Vigan City

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From Banaue we travelled to Baguio City. The journey here was in a mini van and took us all around the mountains. It was all bends. Now I suffer a bit with travel sickness and I have to say it was a miracle I was not sick. The bendy roads were bad enough but the people in the van did not help. Firstly the old lady by the window (luckily) spent the whole 5 hour journey with her head out of the window being sick. Then the baby started and then the little girl. There was also a terrible smell that every 15 minutes would rear its ugly head. We blamed the baby. I found the whole experience nauseating but Kev sat there with a smile on his face eating biscuits. When we did stop to let a family off we found the real culprit of the foul smell - they pulled a box from under our chair which had a live chicken in it.... A CHICKEN!! To be fair to the chicken, apart from the bad smell, it was one of the better bus companions.

After a brief stop in Baguio City we travelled to Vigan City. We loved this place. It was the best preserved Spanish colonial town in the world - according to our travel book anyway. It was very European looking and had plenty of souvenir shops to look around. There was also a 30 minute water fountain display every evening in the main square. Now I know this doesn't sound like much, trust me my expectations weren't high either, but it was amazing! The show itself was pretty impressive but what made it was the number of locals running around in the water soaking each other! From little children to grown adults, they loved it!

While in Vigan City I had my first haircut. It cost exactly £1 but I was feeling generous and gave a 43p tip.

Although the city was lovely, the haircuts cheap and the entertainment brilliant our favourite part was the food. One evening we ordered a portion of sausages that were a regional speciality. Now they were tasty but what we loved most was the vinegar! Another regional speciality but I think it was more that we hadn't realised we had been missing vinegar until that moment. All we could talk about for days after was vinegar!

Now after our pretty awful bus journeys in the Philippines I was nervous about our last one. We had to get a bus from Vigan City to Manila to catch a flight to Ho Chi Minh to meet my parents - a flight I did not want to miss. The journey should take 8 hours but we were taking no chances and got on a bus at 7.30am even though our flight was not until 5.30am the next day.

By 12.30 pm the bus broke down. We stood on the side of the road for 3 hours being told another bus would come. All other buses going to Manila drove past us. Eventually we got a tuk tuk to the nearest town in the hope that a driver would take pity on a miserable looking British couple as we were getting nowhere being part of a miserable looking group. Many buses continued to ignore us but in the end it worked! A bus pulled up and said there is only room to stand. We did not care. I could have kissed him. I didn't, but I could have. The rest of the journey went smoothly until we hit traffic. At this point I emailed my Dad to advise we were probably going to miss the flight. We didn't but the supposedly 8 hour journey took 16 and a half hours.

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