Saturday 11th 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.
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| An old bit of Manila |
And…BE VERY CAREFUL! were the words I heard
over and over from our friends in Coron.
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| 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.
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| Bernard, Renalyn, Johanna, Pete |
Bernard has his
own little outrigger dinghy, and it looks very cute, tied up behind its big
companion catamaran.
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| 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.)
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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…
