Folks. The Philippines as a country is one that has been incredibly elusive for me personally over the twelve years. It seemed at times perhaps I was destined never to reach the Philippines as two booked trips I had made for this country had to be cancelled for different reasons.

Firstly my wife and I were due to hit Boracay for a week back in 2012 before moving to Japan for a few years. However, the company I was signed up for had different ideas. I had checked with them to make sure that my orientation week wouldn’t start until after the planned holiday. They assured me all was good, and then proceeded to contact me with less than a month to go that this was the date and it was the second day we would have been there. The company really offered no flexibility and wouldn’t place English teachers who hadn’t completed orientation so that was that.

The second time the trip got cancelled was 2020. Probably no need to tell you why. I had flights booked with different airlines, and I did get my money back from Air Swift and I think SCOOT. But Cebu Pacific stuck to their ‘no refunds’ policy like glue and only offered travel credit. So if I wanted to utilise what was around $1000AUD I needed to fly with them. And if I was going to use them I was going to have to fly through the Philippines, so I might as well check it out.

My wife had suggested Malaysia as a destination, but didn’t want to visit Philippines anymore so I would be going on my own. One of her reasons was that perhaps we weren’t meant to go to the Philippines, and I have to say, I had that feeling too. But I decided to give it a go.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3T8oQjyNTHA

I made some booking errors again, and actually the first booking of a flight was cancelled again by Cebu Pacific and the funds put back into the travel fund, which I think gave me an extra six or twelve months to use them. I was planning on shifting the date back anyways. I then booked Melbourne to Manila direct with Cebu Pacific and got cold feet after seeing a couple of on board videos showing people fainting on a flight where the air con didn’t work, and another where people were freezing because it was way too cold. An eight and a half hour flight overnight? Most likely I wouldn’t be able to sleep at all too.

And it turned out they flew in the day time from Sydney to Manila, so I used points to travel to Sydney and booked a morning flight the next day from there. I still had travel credit to use up, domestic fares were super cheap on Cebu Pacific so I booked return tickets to the island of Palawan where I had was going in 2020 to a place that looked heavenly – El Nido, and I booked from Manila to Singapore where I would meet my wife and we move on to Malaysia.

My flight to Manila I took out an exit row seat and paid for priority boarding, which was unneeded. To be honest, the flight was great. I mean, bare bones no entertainment, but I took my laptop, but it was less than half full, couldn’t complain about leg room and it did the job. The toilets were super small, smallest loo I’ve ever seen on an international flight, and they really do get a hellova lot of seats into an A330, but I couldn’t complain.

More to the point, it got me to my destination and the ‘curse’ was lifted as it were, I had made it to the Philippines, my 90^th country. Not that I count. Well, obviously I do. But it’s not super important. Yeah, I don’t believe me either!

Manila is really a hectic place. Right up there with the most crazy and busy cities on the planet. I realised quickly I knew basically NOTHING about the Philippines. For centuries controlled by the colonial powers of Spain, up until around the start of the 20^th century. Then … ‘cared for’ I guess you could say by America until just after the Second World War. It’s a country where most people speak excellent English, and it was famous back when for the former President Ferdinand Marcos and his wife Imelda – and his pilfering the economy for his own gain. More recently that had a hard liner for President in Rodrigo Duterte, and currently it’s the son of the former President in Bongbong Marcos.

7,641 islands make up the Philippines, I would only be visiting two of those islands so 7,639 to go! Luzon is one of the biggest and is where you find Manila. Palawan is one of the southern islands, not so far from Borneo.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be writing about the places I visited and saw in Manila, then go into detail about my activities on Palawan staying in El Nido and the two tours I took there. So stay tuned for that and I’ve already started publishing photographic posts of the Philippines too. So lots of work for me to get down to! Hope you’ll enjoy!

Thanks for reading today! Take care wherever you are in the world right now – May the Journey Never End!