Philippines

After seeing more aquatic life than mermaids we decided to see what other land based animals live on these islands. We weren't disappointed. We found one of the cutest,ugliest and most bizarre looking little primates this world has to offer. Known as the worlds smallest monkey the Tarsier can only be found in Philippine Jungles. We went to a Tarsier conservation centre to see these wonderus little beasties and managed to get quite close.
After the beaches, the madness of Manila and bone breaking Jeep rides my birthday was also to be found in the Philippines. Sue managed to find a great hotel to see in my oncoming old age and we arrived somewhat eager to see what it was all about. The Hotel promised that some rooms had private swimming in them and they weren't lying. Our room was normal size room on the face of it but then you pulled open a sliding door to reveal a small pool only a few feet from the bed! The mineral rich water was pumped in from wells heated by nearby volcanoes' and we had a whale(excuse the pun) of a time splashing around this crazy room. We only left to have dinner in the nearby restaurant next to a lake. The food was great but at 9pm exactly a swarm of little black stink beetles descended upon us. Only a few at first but by ten past the hour it got a bit biblical. Smelly bugs started falling in out food, on our table and in our hair. They smelt like rancid aluminium if squashed. Lucky for us we had just finished our meal so it didn't matter that they were doing the backstroke through my curry.
Between the pool and the stink bugs we had a grand old time. A birthday I will not soon forget.
The Philippines held many surprises, I met a old school friend of mine who now lives in Manila and also a friend of Sue's who were both happy to show us the ropes in that great city. "The ropes", I was happy to find out was a lot of good food and beer..Thanks Tommy and Drew!
We said our goodbyes to that crazy group of islands and made our way back to Malaysia.

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!