oliabroad :: Oli on his way from Munich to Hong Kong

Go to:

2010-06-04
News:
New Zealand

Finally the pix are online! :-)

news archive...

Diary - 2009 June (Philippines)

2009-06-25 to 2009-06-28

Back to Manila

To catch the flight for Manila we had to hang out one night in Cagayan de Oro, where we found a 'Wiener Kaffeehaus', where the sausages were real and the Schnitzel gave me some feeling of home!

In Manila I had to do the sightseeing mainly alone. Stefan had seen all this before and it gave him and Clarissa some extra time without me. After being guided for three weeks it was good to make up everything on my own again. I enjoyed a Chinese Cemetery, the old city Intramuros with old houses and churches and the Rizal prison - a major player in the revolution war of the Philippines against the Spanish occupants.

One day we had been in the Ocean Park, where one of the highlights was a small bowl with special sharks - and four transparent eggs with young embryo sharks in different stages of development, all connected with their umbilical cord to their nutrition source. And the sign told us, that the mother shark does not need any interaction with a male shark - so they can reproduce themselves! :-)

The nights we spend again in the local bars with the bands covering at its bests!

2009-06-19 to 2009-06-24

Camiguin - another place where you could hang out for months

The main activities we wanted to do were diving and hiking up the Hibok-Hibok volcano. But after I caught a cold in the first night both was off limit! Bollocks! :-(

But we could easily spend the time with going to hot springs, exploring waterfalls by hiking through the jungle like Indiana Jones - where the water falls from such an altitude, that you cannot go below or there comes so much water down, that you are in danger of drowning, soda pools (literally a pool where bubbles are coming out of the ground and the sign at the entrance tells you already that you can swim, taste and drink the water! :-) and an ostrich farm.

Meeting expats is as easy as everywhere else so we ended spending a whole day chatting in German about the island, the Philippines’ and the rest of the world... Knowing the right people also meant to get invited to private pool billiard parties to local people with their own bars! :-) Time passed away in full speed and we soon had to leave the island to go back to Manila.

2009-06-17 to 2009-06-19

Cebu - second biggest city

Cebu was the city where I could finally start to overcome my sightseeing addiction. An old fort, the carbon market a Taoist temple, a butterfly sanctuary the reminiscences of the Spanish with the Basilica Minor del Santo Nino and the Magellan Cross. But that's really all and you can do it in one day! :-)

After Stefan told me about one week, that in Cebu I had to go to this one famous night club, I had no choice - it was Lone Star time! :-) With the name as the bottom line it's a club with naked girls dancing and girls approaching you in packs of three when you sit down for a beer. To buy 'love' is nothing for me so I had to force me to spend at least one 'lady drink', but that was all I was eager to do. The rest of the night I spent with the expats hanging out a the pool table - literally the rest of the night - when I came home, there was just time for having breakfast before we were heading again to the airport to fly to Camiguin.

2009-06-08 to 2009-06-17

Coron - the dream goes on full throttle!

After travelling for more than a year and nonstop discovering new spots of the planet I arrogantly was afraid of not getting impressed again easily! What a fool I had been! :-) Sleeping in the plane Stefan woke me up just to show me the fantastic island world of Palawan. Stunning!!! Just like in a movie or a picture postcard - spots of jungle filled islands in crystal clear bluish greenish water, one after another ending on the horizon!

60 years ago Coron was the place where the Japanese were fighting the Americans in WWII. And so it happened that a group of so called hell diver (obviously American fighter planes) sunk a full convoy of Japanese cargo ships - a tragedy in these days, but a party spot for the today’s scuba divers!

Unfortunately the visibility down there is most often very poor and going down 35 m and being obliged to have a torch to ditch in the dark is not my dream of diving - so one dive with the Japanese was enough for me. But the best spot diving there is anyway something else - lake Barracuda. At least one Barracuda is said to be still in there, but what you brings there is not the quantity on fish (we counted zero), but the rock formation down below and the surprising change on about 14 m from 'cold' freshwater (about 27 degree) down to hot saltwater (about 37 degree) with its funny mixing layer inbetween. The visibility down there is so good, that even you hardly find any life form down there it's so interesting - especially if you look up to the surface and see the other divers like flying over the rocks - that we spent nearly 50 minutes down there!

