Disaster in the Philippines

The Philippines may seem like a slice of paradise for many but our trip was certainly a bit rocky!

After arriving in the Philippines (only catching our flight with minutes to spare) we took out enough money for the first day and to pay our accommodation and made our way to the apartment. Once we got hungry we decided to head to a shop for something to eat. After walking for twenty minutes alongside a busy motorway we turned up to a corner shop and bought doughnuts. Upon discovering the cash machine wouldn’t take our cards we headed back and decided that tomorrow we can go in the opposite direction. We returned and ordered pizza online.

The next day we spent the entire day walking around looking for a cash machine that worked, nothing would take any of our cards or Chinese cards! After spending the entire day without food we managed to find a McDonalds to have our first meal of the day and then the search continued. Eventually we realised we were going to have to give up so we returned to our apartment and played in the pool for a bit and managed to get a few cool pictures of us jumping in the water. Afterwards we again had to order pizza online due to not having any money.

Luckily the next day we were able to get our parents to send in money via Western Union and we were saved! We met up with my Grandad (who lives in the Philippines) for lunch and rode a rickshaw home.

Now that we had money we could finally get back to doing fun stuff! So we decided to go to a hot spring on a volcano the next day! The hot spring was beautiful, it was filled with many different spa pools and even a pool with a slide. Every pool was surrounded by tropical plants and flowers and had a different purpose.

We even bumped into a Chinese family there. We were in the largest pool at the same time as the Chinese children and we could overhear them talking about us. “他们看到我们” (they are looking at us) they said, “你们看到我们！” (your looking at us!) we replied. All three kids looked so confused but we ended up having a nice chat with them and they were really surprised we lived in China and were impressed by our swimming ability.

The next day we were supposed to be going to a water park but upon finding out it had shut down we opted for a day at the beach. After a long trek to get to the beach we finally arrived, the beach was lovely! We stayed until it was pitch black and floated in the sea looking up at the stars.

Our next adventure was Hong Kong...