OH MY GOD i have SO much to tell you.
WHAT a week.
For those of you who don't know, i'm in the Philippines at the moment, and have been here nearly a week. I arrived last Friday (after a fun fun few hours at Singapore airport with Georgie!) and our friend Rob picked me up. We got driven down to Batangas City where we got a boat over to Small Lalaguna Beach where Anna was waiting. Anna and I stayed there until yesterday, we both completed our PADI Open water and Advanced Open water diving courses, and are now fully qualified open water divers. As part of those courses we did a total of 9 dives including a wreck dive, a night dive, and a deep dive, to a depth of 30m. Once I sorted out how to properly empty my BCD (a very straightforward thing that made a HUGENESS of difference to my control of buoyancy!!!) and forced my brain to admit that if my mask is full of water I can still breathe (i had to show that I could take my mask off underwater, put it back on and clear it) we were all cool!!!
The Lalaguna and Sabang beach area is quite touristy, with hundreds of divers constantly filling the resorts there. There is also an abundance of old men with really young Philippina wives/girlfriends/bitches. One of the funniest things we saw was a "bitch bar," which is kinda like a strip club, except that the girls don't take their clothes off. They literally walk in a bikini and high heels in a circle around the stage. I have never seen a bunch of girls looking so bored or disinterested in what they're doing. However, the place was filled with men, both foreigners and Philippinos!
Yesterday we completed our last two dives, then got a public ferry and public bus (quite an experience for me!) up to Manila. We stayed in Manila for the night because it was too soon after diving to fly just yet. We arrived in Manila with no place to stay (anna thought we would play it by ear... had I been to Manila before, i would have insisted we had somewhere to stay!!!!) but an idea in mind of a place that was close to the airport and a hostel type place. We got off the bus, found a taxi driver who hopefully wouldn't murder us for our shoes and found the hostel. No room at the inn. We called a couple of other places which were all also booked out. So then I did what any girl in that situation would do, I called Uncle Rob. He called about 5 more places which were also full, by which point I am totally over it and would have been happy to pay $100 for somewhere nice rather than trying to find somewhere cheap. Eventually Rob found us a room, and after having our cab driver go up and down the same street three times, we finally found the hotel. Now I use the term hotel somewhat loosely here. Basically it was a room with two beds. And by beds, I mean two pieces of foam on bed sized wooden boxes. Anyway, it was a sort of clean and possibly safe place to stay.
We went and had dinner and sorted out printing out our tickets for the flight the following morning (have you ever heard of a PC that DOESN'T have adobe reader on it?) and went to bed pretty early. Then I had possibly THE worst night's sleep of my entire life. Our airconditioner made these MASSIVE crash bang clunk noises about every half hour. The first time it happened we thought someone was trying to get in our door. We set up an elaborate bag/cupboard door alarm on the room door so that if someone tried it again we would know. When I was jolted from my sleep the second time with the hugest fright of my life, I worked out it was the air conditioner. For about the next three hours I swear I was lying awake in my bed thinking things like "oh my god we're going to be murdered and nobody will know" and "oh my god what if there's a fire alarm? there is no way i am going outside in this city in my pyjamas and leaving all my stuff in this room - we're going to die in a burning building and nobody will ever know." Obviously I worked myself into a right panic. Eventually however, I did manage to fall asleep for at least a few hours in a row. If I never go to Manila again it will be too soon. The city is dirty, chaotic, so polluted and so so so poor.
At 4.45am we got up and went to Manila domestic airport, another experience in itself. Rob had a friend of his who's a taxi driver pick us up at Cebu airport and take us to his travel agent to pay for our tickets here and back, and we also got a GOOD proper coffee. We could leave our bags in his car while we went and organised things, and his car was clean and nice and he was polite and didn't once ask either of us if we were married! All of these things were a HUGE relief, but also a huge change from EVERY single other Philippino guy we had come across. He took us to the ferry which we caught where Rob picked us up in Ormoc City.
So by now we're up to yesterday afternoon. We got to Rob's, dumped our bags and went out on his funkarama boat, had an amazing afternoon, did a dive to the wreck of a Japanese ship that was bombed in 1944, and drank beers as the sun went down. This was suh a relaxed and fun afternoon, it was easy to forget that we're in this country surrounded by so much poverty. As we were on our way back in we could see all the shanties down the beach from Rob's house that thousands of people actually call home.
We went out for tea last night to a seafood restaurant (anybody who knows me well, this is cue to fall off your chair) where i ate raw marlin (SO yum), and Dorado (amazing) and cucumber salad. I never knew that fish could be so delicious. I have been totally converted to a seafood eater - just make sure it doesn't taste fishy! We drank some wine, went and had another beer under an umbrella in this temporary festival/bar/pub place, came back to Rob's where I had the best sleep i've had in ages.
Today we woke up to an amazing view out over the water and to find that Anna's bathers had been stolen off Rob's washing line. She got a bit shitty, but then remembered that she'd already brought them inside!!! We are just about to have breakfast, and then we're heading out on the boat for the whole day. Our first dive is going to be to 52m, which is a long way past what we've done before, and probably a long way past what we should be doing as inexperienced divers, but ROb is sure that we're both advanced divers, and given that both Anna and I have spent much of our lives in water and teaching other kids to swim, we're pretty confident. Also, Rob's boat has this amazing facility where we can do decompression with pure oxygen at 7 or 8 metres, so this pretty much rules out even the possibility of any problems!
In total we're going to do 3 dives today, sit on the boat, eat chicken for lunch and have a few beers on the way back. Tomorrow morning I have to leave at 5 to head to Tacloban airport to catch a plane to Manila, where i have a 4 hour wait before my plane back to Singapore, where I am meeting Georgie and Ed and then flying to Koh Samui to spend a long weekend there with them. I'm totally hookedo n diving now, and am planning on doing at least a couple of dives in Koh Samui each morning, before sitting by the pool sipping cocktails and shopping for knock-offs with Georgie. I am so excited about seeing them both and getting to spend an extended period of time with them!! I adored just sitting in Singapore airport and talking and talking and talking with Georgie last week, so it will be awesome to have a whole week of that!
ok, i'd best be off. The deep blue awaits, and some Philippino boys to sail the boat.
Love you and miss you (kinda!) all.
Love me.
