We arrived in Manila after after a smooth 17 hour flight (including a 3 hour stopover in Doha) feeling a bit dazed & confused with the 8 hour time difference (and in my case having watched Barbie). We managed to get the extended visa waiver we needed for our trip in the airport so we can stay for up to 59 days, although we have our return flights booked for 4th April. This was an amusing process with everything done manually and in triplicate.
We jumped in a taxi to take us to our hotel in the Makati district (the financial/tourist centre) & could immediately see the traffic in Manila is (particularly in the evening rush hour) everybit as chaotic as we'd expected. The 45 minute journey cost just £4. With the shiny high rise buildings looming in the distance we still passed families living on the streets and in shanty towns.
Our base for 2 nights was centrally located in Makati and a clean comfortable small hotel. After a quick freshen up we braved the busy streets. Crossing roads was a risky business but we tail gated the locals for safety in numbers. We called in a small local street food market - the food (mainly meat kebabs) didn't appeal but we thought we'd better acquaint ourselves with the local beer - San Miguel - as a non- beer drinker it did hit the spot. We also enjoyed the very out of tune singing by a local band.
Not feeling particularly hungry we weren't sure what we felt like eating and somehow ended up in a busy bar doing basic food. The clientele were middle aged single white men & young (& not so young) Filipino women. After a visit to the bathroom Colin spotted that the attached hotel did rooms by the hour. After some dreadful food we made a sharp exit.
We were slow to come round in the morning and ended up having brunch at a very nice coffee shop. It was full of groups of office workers. We ordered a Grabit (uber) taxi to take us to the old town where most of the sites of interest were located. Again there was crazy traffic to navigate. It dropped us at the City Hall on the edges of Intremuros, the walled historical centre. We'd booked a bamboo bike tour (yes bikes made of bamboo) for the late afternoon. Although it's always good to get the local facts & stories of a place, the bikes didn't really add much to the short distances between each stopping point and there were definitely way more than the 10 persons max advertised.
We headed back to Makati in another Grabit after I'd thrown myself down the stairs to an underpass - thankfully I got away with scuffed knees.
We thought we'd try somewhere more classy this evening so headed to a rooftop restaurant (32nd floor) in a swanky looking hotel. We were surrounded by much taller buildings as well as the usual old white guys with Filipino women - maybe the hotel wasn't as swanky as we'd thought!
The following morning we checked out early & caught a Grabit to another part of the city where we were catching a bus to the ferry terminal of Batangas.
The hotel meeting point was a weird place with strange looking guests. The lady organising the bus was quite a character and the chintzy bus whisked us to the ferry terminal in a couple of hours.
We boarded what we thought would be a one hour hydrofoil crossing - the boat looked like it had seen better days and we ended up having a two hour sedate crossing being entertained by Disneys Alladin.
We had to pay a small environmental fee when we landed on Mindoro and prove we had accommodation booked. We then took a local tuk tuk to Sabang, the bay just north of Puerto Galera which the diving centres are based. After paying so little for longish taxi trips in Manila we're pretty sure we were overcharged for the 20 minute ride to Sabang but we are talking about an overcharge of £1. We were met by 2 guys from the dive centre who helped us with our bags to walk to our dive accommodation. The seafront of Sabang is all dive shops with rooms, bars & restaurants. After the mayhem of Manila it felt wonderful. We were given a lovely warm welcome by Amy (the owner/manager) of Arkipelago Divers and her team & shown to our poolside accommodation. It is all perfect and we immediately knew we'd booked the right place for us. We walked into the central area. We couldn't believe the number of dive operators here - I'd guess ver 25. We had a cold beer on a balcony overlooking the sea and watched the sun go down looking forward to 4 chilled days here.
We have enjoyed 3 days of diving in the bay here. The sites are all just a few minutes boat ride away & have been relatively easy dives (around 20 m) which is just what we needed to get our skills back and prepared to dive in lots of other beautiful sites on our trip. The fish are plentiful and colourful here and there were some nice corals, although visibility hadn't been the best. Colin had been using his iPhone in a sealed case so we have some good underwater photos and clips to share.
We should have had another day/night here but we discovered that the ferry we need to catch from Mindoro to Coron only runs on Tuesday and Saturday mornings - the website says it's a daily service but doesn't run on Sundays, Mondays, Wednesdays, Thursdays & Fridays ......
This meant we needed to check out on Monday to do the long journey to the ferry in the south west of the island and overnight in San Jose to catch the ferry on Tuesday morning. Amy has been amazing helping us find a route and book ferry tickets and has been cool about us cutting short our stay. Lesson learned for us is to check timetables more thoroughly and plan a little bit more in advance.
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