life in the philipinnes

We arrived into Clarke airport, to find it was in the middle of nowhere, the cash machine was broken and the foreign exchnage desk didn't accept travellers cheques. Oh dear. Was all fine tho- we managed to get taxi/bus and get on the road pretty quick. We just passed through Manila this time. Can't say i minded. Looked very grotty indeed. We travelled on by bus to Pagjasan, where the big attraction is that you can go upstream on bamboo rafts to a beautiful waterfall and then shoot the rapids on the way back. Also the final scenes of Apocalyse Now were filmed there. When you arrive there you begin to realise that this is the only thing the town has, as absolutely everyone is trying ot get you on their boat or to their hotel. Big of a shock to the system. Just too much! One guy in particular just would not go away. He was everywhere-so annoying! And when we did the trip in the morning he was one of the boatmen! Argh. Anyway, the trip was fun, but weird. The guys nearly kill themselves trying to get the rafts up the rapids, then on the way down they don't even go over most of them..just roll the rafts over some metal bars! Anyway, the surrounding were gorgeous, but think the whole thing was a bit pricey for what you got!

After travelling all the next day (we wanted to get out of that town as fast as possible), we arrived Daet at night. Supposed to be a nice surf town, but when we arrived it was dark and we could only find one place open to stay (the others you could rent by the hour...hmm). We stayed in a crappy dormitory, with a bathroom with no running water (what was the point of having it?), so we couldn't even shower. The bathroom in the main house also had about 30 cockroaches. The next morning, the rain was torrential, and the place looked so grotty and miserable. Around about this time I decided I really didn't think i liked the Philippines after all, but we decided to keep on heading south and try and find somewhere nice!

The next night we arrived Legaspi, a town right beside the Philipinnes most active volcano. Luckily it wasn’t doing anything but looks amazing- a perfect cone shape. That night we went and had a walk around the town and ended up down at the beach. All of a sudden tehre were all these kids coming around us, saying hello and and then they started following us-there were so many of them, and it was just getting more and more. At one stage they made us sit down amongst them while they all gathered round and stared at us. They were all telling us their names and shaking hands with us, and cheering and jumpiung up and down. It was seriously mad. We didn't really know what to do so we just kind of sat there and smiled and nodded like idiots. When we were leaving they all came with us, and were just yelling and screamin grunning up the street. I thought there was going ot be a riot. Amazing kids...and quite exhausting!!

The next day we headed off to Donsol, where you can swim with whale sharks- they only have similar numbers in West Australia, and Galapagos Islands. We weren't really sure if we were going to do it as it seemed bit pricey, but it turned out that the cost was for the boat and you got put in with a few other people so it worked out really cheap, in fact, more that 15 times cheaper than in Australia! And it was amazing. We saw so many. They were just everywhere. At one stage we had 2 around us! It was quite tricky to see though, so we kept getting in the water, try to find it, and the next thing you just see a giant mouth in front of you! (don;t worry they only eat plankton). At one stage we all jumped out of the boat and on top of it. And as well as that, the weather was calm and we were in a great little boat, whereas in Australai the weather was so bad and the entire boat was sick...so it was much better this time!