A Big Adventure

December 30th 2008, Tagaytay, Philippines

So for the last few days we have basically been camped out at the Mum in Laws just being lazy.

Barbara my Mum in Law is quite amazing for a lady of her age who is undergoing  Chemotherapy, she is in a surprisingly robust state of both physical and mental health. Good to see.

Sofia really needed to see her mum as she herself has been through full on Cancer treatment herself some 11 years ago, her treatment included both chemo and radiotherapy so she truly knows what her mum is going through.

I have been trying to organize some rooms at our next destination which is in Anilao (Batangas) where we want to take the kids in the lovely warm clear and fish filled waters to snorkel.

But as I am sure I have mentioned before the Philippines really is not actually that good at helping foreign visitors get around and book things.

So I tried contacting a couple of the dive resorts, both via their websites – which with few exceptions did not work properly and also by telephone where I was 100% on the numbers shown on the screen not working!

These people can obviously thrive without making it easy to book rooms.

So with just a couple of days to go we still have not managed to book anywhere.

Anilao is not a place that you want to drive to with the hope of just pulling up at a hotel and booking a room.

Most of these resorts are down amazingly steep long, badly paved roads or lanes and usually you have to park at the top and take the resort transport down to the resort. I wonder if they would be keen to take you back up if you did not book in after they took you down!

If we do actually manage to book somewhere then we really will fall off of the blog map for a few days as I do not think any of our chosen resorts even know what wifi is!

We will actually be out of touch for up to five days before finally heading back to Malaysia for the next couple of months.

I also tried to go to the casino in Tagaytay, a place I have been too a couple of times before.

Upon entering the place was buzzing, a very good singer held many of the visitors spellbound and the rest were surrounding the tables 3 or 4 deep.

I don’t normally play card games in a casino preferring roulette. The two roulette tables were besieged and after waiting for half an hour I knew I would not manage to get near enough to lay a bet.

I had a wander around the card tables the price to play was way beyond my meager gambling stack, the cheapest table was 300 peso which is about $6.50 and most of the tables were more like $22 a hand.

I like to visit a casino for a fun time losing two of three hands and going back to my room is not my idea of fun.

I tried to find a video poker machine sadly most of them looked way beyond there best, those that were working were almost all taken and the few that were not did not seem willing to accept my 500 peso notes.

So sadly even the Casino’s in the Phillipines don’t make it easy to spend your money. After an hour or so I went back to the hotel to sleep.