The Philippines

We've been in the Philippines for almost 3 weeks now and have spent a large proportion of that time on transport. As there are so many islands, we've been alternating between busses and boats. Some of the islands where we've been don't have sealed roads, which makes the going pretty bumpy, especially hard with a full bladder, as Dan will testify to! I've lost track of how many bus and boat journies we've taken, some days we rack up 4 or 5.

My favouritte transport has to be the jeepneys, which are long extended jeeps which people, bags, crates of fish etc clamber into, to sit on long seats along each side. They're all individually decorated and really colourful. They're really cheap and stop anywhere you ask along the route they travel. To ask to stop you bang on the roof with your hand, or use a coin on some metal to attract the drivers attention. Some people appear to carry a coin in their ear for this purpose (either that or I've just worked out how that magic trick where people pull money out of your ear is done!).

By far the most eventful journey we've had involved a jeepeny journey, which in dry season should take maybe 4 hours. It took us 9 and we had to get out of the jeepney to walk several times, while they pulled and winched us out of the mud. I still don't know how we both managed to get so muddy, as we were following others to walk through the muddy parts, but at times we both ended up sunken in mud up to our knees - no-one else seemed to have mud anywhere else but on the soles of their feet where you'd expect it. One guy even had a white bandage on his foot which didn't have a speck of mud on it. I manged to flick mud up into my hair and when Dan lost his flip flop sinking in knee deep mud, without really thinking it through I plunged my arm in up to my elbow to find it - I had to dig around for sometime and nearly got runover by the approaching jeepney in the process, but I managed to retrieve it, only to find it had broken with all the pulling and he had to throw it away anyway! There were only stagnant pools of water to wash in, which we sunk even deeper trying to approach, so we had to climb back on the jeepeny covered from head to toe in Mud. The whole bus found us hillarious and those who hadn't seen teh best part of us actually sinking in the mud just roared at how muddy we were anyway. By the time we'd got out our wet wipes and at least cleaned as much as we could off with 3 inches of damp cloth, we'd arrived at another muddy section and had to do it all over again. Luckily we passed a stream at the end of this one, which the driver suggested we might like to get into!

To get around towns there are tricycles, which are motorbikes ot bicycles with a sidecar attached on. As tourists we have to barter hard not to pay many, many times what the locals pay. They're good fun to ride on and are all individually decorated, with lots of praise be to God on them.

I've just realised how much I've just written about transport and will try to think of a few other things we've done here.

Karaoke is really popular and taken very seriously. There are Karaoke machines everywhere, even on ferries and you can walk past people's houses and hear them singing along, seemingly alone. Christmas is also a very big affair and people have already started to wish us a Happy Christmas, although I guess back home, decorations and Christmas ads must be about to start soon now we're in October.

We've spent a lot of time on the coast snorkelling and diving. There are some amazing reefs and everytime we've been we see new, weird looking, brightly coloured fish. We also snorkelled with a coral snake, which was beautiful. Dan says they're very venemous, but only bite if you get really close and poke them. We didn't poke it and it didn't bite us, so I guess it must be true! We also saw the biggest fish I've ever seen, which was about 1.5 meters long (Dan says it was nearer 3). It's the first time we've been diving since we learnt in Brazil and it was good to go again before we forgot everything we learnt.

We've just been to the chocolate hills, which much to my disappointment their only link to actual chocloate is that they go brown at certain time of the year - I thought I was heading to chocohollics paradise!

As with every Country we've been to, Dan has people telling him he looks Philippino. Also several people a day shout out Bob Marley. Dan's been trying to remember some famous South-east Asians to shout back, but so far can't keep up. Me, I'm just a Dimdim, so never get lookilikees!