valla verde

didn;t have time to mention the lovely resort we went to in Guimeras, just off the coast of Panay - its meant to havr the sweetest mangoes on the planet, and the shakes where pretty special i have to say

i was feelin pretty ill and tired when we got there, but we found a lovelty cheap tree house, and the resort had a lovely warm swimming pool on the side of the mountain with views of the islands below and the rain forest -

felt a lot better after that little recharge - well untill the dodgy goings on mentioned below

straight from the pages of viz

well, the Borocay news actually - i'll paraphrase this, but the jist is the same - made me larf this did

BOROCAY NEWS: "Craftys, a new roof top bar has been packing them in recently. Craftys, which gets its name from 'to have a crafty one', recently opened to an expectant public. "the initial repsonse from the public has been really positive" says bar manager Dave Crafty!'

quality

borocay ay ay ay

well this place well bettered my expectations which where pretty low actuall - expected, built up, dirty, cheesy place - but its totally lush, the beach is amazing, the water clear as you like and all the abrs along the 5k beach are just a lovely mix of cheese and chill out, with a few good hot spots - its not ibiza - but its a great holiday destination and we notyh totally love it

we even scored a lovely beach front room for half the price of the most rooms, and as the manager has now done a rummer and handed the keys to next door - we think we have the last night for free! brilliant

we hacve to leave tomorrow which is a shame, but we heading to puerto galera which is meant to be pretty special too, so looking forward to that

the only bummer is that since my little virus thing, which hasn;t quite cleared up, ive had not much apetite, so all this lovely food is passing before me and i cant sample it - gutting!!!

could be worse though!

screwed

a mixed few days really - seriously dodge virus for 48 hours, all ok now, a lovely jungle retreat with pool for a day - wallet stolen with everything but one card from us on a jeepney, and just found out some f*cker using my egg card at liverpool street to buy expensive train tickets!

mmmm, trying to sort it out now, AND stay relatively cool, tricky !!!

byeeeeee

try this at home

one way that phillipino's give directions to people, eg 'over there mate' is like this....

purse your lips really tightly, then with both your chin and lips point repeatedly (with a brucy forsythe type chin shaking) to whatever it is you are pointing at ...

its quite amusing to see and do, we love it !!!

hope you like the pictures, see yer all

some shots of the island,

our hut is the one on the far right,
the old spanish fort
the fort again, and a few boats
the beach snd the lovely sand, and crystal clear blue sea

me and gerald fooling around

gerald was a mute kid from on pamilican, who we quite took too - he was lovely and think we got a wee bit attatched to him - he would just come up and sit on the balcony and watch what we where doing - we just used sign language to
try and explain anything, which was quite hard but normally worked! quite a witty/cheeky little bugger too, - which is all good in my book!!

crazy creatures

this is a spider we found in our room one evening - after some careful deliberation we decided that neither of where brave enough to deal with it, so we called the woman at our place, she then called one of the boatmen (henry) over - we assumer he would use some anchient technique to carefull remove the spider but he just took off his flip flop and started battering the spider with it, but he missed and the spider escaped !

the other picture is a thresher shark which had been caught on the other side of the island - they just chop it up there and then on the beach - very messy indeed!

me, me , me

errr, me with a fresh coconut just chopped down from the tree - very nice indeed
err, me doing a tarsier impression
errr, and me trying to see if i could rob a bank with this stocking over my head - errrrrr, No!

chess and scrabble

that last one was meant to be my record score breaking 436 in scrabble - which justine only two days beat with a new high score of 438

and also a pic of the chess set (not the board) that i knocked up with ma little swiss army knife - whats more amazing is that i still had all my fingers left afterwards - no blood shed all all - i was well shocked at that stroke of luck

games, games, games

OI....

....MARC CAN YOU STOP COPYING ALL THE PICTURES I'M PUTTING UP ON MY BLOG!!!!!!

justine enjoys a post paddle drink, and we leave the vehicle tied up to the floating bar!

malapuscua

this is me and the little bankga that we paddled all the way around the island of malapuscua, its about 6-7k i think, and was quite rough in bits - but we paddled to the floating bar at the end of it for some ice cold san miguels!

Esperanza - on Masbate

we where just meant to pass through here, but we found these wonderful bungalows, so stayed for two days - ran by a crazy woman called cherie

is it just me, or is this marge simpson in the clouds!!

no virgin marys here, only Fox tv characters

and this is may fave shot

not sure why, but just though it captured the whole phillipino beach vibe - just surrounded by srong blues and greens all the time - its so lush here

look out for the little monkey climbing the tree in the back ground

this is bithon beach - its like a weekend butlins on the beach - and we where the only customers there - had the place, beach, and resteraunt to ourselves!!! lovely

mount mayon...

(in the distance) which is actually an active volcano just outside legaspi where we stayed

justine about to jump in the shark infested waters in donsol!!!!

legaspi

this was the lovely evening when the kids followed us all down the beach then down the street - it was bedlam but lovely at the same time!

and this is one of the first mornings at our supposed beach spot

had us a bit worried it did, espesh with the el nino effect - but things soon got better

ok, hopefully i can stick some pictures up now!!!

we are in dumagette now after a lovely boat journey this morning on some really calm waters which was nice for a change

dumagette is on negros, which a looks a pretty mountainous island - the town is a huge university town so theres loads of student stuff - cheap food, internet cafes and funky bars -
should be cool - anyways, gonna have to go backwards here cos have got photos on CD and gonna go right back to the start of the phillipines trip

here goes the first one - this is the boat trip up the pagsanjan river - its also where parts of apocolypse now was filmed

map of the phillipines

just to show where we have been geographically - we started in manilla, headed down through lagaspi, over to Masbate, over to cebu, then over to bohol - now we are heading up through negros, panay, and mindoro - and flying out of manilla on the 1st may - then we come back on the 21st may, and do it all again!!woo hoo!

sad to leave the island of pamilican today, Mary (the woman looking after us) cried, bless her! still good to be on the road again

last night we had to give a briefing to 30 of the boatmen, with feedback etc - but they delayed the meeting by 7 hours - which can mean only one thing ! "see see San Miguel!" ended up giving some talk which i cant cleary remember - but it was ok i think :-)

this is not my picture...

...but its the kind of things we see every day - got pretty closer this morning (about 10 meters away) and there where about 70-80 of them - which was lovely

we also seem to have adopted every child on the island - and we now have a permanant motley crew of young whipper snappers waiting for us most times when we return, or when we get up - very sweet - but not at 8AM when you have just fell out of bed!!!

happy birthday doug and mels

both celebrating this weekend,m and if my memory serves me right - i think emily's birthday is sandwiched between them, so happy birthday to emily too!

with ref to ma sis below, i think i wrote it wrong - tourists are not allowed to touch them - and we where not either - which is a shame, cos i prob would have stolen one :-)

this is the kind of boat we are out on every day

some smaller. some bigger - but not this one, and no, thats not me at the back!!!

day off again

well, we where both up at 3:30 this morn - crossed into the mailland, and where told there was only one tour today, so i selected the lazy option and bunked into town - well, i actually walked 7k into town cos it was 6am and nothing was open, so had some time to kill

pretty rough crossing this morning, the winds where howling before we set off so we knew what was in store and sure enough 5 mins into it, we where soaked by a big wave - well, i was cos id follishly given juz my waterproof jacket (ok, where 'sharing' it :-)

not to worried re the boats cos they have these bamboo stabilisers on (i'll try stick a pic up) so even though its bumpy and choppy theres not much chance of em going down like your more conventionla ship/ferry type thing

anyways that was the worst one so far, and sure hope they dont get any worse

so we leave here in a week i thionk and head back north (slowly) via a few nice beaches and we are gonna check out borocay which sounds a bit mental, but should be fun

then need to start thinking about getting flights to oz at some point - looking forward to sidney actually - chris and becky seem to be enjoying it there, and it sounds pretty cool -

oh, actually had a dolphinless tour yesterday - it was quite rough and its hard to see the fins so we had to turn back after not seeing any - i fet so sorry for there two japanese ladies on the tour - such a shame to plan and organsie something and then not see them - they where prob well excited the night before

to 'compensate' them they where taken to the museum - which is bin bag lined cloakroom, with some fish jaws on the wall - if there day wasn't quite shit enough already, that surely was the icing on the cake for them!!!

well done to mels and barnsey

for completing an 8 mile run (i think that was distance) in just under world record breaking time ! i cant quite believe it - but big hip hip horrays to them

sterling effort i think, well done :-)

and we stayed in this lovely little place called nuts huts...

apparently everyone raves about them in the phillipines, and they are pretty good i must say, they are down a steep patgh to the river where you can (and we did) have a lovely sweim in the slow flowing bright green river - they also have a pure ttravellers menu so we gorged on curry burgers, fries, spring rolls, garlic bread etc

been trying to find a decent pic of them online, but this one is the best i could find, and kind of shows the area off, but not the lovely huts

here goes

so we decied to take a few days off the island -

lovely as it is, its nice to get into towen or go somewhere else and get some unhealthy stodgy food - so we rocked off into the mailand of bohol - its pretty much jungle here and is lovely with a bright green river running though it - and we went to see the cholcolate hills, which are pretty wierd and very unique - but a bit of a flimsy base for ther islands tourism industry - the beaches are far more spectacular!

hopefully can stick a picture here - supposedly they look like chocolate, mmmmm - see what you think ??

lovely little tarsiers

we went to see a visitor centrre for these little endangered creatures yesterday- they are pretty thin on the ground but this guy has set up a bredding programme for them -
you are allowed to touch them (tourists arent anyway) cos it can stress them out and possibley kill them! poor things

anyways, they are the lovely, and can swing their head around almost 360 degrees which we saw one do - from me to juz!! it was wonderful

Happy birthday Mother

just a quickie to wish my mother a lovely happy birthday, which was celebrated in dat der dublin on april the first ! a birthday shared with none other than the recently married Jo Thomson as well

Happy birthday!!

more dolphins

not that im gettin bored or anything - its still cool - we had our 4th trip today out dolphin spotting which was cool

although they have got into this funny habbit of not telling us we are out in the morninh, and then waking us at 3:30AM to tell us they forgot to mention we where due out - which is a pain cos when we know we arenot going out, we obviously kick in a few beers and stay up a little later

still, its cool - once we on the boat things are all good - just flagging a bit in the afternoon

more dolphins

not that im gettin bored or anything - its still cool - we had our 4th trip today out dolphin spotting which was cool

although they have got into this funny habbit of not telling us we are out in the morninh, and then waking us at 3:30AM to tell us they forgot to mention we where due out - which is a pain cos when we know we arenot going out, we obviously kick in a few beers and stay up a little later

still, its cool - once we on the boat things are all good - just flagging a bit in the afternoon