Philippine Travel Notes

5:12PM, National Road, Brgy. Pawing, Palo Leyte before McDo and Shakeys... Another day in the life of this our traveling public. Where there is a crowd, therefore crawlingly-slow or stagnant vehicle traffic, something untoward must have occurred. Meron nga! My driver usually says "sana walang namatay" . I heard him say that now. Too easy to tell which part of the road has an issue - look to where the uziseros are! Anywhere something like that happens, ang daming tao, but only 1 or 2 are helping. Ay pastilan, I saw a motorbike with two babies - halatang the parents are just uzi! In fact, all the "single motorbikes" in the scene have no business being there. Uzi lang! See that? Only the man in black sando seem to be helping the accident victim/s. Vehicles cannot easily pass-through because of many people and vehicles stopping by just to literally look without offering any help. So, movement unnecesarily crawls. These " waray labot " people and th...

Really. It happens and it happened last night in the Philippine capital, Manila, when a Xiamen Airlines plane skidded off the runway and ditched to a muddy grassy portion. That picture above isn't mine. I just copied it from Business World so I can show some image in this blog story regarding the mishap. Such disruptions, by the way, are considered 'normal' by experts, from the point of view of operating airports. It can happen to any airport anywhere anytime. And they know too, that accidents like those can cause a mind-boggling 'domino effect' of disruptions in air travel. OMG! So, is it really normal? Well, it obviously is/was not normal - at least for us the riding public who are not at the airport daily. For aviation authorities, experts or employees, when they say "normal" - they actually want to say "it happens" or "it can happen" to/at any airport. In any case, like it already did since midnight, that accident is going...

Let's go whale watching again! This was my 3rd visit, but an excited first-time for my two friends from QC, who are loyal readers of this blog. I had to cut my roams at another island-province for this! I rushed to rendezvous with them in Cebu as I promised to be their guide. This was Day 1 of their 4-day vacation, that almost got canceled, due to Yolanda’s aftermath. Ideal flight schedule to Cebu Note: Travelers from Manila, read this, as you could pick a helpful hint or two here. My friends got a very-early flight from Manila. A ridiculously low-fare promo they were able to grab, and per schedule they expected to land Cebu at 4AM . Jusko gino-o ko! Imagine what time would I need to wake up to fetch them! Walang tulugan? On the other hand however, I thought that was splendid - so we could go straight to Oslob that very early morning - since whale watching is only from 6AM up to 12NN . Good plan to max-out their time. No need for them to sleep overnight in C...