With so many beautiful islands to visit, we completely skipped visiting Manila. We’ll just be there for our flight to Vietnam, and get the complimentary potato chips 🤡

Ok, I confess, I’d prepared this post in advance just so I could place this most hilarious pun. It turned out slightly different.

So after two days in lovely and quiet Port Barton, we headed back to Puerto Princessa, one day ahead of our flight to Manila, because Mary had heard of an underground river that could be visited there. But after further investigation, the underground river seemed very much an expensive tourist trap where we’d be spending the whole day in transfers and sitting in a boat. So we ditched this and went back to what we do best: waterfalls and beach sunset, on a scooter!

In Puerto, the waterfall was farther away from the beach than usual so it was still quite a bit of driving, but at least we could bathe.

We went to the Talaudyong beach, on the west coast, a fantastic white sand beach and barely anyone there.

The only problem with sunsets is that after them, it gets very dark! And this time it started to rain, and we had two hours drive back to town, in the night and with the rain slapping our faces.

We drove carefully and arrived completely drenched at a restaurant where we each ordered a hot tea to warm us up.

This morning we woke up at 4am to catch our flight to Manila. We reached at 9am and -like in LA- we had most of the day to kill before our evening flight to Saigon. So we left our luggage in storage and headed to the old town for a little cultural stop.

We learned about the Spanish rule in the 16th century, who are praised for bringing the smallpox vaccine to the country. We learned about the Americans replacing the Spaniards after 1850’ish, and their failure to protect the country from the Japanese invasion during the second world war. The Japanese then occupied the country for 3 years and massacred over a 100,000 Filipinos before the liberation by the Americans at the end of the war. Only in 1946 did the Philippines become independent, when most of the decolonisation started.

So much culture after 3 weeks of waterfalls and sunsets! 😅

Once, in Dubai, Rita had introduced us to Dampa: a Filipino restaurant chain serving delicious seafood, and Leo fell in love with it. Mary kept it a surprise to the last moment that we were going to Dampa for lunch today. When we reached the restaurant, Leo was jumping in joy! We had a feast of crab and prawns and mussels.. then it was time to get back to the airport.

And that’s it. 3 weeks in the Philippines flew by so fast! We’ll have to come back here, it’s lovely, it’s clean, it’s safe, the nature is fantastic, the people are polite and friendly, and, well, for us indeed, it’s cheap!

Good bye Philippines, we had a blast! We’re now off to Vietnam!