Sometimes travelling is hard work like the day we travelled to Manila from Puerto Princesa. James was back from the dentist and our flight was scheduled for 3:40 pm. We had already had a message that the flight would leave an hour late.
It was also stipulated they wanted us at the airport 3 hours before the flight!! This is a domestic flight we’re talking about.
So thinking ok we’ll not have lunch and grab something there we arrive at the ridiculously asked for time and guess what? It’s delayed again and then again! We ended up at the airport for 5 hours before we got on the plane.
We had decided to stay close to the airport and are glad we did as traffic in Manila is horrendous.
Our stay was at Alicia apartments less than a kilometre from the airport and as only opened four months ago was although fairly bland was comfortable enough. We were a little weary as it was clearly in a shantytown village.
Luckily the new presidents extremely hard stance on crime has cleaned up the city considerably and violence seems to be at an all time low. No beggars and we were once again impressed with the friendly locals.
For our one day in Manila we took the advice of several Filipinos we met and took an Uber into Intramuros which means inside the walls. This area has some of the buildings from the Spanish era here and there were quite a few that were reminiscent of our visit to Cartagena on our cruise.
We took a horse and carriage ride for an hour and got some great ideas of where to go for the rest of our day.
We went and visited gardens, the fort and museum of Jose Rizal. Had a yummy lunch and walked through lots of character full streets.
Not sure if there’s a building code here or not! I’d say it’s a safe guess NOT, when you see some of the structures around. It’s truly surprising they are inhabited by families and trades and haven’t fallen over in a domino effect.
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It was a great end to our month here and we left the next morning with one million photos and great memories.
Next stop Hong Kong.
Offtolivetheworld 
Just Amazing…xx
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