| Philippines Highlights |
| 17jun2004: Greetings friends & family, I'm back home now from my 4-month long journey, just arrived back at SFO from Manila on Sunday night the 13th. Much like my stay in Sydney, my stay in the Philippines was highlighted by the hospitality of my hosts, Bob & Gwen in Manila and Ronna & her family while we were in Boracay. I got to Manila from Sydney back on 30may. For many travellers to the Philippines, the first & only impression they get of Manila is traffic & pollution before they run off to tropical paradise of islands like Boracay or Palawan. But while I can't deny that the traffic & pollution can be frustrating (even tho I didn't drive there!), Manila does have some cool things to offer. Probably top of that list is the food... maybe it was just the style of travel I was doing (backpacker buses, etc), but I had the best food of my entire trip while I was in the Philippines. Or maybe I just have a short memory! Anyways, not only did I enjoy traditional Filipino food (except for perhaps the balut I tried on Boracay... more on that later!) but Manila in particular had a number of excellent restaurants you can eat at quite cheaply. For example, Bob & Gwen & I had dinner one night at a seafood place where we each scarfed down an entire crab and had drinks and appetizers and it cost only like US$60. So other cool things I saw & did in Manila were: Lake Taal & Taal Volcano, Corregidor Island, Pagsanjan Falls, Wawa Gorge. Near the town of Tagaytay, Lake Taal sits inside the enormous crater of Taal Volcano, and within the lake is an island called Volcano Island (which is the active part of the volcano), within which there's another lake! So we took a boat across Lake Taal to Volcano Island, then did about a 45min hike up to the interior crater, where you look down on the smaller crater lake (which, of course has a little caldera island inside it as well... crater, lake, island, crater, lake, island,... sounds kinda like you're in the fun house looking in the mirrors at other mirrors and seeing endless images of yourself in the mirrors, huh? :) Anyways, yeah, it's pretty much as cool as it sounds. Corregidor Island sits out at the mouth of Manila Bay and is a site of some of the fiercest fighting in the Pacific during WWII and was the sight where Gen. MacArthur uttered his famous, "I shall return line". Now, it's primarily a monument to all who perished during the war. An hour's boat ride from Manila took me out to the island, where I did a tour guided by Pablito, a very knowledgeable old Filipino guy who would, for example, point to a hillside next to the road and give us tidbits like, "It was right here where a couple dozen Japanese soldiers saw the American troops coming down the road above (as the US was re-taking the island) and rather than be taken prisoner, took suicidal leaps off the cliffs." <Gulp> Pagsanjan Falls was about 2 hours southeast of Manila, very nearby my good friend Gie's hometown of Lucban. This was pretty cool... what you do is take a canoe trip both up and down the river. "C'mon, Pat, how do you take a canoe up a river?" you're probably thinking. Well, when you have a couple of banceros with you, you just sit back & watch with amazement as they paddle upstream until they reach some rapids. Then you watch with amazement as they jump in & out of the boat in the rapids, alternately pulling the boat upstream and pushing the boat upstream off of rocks,etc with their legs. When you finally get to the waterfall at the top, you turn back and they deftly negotiate the narrow gaps between rocks as you zip back downstream. Then you get back to where you started and tip the gentlemen nicely for working their asses off during a spectacular 2-hour trip! Wawa Gorge(scroll down a bit for the info in this link) is northeast of Manila, also about 2 hours away. Another historical WWII site, there are a number of caves as well as a dam that were built during the Japanese occupation of the Philippines from 1942-1945 (some of the caves are natural as well). Bob's friend Bobby guided us there, as Wawa Gorge is normally frequented more by Filipinos than by tourists & expats. We had a blast swimming & jumping off a tower above the falls, before we wandered back downstream to where we started to check out one of the caves with a local guide who charged us a mere P200 (about US$4) to take all 5 of us into the cave, which apparently, if you're willing to do some serious spelunking, will lead you 50km to another town on the other side of the mountains! So in between sightseeing and eating in & around Manila, I spent 5 days on the island of Boracay, which is pretty much the epitome of tropical paradise. The first 3 days were the most satisfyingly lazy days I'd had since I was in Darwin... basically I did nothing but loaf around in the sun reading, loaf around in the shade reading, stroll up & down the gorgeous white sand beach, splash around in the waves, sleep, & eat! The final 2 days I spent with my friend Ronna (Gie's niece), her boyfriend Leo, and about 20 of Ronna's immediate family, who were all very welcoming and kind to let some random friend of their Tita Gie hang out with them for 2 days! We spent an afternoon getting dragged around on a "banana boat" and a "flying fish", then an entire day on a boat cruise picnicking and snorkelling our way around Boracay. In between was an enjoyable evening eating a traditional Filipino meal with Ronna's family, then going out to have a couple San Migs and go dancing at Cocomongo's. In between dinner & Cocomongo's was the balut. For those of you with weak stomachs, you can skip this part! Balut has made an appearance on "Fear Factor" (btw, Ronna, I'm still waiting for my US$50,000 from your dad!! :)... without further ado, balut is a duck embryo. You start by cracking open a quarter-sized hole at the top of the egg, then you slurp out the juice. If the Filipino folks you're with have some sympathy for you, you'll have some salt to lick margarita-style as you drink the juice. Then comes the hard part, the black, slimy embryo itself. I tried to pretend it was an oyster and gave it just one chomp before basically swallowing it whole. You finish it off by nibbling at the yellow yolk, which is sorta crumbly hard-boiled style and isn't too bad. So even though I think trying balut was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, I was happy to provide some entertainment for Ronna's family for a few minutes there! So now I'm back home, sorting through 4 months of photos (as well as 4 months of mail!), coming soon to a slide show and/or a website near you! Like they say, "Take only pictures, leave only memories." and I'm fortunate to have 4 months worth of both! :) |