Greg and Mandy's Travels

Mar 23, 2025

Breakfast on the rooftop overlooking the boats preparing for the day’s hoards.

Today was our island hopping day, so after breakfast and a quick run for coffee because our hotel didn’t have any (they pitifully proffered us a sachet of Nescafé and pointed to the hot water), we headed off in some minivans to the local beach.

We were told that the choice for today was getting wet or very wet. So far we’ve been blessed with just getting wet, as the seas were calm when we waded out through the coral and clambered onto our boat. Headed out to sea, enjoying the natural beauty of the limestone islands until the guide decided to turn us into a party boat and cranked up the boombox.…

Mar 20, 2025

We’ve been staying at a hotel that bills themselves as ’boutique’, principally because it has art installations in every room. Ours is a huge wall mural of young Filipino women floating on icebergs, which we think is incredibly culturally appropriate.

Today is our long drive day, about six hours the length of the island of Palawan from Puerto Princesa north to El Nido. They have obviously figured that it’s cheaper to hire a fleet of mini buses rather than fly us, so we were placed four people into a minivan, and a fleet of vans then headed out of town like a long white snake.…

Mar 21, 2025

Today was a ‘will we or won’t we’ kind of a day. On the itinerary was a trip through the Puerto Princesa underground caves, but for the last two days they have been closed because of rough seas and bad weather. We wouldn’t know until this morning whether it was happening, and so there was a flurry of messages and phone calls about 6am to let us know whether we were going. Rather important actually, as if we weren’t, we could stay in bed till 7 o’clock. Our room has a red bat phone complete with flashing light and push button to answer.…

Mar 20, 2025

Today being the Manila day of our tour, the first thing they did was take us on a visit to the only tourist attraction in Manila – Intramuros. A shorter and less detailed tour than our private guide yesterday, so we didn’t learn much that we hadn’t already known.  However, there are a couple of things that we didn’t realise so probably others don’t too.

There are lots of Santiago’s around the world, and the original part of the Spanish settlement here in Manila was called Fort Santiago. What I didn’t realise is that Santiago is Saint James in Spanish.…

19 Mar, 2025

Our tour of the Philippines starts today, but we came a week early in order to visit Laos, as well as some of the sites in the Philippines that are not covered by the tour itself. So, whilst the rest of the tour group were fighting with security lines and aircraft boarding procedures, we were already here. Instead, we had to fight with hotel check-in’s, traffic jams and sick Grab drivers.

Started the morning thinking that we had plenty of time, so we went down to the café next to the hotel and ordered ourselves a coffee. Much to our surprise, the display cabinet was full of Bundaberg drinks – unfortunately not ginger beer only sarsaparilla and grapefruit, but heck it’s the start of a takeover.…

Mar 18, 2025

Decided against going to Auntie Half-Half’s store next door for breakfast, and instead went back to yesterday’s cafe and had another honey latte. Over breakfast we were assailed by ads including one for a shower head, the big selling point of which, we were assured, was that your husband will no longer have to hold the nozzle while you wash your hair. Dang! They take all of the fun out of life.

Checked out, and caught a Grab (filipino Uber) to the main bus station and then our 1st class, leather seated luxury coach back to the big smoke.…

Mar 17, 2025

The Philippines is located on the ring of fire, and there are a lot of volcanoes, many of which are still active. Baguio City is built way up in the mountains, and is therefore built on an old volcano which we hope is not active. The town is actually built in the crater of the old volcano, and has an enormous amount of American influence.

Being a rather cool climate and fairly close to Manila, it’s become the summer capital of the country. The grand old house was the summer residence of the US Governor General after the Americans booted out of the Spanish, and decided that they would keep it from themselves.…

Mar 16, 2025

Well, sooner or later I had to stuff something up. We carted our bags along the broken footpaths down to the bus terminal early this morning with Mandy bravely trailing in my wake. Arrived at the right place at the right time to find, well, actually it wasn’t the right place. Certainly it was the Victory Liner bus terminal but it turns out that the tickets I bought online would depart from another Victory Liner bus terminal on the other side of the city. And, of course, given the nature of traffic in this city, there isn’t time to get a taxi all the way across to the other side in time to redeem our tickets.…

Mar 15, 2025

So it was goodbye to Laos. We enjoyed our time and we’re glad we came, but I’m not sure I’ll fly around the world to come again. Vientiane was lovely, cosmopolitan and enjoyable. Luang Prabang had lots of lovely things to see, was full of culture and certainly worth a look if you’re in the country. Vang Vieng is the backpacker party capital of the country. Not quite our cup of tea. Put it this way, if you’re at the stage of life where your kids are into adventure backpacking, then you’re probably not going to want to go there.…

Mar 14, 2025

Vientiane is typical of the divide that exists in many countries between their capital and the more rural cities and towns. It is vibrant and prosperous, there are a lot of well educated and well employed people around. But to understand Vientiane you also have to understand the history of Laos.

By the 1700s the three regions of Laos had been largely unified under a king based in Luang Prabang. However, the invasion by Siam broke it all up again, and it didn’t become re-unified until 1893 when the French asserted control. Colonial France wanted to ensure that it had safe ports and friendly waters in the region in order to support its pacific islands, especially in view of other strong colonial powers controlling strategic trade routes like the Dutch, the Portuguese and the English, so they exerted their presence in what was called French Indochina – Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos.…