11th October - Busuanga to Manila

Saturday 11^th October

So far nobody, coming or going, has had a kind word to say about Manila.  Worst place I have ever been, is the general consensus.  

An old bit of Manila

And…BE VERY CAREFUL! were the words I heard over and over from our friends in Coron.

Please note - there is blue sky - from the plane it looked as if the city was shrouded in smog

But…so far so good.  We are staying at the (very) cheap &cheerful Tune Hotel, in central Makati.  Pete was a bit crushed.  “It looked much bigger in the photos on the internet!”  Well yes of course; they use a fish-eye lens!  There is, however, room (just) to walk around the bed.  And said bed is very clean and comfortable.  The bathroom is roomy enough to wash my travel dress and the shower has a great big flower-type head.  What more could we want??  It s much bigger than our cabin on 2XS, where I have to climb over Pete like a ninja every time I want to go to the toilet.  (This presents a different complicated challenge every night; I never know where his legs are going to be deployed…)

Speaking of our beloved 2XS…We woke at 5.30 and went straight to Action Stations.  Baby Johanna and her mother stayed out in the cockpit, having a bit of a gentle feed and play.  Pete and Bernard went into a cleaning frenzy; I washed all of our bed linen and towels.  And we got to Seadive at 7.00, in time to have breakfast before the shuttle van came to collect us.

Bernard, Renalyn, Johanna, Pete

Bernard has his own little outrigger dinghy, and it looks very cute, tied up behind its big companion catamaran.

2XS and outrigger in the dawn's early light

We were on the same flight as Toby and Rosie, who are on their way to Davao to visit Rosie’s three children – Elisa, 11, Cy, 8, Ly, 6.  She misses them most dreadfully and this week is going to fly past much too quickly… (They live with her parents, who have already raised their own 8 offspring.  This is often the way in the Philippines; Rosie has to get work where she can, to support them.)

Rosie and Toby

The flight was swift and easy…and then we had to get a taxi to Makati.  We had been told ONLY to get a yellow cab; the big white ones are far too expensive and unpredictable.  So we stood in a long, uncomplaining queue for…an hour and a half… There were several hundred people waiting, turning up their collective noses at the big white vans which were charging at least three times more than the yellow cab fare.

The queue is fading away and losing the will to live

Things got a little bit more exciting when we realised there was an unattended bag on the seats at the end of the queue.  There was a lot of discussion before security was called… We would have been blown to smithereens had it been dodgy…Mind you most of the people in the queue had more or less lost the will to live by the time we found this golden bag in our midst so there was not quite the frenzied panic one might have expected.

Nothing clears and area like an abandoned bag

Our taxi driver – YES!!  A yellow cab just for us did turn up – was very quietly spoken (this posed a problem for me; my ears are a bit tropical again,) but such a nice man.  Pete asked how long he had been driving taxis.  Twenty years, he said.  But he used to work every second day, so he had time to be with his wife and small children.  But now…he works seven days a week.  We asked why and he said that his wife’s family came to visit and never left.  They don’t work, any of them, so he has to support them all.  There used to be a nice little family of four in their small house; now here are TEN of hem.  Some of them share the marital bedroom with our poor driver and his wife.  “I thought they were coming for a short visit,” he said, sadly.  So how long have they been here, leeching off him??  Four YEARS!!!  He started to get a tad hysterical.  “When I want to make love to my wife, we have to be VERY quiet!” he said, laughing just a bit.  Then he guffawed.  “We can only do it sideways!  And we have to stop whenever we hear any of them move!”  By the time he dropped us off at the Tune Hotel all three of us had tears of laughter and sympathy rolling down our cheeks… I do hope this was therapeutic for him…