The place we stayed in is the one and only backpacker place on Coron - a perfect guesthouse built over water offering everything what you need. We hung out there quite a lot and were just enjoying the perfect view on the other islands or just on all the boats dancing on the waves. A paradise! As the Philippines are build on volcano stones hot springs can be found nearly everywhere. On Coron we enjoyed frequently the very nice arrangement with several pools, with benches in the water including waterfalls where you can sit below. Just the water is that hot, that every now and then you have to get out of the pools to cool down - or cool down yourself with a cold San Miguel beer from inside! :-)

The other day we had a splendid tour to another lake in the rocky hills of another island again with crystal clear water and perfect rock formations where we were snorkeling non stop for more than three hours - it was just overwhelming! The same trip brought us to some other spots for snorkeling in the sea and to the so called twin lagoons - two lagoons where you can dive from one lagoon to the other through a five meter long tunnel. Quite exciting the first time, when you don't see the other end! Looking up, when you come back to the surface help avoind a crashed head! :-)

The highlight for going out in the night was the so called hard rock cafe. A disco-bar, where three ladyboys were performing covering songs from the charts - with surprisingly good voice and very female movements! If you don't know about ladyboys, you would never figure out, they are boys! :-) After midnight the place transforms into a club where the local youth is dancing and trying to imitate the stars from telly in front of the mirror - quite funny! :-) ...of course they were dancing much better than we did! :-)

After a heavy party night I was finally prepared to eat the famous Balut - a nearly full developed chick! It looks so horrible with it's feathers and bones and just deadly looking bend green head, that it took me a view beer to get brave enough. But it was all in the head! If you wouldn't see, what you are eating, it would be nothing than the good taste!

Another trip brought us to a leprosy island. A place where the Philippine government sent all leprosy infected people, which were searched by the military like in an ethnical cleanup. People who came there would never leave again. But they could live a life without being a leper. Just about two years ago the island got leprosy free! The illness was first treated with a juice of a leaf of a special tree. Later teams of doctors figured out, how to heal it with a combination of three artificial medicaments. It's still not sure, how this disease gets transmitted!

Travelling in the monsoon time meant that every now and then we had to adapt to the weather. So once when we just had been starting going out to the sea by kayaks a very heavy rain started which forced us to go back - being out in a 2 square meter boat with heavy lightning was not what we would have defined as a good way of dying! :-) ...of course some people might have said, with 'Rammgeschwindigkeit' nothing could have gone wrong! :-)

2009-06-06 to 2009-06-08

Manila - a dream starts!

The Philippines - actual not on my itinerary - came out to be a 'must see'! After a crazy night flight - starting ten past midnight in Bangkok, arriving around 4 o' clock in Manila - Stefan and me arrived pretty tired in Manila - capital of the Philippines.

The Airport was brand new and clean, pretty much like Bangkok, but smaller. After a quick breakfast we hit the city - everything quite developed and tidy - kind of chaos, like all Asian cities, but not in a way that you think there will be no tomorrow. Stunning!

We checked into Stefan's base camp of the Philippines - the Malate Pension in the same names district. Everything is nice, warm and the people friendly and helpful! We take a two hour nap to get fit again and wait for Stefan's girlfriend Clarissa to arrive from her home village out of Manila. They met five years ago on Stefan's Asia trip - since then, they are a couple.

After a big hello meeting Clarissa we head out for lunch and got the first experience of Philippine food - which I heard should not be too good. But this information was totally wrong! I always enjoyed the food, which has a little bit more meat than the Thai food and is less sweet. Of course you get all the backpackers ABC as well, like burger, chicken and little meat spits.

In the evening we went to Calle 5 - a typical Philippine 'bar', where young bands cover all time hits and the newest chart songs - and they do it amazingly good when you once stop just looking at them - because they show one thing the Philippines are famous as well - the beautiful girls! :-) We didn't order the barrel of beer, what they serve as well, because the next day we already had to catch an early morning flight to go to Coron on Palawan. We didn't do any sightseeing, but that was already a perfect start into a three-week-side-tour!


	Start: 2008-04-10					Oli on his way from Munich to Hong Kong				End: 2010-05-12