Off to the beach!!

We managed to survive Manila! I've never experienced anything like that city in my life, and probably never will. With close to 22 million people residing in the city, the traffic of cars and people is non-stop craziness. Cars, horse carriages, jeepneys and tricycles (that transport people) fill the densely busy streets at all times of the day. There isn't much for traffic lights either, so every one kind of yields to one another in a semi controlled chaos. Cars literally merge and swerve inches from one another. People walk amongst this chaos in and around the cars to get where they want to go.

Poverty in Manila is unreal. With no national welfare system, and minimum wage being at around $1 or less an hour; millions live in poverty. We constantly saw children from as young as 1-2 years old begging on the streets for money. They are aggressive too and don't leave you alone! You get swarmed by them! It was pretty sad.

We had the pleasure of visiting Lorie's dad and family at their home in Manila. We were fed delicious Filipino food. It was very nice of them to have us there!!

We were happy to get out of Manila, but it was an absolutely crazy experience that we will appreciate in the long run!

As I type this we are traveling on insanely winding roads on our 5 hour journey to El Nido; one of the worlds most beautiful places. We are accompanied by 14 other foreigners in a van, with all our bags strapped to the roof. We spent one night in Puerta Princesa, which is the main city you fly into on the island of Palawan. Here, we were planning on doing the underground river tour (one of the seven wonders of the natural world) but it was all booked! Fortunately though, we booked for Saturday and will come back from El Nido Friday. The city is a whole lot less crazy than Manila but I am looking forward to some beach and water in a few hours!! Paradise here we come!

Updated: since I wrote this when I didn't have wifi, I will carry on a bit! We are now in El Nido and the ride here was nuts. The can probably did not go in a straight line longer than 10 seconds and it was a 5 hour drive. Twists and turns the whole time, and a gravel road for the last hour and a half! But the beauty of this place was worth the back and butt pain! We are staying at a place over looking the beach for $25 split between 3 of us. We will be going on a tour tomorrow to explore more scenery!

Day 1 - fighting jet lag

After roughly a 27 hour journey across the world, Mark and I successfully made it to Manila; the largest city in the Phillipines. We quickly crashed at the hotel as our flight didn't arrive til around 10pm, 7am Winnipeg time. Having not slept much the night before we left, we were quite useless humans by the time we got to the hotel. By midnight, we were asleep (some of us...) and managed to sleep in til 6:45am, 15 minutes short of my goal sleep in of 7am haha. Having a few jet lag experiences under my belt, I knew even after waking up wide awake at 4am that I had to force myself to sleep longer so I wouldn't be asleep in the afternoon today! By 8:30, we set out to site see. Dustin's girlfriend Lorie recommended a few places to check out while we are here since she has been here multiple times to visit her family! Our first stop was Chinatown. I thought our hotel would have free maps available but they only had ones for purchase. Being the budget travellers we are, we opted to not buy a map and find the public transit system on our own. I had a ballpark idea of where a train station would be from google maps so we headed in that direction. We found a station and hoped on for two stops to China town. Chinatown was an area where they sell EVERYTHING you could think of. We walked around for awhile, adjusting to the stares and hustling of people selling things. One man asked Mark if he could "know your girlfriend". We wandered and walked for awhile longer in the area near our hotel and walked along Manila bay. Then we headed back to our hotel for a quick break (and mini nap..oops) and then went back out in the opposite direction. Lorie told us to check out the mall of Asia which is one of the largest malls in the world. 780 shops. 4.3 million square feet. According to google maps it wasn't far from our hotel so we decided to walk. After at least 5km walking in 30 degree weather we got there. We walked around there for a bit, but since we didn't want to shop on our first day we didn't stay too long! Now we are back at our hotel, legs tired and body sleepy. Dustin gets here in 7 hours around midnight and I am fighting sleep as hard as I can for his arrival and so I can get my body clock back to normal. We are done site seeing for the day as we probably walked a good 10k today, so we are a bit bored! Sorry if my posts have mistakes, typing on an iPhone makes things a bit more difficult!

Off we go!

Hello family and friends!

Off we go on another adventure! I am going to try my best to keep this blog updated.  It may be hard as I won't have my computer, but I will do my best to post from my iphone or Dustin's computer as often as I can!  See you in the spring!