Indeed we needed a holiday, as travelling is actually hard work  🙂

Finally some wifi here in NZ and we could upload some pictures from Philippines. We spent 3 weeks there over Christmas, and visited 10 of the 7000+ islands of the archipelago. And that was a lot of travel in all sizes of boats, buses, tricycles etc… More details in the video 🙂 But overall things were rather easy, because for the first time in the past 6 months we could READ what is written (all countries visited so far use Cyrillic or Chinese characters!) and talk to people who mostly speak good English, with some Spanish words mixed up… That is because Americans took the territory from the Spanish in the 1900s and Philippines gained independence only in the 1970s.

So we went around the area of Cebu, Negros and Bohol islands (no time for the famous Palawan, but we’ll come back for that!). We visited some old Spanish colonial cities and sugarcane plantations, drove around mountainous and un-touristy islands, snorkelled in nice beaches, and just relaxed for a change. Finally a true holiday within our trip… and yes, the goal of getting “beach-bored” was achieved!

Here’s some of what we saw:

 

A few glimpses from the road and the incredible swimming with the sardines cloud in Moalboal: