After arriving in Manila, we found that it was going to be hard to get out of the city as quickly as we had hoped. Jeanette’s research had kinda painted the city in a bad light – it being known for scams and pick-pockets. We arrived on a Tuesday, but the ferry that we planned to take to Coron only left on Tuesdays and Fridays – missing the Tuesday ferry we had to wait the 3 days for the next one. Since it was holy week, everyone in the city was off for Thursday and Friday, and most tours or buses out of the city were fully booked. I felt lucky to even get a ticket on the ferry.
Manila turned out to be a cool enough city. It had some very modern malls (Global City Mall and Robinson’s Mall were both cool), and people played basketball on a lot of the side streets. Some cons were the traffic (absolutely terrible, but people actually followed road rules), the homeless/beggars, and the litter/trash all over.
My favorite part of our time in the city was the tour of the Intramuros. Julio talked us into a guided tour for 250 pesos ($5), and the tour was supposed to last 30 minutes. He was very entertaining and seemed to know his stuff very well. He would take us from site to site on a bicycle with a side car. Every time that we would start from a stop, he would yell in a strained voice, “Philippine history!” Our time with Julio, unfortunately ended on a sour note with him telling us we owed him 1000 pesos for the tour. His math was it took 2 hours and it was 250 pesos/ 30 mins. This, of course, contradicted the original quoted price of only 250 pesos and through pictures on my phone I knew that we had only been with him for 1 hour and 15 minutes. We gave him 416 pesos ($8.40) (me pretending that it was all that I had) and got out of there. Walking away with him, he looked a little dumbfounded. I felt a little bad, I also wished he would not have tried to cheat/trick us. I still consider it a good experience.
Philipine Peso conversion – $1 = 50 pesos.
– Jason
Life as a Local in Syros, Greece 
Not bad. Only scammed ya $4 and you still got your tour 🙂
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Manilla looks fairly developed and yet still everything is so inexpensive!! Or are you simply seeking out the less $$ way to go and do things? Its come a long way from when we were in Southeast Asia in the ’70s. Of course everyone speaks English…right? BTW What are Joe and his wife doing over there? Were their parents missionaries for a time? Look forward to seeing you and hearing more about your trip. It’s going to be a bit of a culture shock coming back. Much love from home, Ruthie
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It definitely is inexpensive compared to home, but you can spend a lot of money if you are not careful. And we get tourist prices to some things (instead of local prices) that are a bit higher. This annoys Jeanette a little. And people dont speak as much English as I thought they would here in the Phillipines. There were areas in Thailand where one person out of 1000 spoke some English. Cambodia was a little better than Thailand, then Philippines, and Malaysia was the best (but we were only in the big city there). Karen and Joe were in Phnom Penh for Karen’s job – I believe she took it for the adventure of it, and they seem really happy in Phnom Penh.
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