13:14 We started our journey on 13. January and it’s been a joy since. It was pretty emotional sendoff from Tallinn into the unknown and I guess both of us felt a little bit scared for the 100% change in our life.
But you can’t stand still and let the life go by – changes make opportunities (new friends, challenges, experiences).
Don’t waste your life doing something you really don’t want to do or don’t like to do – live the life to the fullest and try everything.
Our airplain trip took us around 30+ hours, Tallinn-Oslo-Istanbul-Hong-Kong-Manila with little or no sleep for both of us. And advice to other travellers – try to setup your first place to sleep when arriving an unfamiliar city. We got to Manila around 00:00 at night and were trashed (Veronica hadn’t slept for days because of travel anxiety) and got little bit hassled by the Hotel (or to be exact by the airport information booth lady – thank you).
The Hotel was pretty expensive even for Manila and had lots of bad reviews on tripadvisor (as we found out later). Manila Airport had not usable wifi, so we couldn’t check this before but you should, if possible. Some reviews warned about muggings and so on. But luckily we are fine :).
So due do this bad first experience we were pretty bummed and almost felt like maybe this was not so good idea to get out of our comfort zone and leave familiar home. That is inevitable that you also have some bad days in your journey, so try the see the best in them and learn from your mishaps (we learned definitely a lot).
But the next days in Manila we’re just awesome. On second day we got back to Terminal 3 to get a flight to Bohol or Palawan. Prices were expensive for the same or next day, so we took a risk and bought our tickets for day after next. Then we hit another problem – were to sleep for the next two nights?
We don’t have sleeping bags or mattresses in our bag yet to spend a night at airport, if necessary. I had heard about couchsurfing and took a leap of faith – filled out a profile, verified the account and sent out about 15 almost copy paste requests for different hosts in Manila (you should never send copy paste request and try to have an unique output for every single request).
Some of them declined pretty quickly and one of them just wanted to hang around in Manila but couldn’t offer a place to stay for 2 days. Luckily I asked a stay for only one day and great success 🙂
We took Uber taxi (top tip: it is much cheaper and safer to use Uber in Manila) on Friday rush hour from airport to our first hosts home. Traffic was crazy at this time and the ride took about 2.5 hours (about 8km) and cost around 360 peeso (about 7€).
I would really like to thank our friendly and helpful driver – he made us forget last nights failures and feel like we arrived in somewhere where we were welcome. Thank you Albert.
As we arrived to our first couchsurfing host (our very first experience, yes we were thrown into the unknown again) he didn’t answer to his phone (it was switched off) so we got pretty anxious yet again. Our Uber driver (daily a policeman) was also concerned about our well being. I think the place being not in the nicest part of the city (pretty slum looking and even more scary at night time – as we arrived after dark).
Thankfully we had the exact house number, looked up the right person and had a feeling of relief – we found Nathan (our first host),hes was super friendly and welcoming 🙂
He had his friends over – some drinks and karaoke planned for later. This is easily one of the most memorable parties of my life till now. Everybody spoke near perfect english (better than me, yes), were talkative and most importantly pretty much all of them could sing.
Im out of my words but I will remember it forever! The bed was narrow but as we were tired we didn’t mind. If your planning to couchsurf in Manila area I would definitely suggest Nathan or his friends – it is pretty close community and most or them know each other 🙂
Next day we hang out at Nathans place, met hes new surfer from France – thanks for the hiking advice in Malaysia! Our second evening host was Anthony, from another city in Manila (Manila region has 17 cities inside, if I remember correctly). Completely different style of area, more European. Another great guy, to bad we didn’t have enough time to share stories – but we sill be back in Manila for few days to make it even.
We had dinner with Nathan, Anthony, Matthev and hist Israelian surfer (vegetarian and non alcohol drinker, but despite that yet another great personality – respect for not drinking with us).
Anthony took us to Rooftop nightclub, supposedly one of the most popular in town (Z bar/club) with view over the Manila skyline.
Thank you for not letting us sleep that night (as our plain left 7:35 in the morning) 🙂 We got 2 hours of sleep, woke up at 5 and zombied ourselves to airport for short flight to paradise island Bohol.