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Published: September 9th 2007
Edge of super typhoon hits metro Manila
taken from our bus window as we try to leave Manila for the fourth consecutive day!Sorry the pictures are of flooding, but we couldn't be bothered to take any others and the reason for the flooding will be explained through the course of this blog! Also we tried taking the camera out of the hotel a couple of times but it almost got ruined as the rain was very very torrential!
So the weather forecasters said that the typhoon would hit Manila on Friday. So we thought that if we arrived into Manila on the Tuesday we could get our Chinese visa at the embassy on Wednesday and a boat to Mindoro on Thursday, leaving a day to spare. However, luck was no longer on our side and a list of nightmare scenarios were about to play out.
Disaster number 1 - The Hotel The 3 hotels we had in mind to stay in in Manila were fully booked and had raised their prices again since our last visit in February. We were able to find one hotel with rooms for 1200 pesos (£12), however it was a shithole, made worse by the rain that started the minute we arrived through the door.
Disaster number 2 - The Rain It rained, then it
rained really hard, then it rained really, really hard. Then the thunder started and we began to panic that the shoddy hotel we were staying in wouldn't stand up to this extreme weather and sure enough water soon began to pour through our air con unit. The roads outside began to flood and it was beginning to rain so hard that even with an umbrella you couldn't hope to go anywhere.
Disaster number 3 - The Food Instead of slowing down, the rain came down harder than we had ever seen, so we had to make a run for the nearby shopping centre for food. We were quickly reminded of how bad Manila is for food/restaurant options. Unless you like a diet of nothing but fast food you are stuck with few healthy options for food.
Disaster number 4 - The Chinese Embassy The rain had continued all through the night and into the morning and we had to be at the Chinese embassy in Makati (the other side of the city) before it closed at 11:30am to get our visa for our up and coming visit to China. Not only that but we had to arrive at
Water everywhere....
wish we had more pictures of Manila but if we had taken the camera outside the rain would have found a way to destroy the camera! the embassy wearing smart clothes (this meant trousers and shoes for Neil). We thought it best to prepare for the journey and bought another umbrella and 2 heavy duty waterproofs. Equipped with these we thought it would be an easy 5 minute walk to the Light Railway Transit system (LRT) which then would take us close to the embassy. 2 minutes into this walk and the pavements began to flood and the water rapidly got so high it reached Neil's knees. Bearing in mind he was wearing trousers and shoes and the water wasn't just water but sewerage as well (think vomit and shit smells mixed). The LRT was in chaos because of the weather and even though we had set off at 8am for the usual 20 minute journey, it was now 11am and we were still a long way from the embassy. Neil was plodging along in this wet, soggy and very smelly Sketcher shoes and Donna looked like a drowned rat clutching our passports which had been 'water-proofed' by 4 plastic bags! Miraculously, we made it to the embassy with 5 minutes to spare, only to be told by the visa lady that we were not allowed
Manila hotel corridor which Donna found for us
It was unusually fitted out like an old castle...a castle though where the walls wobbled and the rain poured in through the air-con units! the 90 day visa we had requested, we would have to 'make do' with 30 days and that the visa processing would take 5 working days.
Disaster number 5 - our attempted escape from Manila It was still raining 3 days later and the typhoon has been upgraded to a super-typhoon, whatever that is...just when we thought it couldn't get any worse! We had booked tickets for a bus journey to the port of Batangas and then a boat journey to the island of Mindoro. But alas, we were to run into more bad luck. We stupidly checked out of our hotel at 6:30am, walked for 30 minutes with our big, heavy rucksacks to where the bus was departing from, only to be told when we got there that the ferries had been cancelled due to bad weather...no shit, but hadn't they ever heard of a phone to let us know? The woman said for us to go back the next day and the ferries would definitely be running. So we walked the 30 minutes back to the hotel (with luggage) we had just checked out from! The next morning we checked out of our hotel and did the same walk only to find that the ferries had been cancelled again. So we walked back to the hotel again and re-checked in...think of the film Groundhog Day! So the following morning we got up at 6:30am and it was still raining and we thought, you know what? let's not bother going to Mindoro as we may not be able to get off the island once we are there to catch our flight to Palawan.
Disaster number 6 - Stuck in Manila Because of Disasters 1 - 5, we were stuck in Manila and let us say that Manila is NOT a good place to be stuck in for 5 days. It was expensive, every time we left the hotel it rained, the food was awful and the attractions of the glitzy big shopping centres were beginning to wear thin, even with Donna! So we got away for a few days to a nearby province whilst we waited for our visa to be processed and our flight to take us away from the awful Manila to Palawan!
Disaster number 7 - The Booking of Flights We needed to book a flight online to Puerto Princesa in Palawan. But every time we tried to book the website would not accept our Visa card. By the time we had figured out a way to book the flights the cost of the tickets had risen from £27 to £120. To cut a long story short we juggled our dates around until we found flights for £42, only to find a few hours after booking that the original flights we saw had come back down to £27. Grrrrrrrr!
Disaster number 8 - The Chinese Embassy Re-visited Like some sort of Bermuda Triangle for idiot travellers, we were drawn back to Manila to collect our passports/visas from the Chinese embassy. Even without the bad weather we still only managed to get there at 11am and we got our 'deli-counter' style ticket number to wait to collect our passports/visas. Our ticket number was 479 and looking at the number on the passport window it was currently serving number 348. An hour later the window was serving number 358...you get the picture?
We won't write anything more about this day, or in fact, Manila as it makes us too angry. Besides which we are sitting on our cottage balcony in idyllic Palawan writing this blog looking out onto the most perfect beach we have ever seen and thinking of our experience in Manila as some sort of surreal nightmare. More on Palawan in our next blog...
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Ben
non-member comment
Oh, fun
I've gotta say that your Manila adventure sounds like a good time spoiled! Sorry that it was shit... Kind of makes me jealous that I'm sitting here in sunny (I know, amazing) London with the clock slowly ticking and absolute boredom well and truly set in. And to think I was angry this morning being delayed a good ten minutes on the tube! Anyway, Palawan sound niiiiice!