The Adventures of Paul, Sadie and Daisy Moo too!

The weather in Cebu was torrential rain and as the airport is about 45 mins from our hotel and the main part of the city, we got a Grab taxi and watched the city unfold. We passed high rise towers, posh hotels, corrugated iron shacks for homes and small children swimming in what must have been huge holes at the side of the road!  Our hotel was the Cebu Palm Grass hotel and the bed was soft and comfy, which is a rare luxury it would seem in Asia. Obviously, as only here 1 night we had to try the local speciality of Lechon (Suckling Pig) and I can recommend House of Lechon in the business district as being good value and tasty, just don’t leave your bag on the ground as rats are found everywhere. Our next destination was Moalboal, which we’d heard was good for diving and had the world’s second largest Sardine bait ball just off the shore. A Ceres lime green bus will take you to the nearest bus stop for 156php each and then you negotiate a tricycle to take you the final 10 mins t

So, we had arrived at Coron Port, but the island we were on is actually called Busuanga Island, the actual Coron Island is where most of the tours go to, more on that later. Coron is part of the Calamian Islands, of which form part of the Palawan area of the Philippines, where we will be visiting the popular areas of Coron, El Nido and then leaving via the capital city Puerto Princesa. This area is known for its huge expanse of islands, mostly formed with limestone and very similar to Halong Bay in Vietnam. Our first stop here was in the middle of the town, so it was a short tricycle ride at 120 pesos to our hotel, Balaibinda Lodge and we got checked in to our room. It was decent enough, with a little garden area outside and was clean and well looked after.  Although one of the reception staff was a miserable sod, we had a pleasant time here for the 3 nights we had booked. We had arrived around 5pm, so we got freshened up and went for a walk around the town. To be ho

The Philippines! I’m not sure whether to be exited or daunted by coming here. It’s such a huge place so we’re going to be doing a lot more traveling between places than we did on our other Asian adventure but we struggled to get our list of ‘must visit’ places down any shorter, so this is just the way it has to be. First stop is Manila, because that’s where all the flights go to. We didn’t want to spend much time here, it’s a busy noisy city and not what the Philippines is about but we decided to take a couple of days at least to get over jetlag and do some essential shopping. Sorry, jumped ahead of myself slightly as I should mention that we were flying from Lisbon, having left the motorhome in a campsite very close to the centre (Lisboa Camping) and paid only 2.5 euros a night storage.  We flew first to London Heathrow on a Tuesday morning, then onwards to Kuala Lumpur before finally landing in Manila on Wednesday evening. Traffic in Manila is crazy, if you have been to Mu