Day 728 - Waiting for wings this time

When our overnight bus finally deposited us in the capital at 4am this morning, we had a few hours to wait until the local buses started running into the centre, 10kms away. So we dumped our bags and bunked down on the benches with the other locals - anything to save a few dollars (the other tourists grabbed a taxi into town instead)!!

Come 6am we were on a bus that led us to another bus that eventually dropped us in familiar territory - though everything in town was still closed at this hour. So we sat in a park, ate some muesli, and waited for the town to awake around us. We also managed to squeeze in a look at the Atkinson Clock tower - a memorial relic from WWII.

At 10.30 we jumped on the bus to take us out to the airport for our flight to Manila, Philippines! We managed to wile away the few hours waiting for our plane - although travelling involves a lot of doing and seeing, it also involves a lot of sitting around and waiting, which is exactly what we ended up doing this afternoon!!!

We arrived in rainy Philippines at 5.30pm - after 2 years of travel we've managed to time our visits to each country perfectly by missing rainy seasons and very hot seasons, but this is the first time we've come to a country when we know that the time's wrong for travel!! We'll just have to hope it doesn't rain too much ... though the locals we've spoken to have all said that it rains all day, everyday ... hmmmmm.

The pain about Air Asia's cheap flights to Manila is that we didn't arrive at the main Manila airport, but one 2 hours north of the capital. This didn't really matter as we're heading north anyway, but unfortunately we couldn't find much information about public transport from here, so we had to take a taxi into Dau, a town 10km away.

In Dau (which turns out to be a complete "nothing" town) we spent a while trying to work out buses for tomorrow and then walking around in the dark, rainy night in search of a place to stay that wasn't either too expensive, or a total filth-pit. We ended up in a rather dingy place, that usually rents by the hour - but it had a bed and clean sheets, and since we haven't really slept in the last few days, it did us just fine!!!

Adlibing it to the Philippines.