Woman had been struggling with a heavy cold and stomach upset pretty much since we arrived in the Philippines, but Baguio did not seem to be a town suitable for a recovery period so we decided to plough on to Sagada. The ride out of Baguio was in the sunshine, and the swathes of houses clustered on the hillsides made it look significantly more appealing than when we'd arrived. The entire journey was on twisting mountain roads with many parts completely unsurfaced so comfort was at a premium, but we did pass a place called Loo, a roadwork sign warning [View Full Entry]

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With Sagada, the next place on our itinerary, being about 60km away as the crow flies, one might have anticipated a journey of a couple of hours to get there. However, with the road infrastructure being what it is, we had to travel closer to 300km, first heading south to overnight in the town of Baguio before heading north again. Baguio's elevation is about 1,400m so, in the misty Cordillera mountains, we were able to escape some of the heat and humidity of the lowlands, but it wasn't an enormously inspiring place. The last 45 minutes of our bus journey from [View Full Entry]

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One aspect of Filipino transport that makes life difficult for travellers is the general lack of centralised bus stations. Having plenty of bus companies is a good thing, but not when they all depart from different places in the same town. Fortunately both the potential lines for our next destination shared a bus station, so we chugged along to it on a trike - LA Woman in the sidecar with my rucksack, her rucksack balanced precariously on the sidecar's roof, and me balanced even more precariously side-saddle behind the driver. The bus was one of the more comfortable I've had on [View Full Entry]

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Having read numerous reports about the direness of Manila, we were pleased that our budget flight from Macau was going to deposit us at Clark, an old USAF base north of the capital. As we discovered, this place had a grimness all of its own. Flying in over northern Luzon, we saw very green countryside with little in the way of habitation. A grey sky greeted our arrival with spots of rain - not too surprising given that it's the rainy season now. We had no idea of the geography of Clark so simply took a taxi to a decent-sounding hotel [View Full Entry]

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A 1 hour ferry ride took us from Hong Kong to Macau. At first glance, the place seemed similar to Hong Kong but with some Las Vegas ingredients supplied by the casinos - the cheesiness of the Sands, the tackiness of the Lisboa, the awesomeness of the under-construction Grand Lisboa, and the plain but still opulent Wynn. Subsequent ramblings revealed elements of the mainland (not an enormous amount of English spoken, people staring at us, and more smoking than Hong Kong) as well as Portugal (cuisine, especially baccalau i.e. salt cod, architecture, narrow streets with thousands of mopeds, and street signs [View Full Entry]

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