Friendly's Guest House Manila

The bus took a little over an hour to get to the outskirts of Manila and then around another 30 minutes to navigate through the city to the Pasay area. We didn't ride the bus the whole way, but the attendant on the bus let us know where the most convenient spot for us to disembark and find our way to Melate was. The first taxi driver that we talked to agreed to use his meter when we asked, then in the next breathe said "250 pesos." We were not going to play that game and simply walked 10 mete...

Our flight was smooth but about 20 minutes longer than the hour that had been scheduled. Overall this made the flight around an hour late but it didn't really matter much for Lisa and I since we didn't have to worry about connecting flights. After picking up our bag and looking around for a ride back to the Melate suburb of Manila, we discovered that the taxis that you catch within the airport limits are around twice the price of taxis outside the airport. Considering that it is easy to see t...

October 1st, 2008 - Manila, Philippines

So our first big trip was to Borneo, Malaysia via the Philippines. I was actually quite surprise that trip happened, because when planning it, I was skeptical that people would wanna come. My main travel book was Lonely Planet’s: SE Asia on a Shoestring. The main reason why I wanted to go to Borneo was so I could climb Mount Kinabalu, the tallest mountain in SE Asia. When I suggested it to the crew, everyone who didn’t have conflictin...

A couple of delayed flights caused me to arrived at Manila after midnight, under a light rain. The original hotel that I had in mind happened to be out of basic rooms so the other choice was Friendly's a P$ 325 a night for a dorm bed that ended up being an excellent surprise. The original idea was to spend only one night and head towards the rice terraces of north Luzon, but a typhoon had went by and after missing Manila went to the north were it made some roads impossible to cross and cracke...

29-01-08 Had a lay-in and did not get out of bed until 2pm, and after I had had a shower, Saff came in and said apparently our room had already been booked, so we had to check out, so not so "Friendly" after all. So in our mood, we got our stuff and left. We checked into another guesthouse just up the road called Adriatico Pensionne Inn (Pensionne is mean't to mean cheap guesthouse) however not so cheap, friendly's was 800 peso and yet this one was about 1200 peso, hoe hum, only for one night...

I flew to Manilla, just before the Typhoon. I was stuck at Friendies Hostel where I did alot of reading and deciding where I was going to go.

I love arriving in a new city for the first time, not knowing where I am, where I'm going, how to get there, prices, or even the language. But landing back in the familiarity of Manila and providing the taxi driver directions to Friendly's Guest House was a real nice (rare) sensation too! After a night I headed north to the famous rice terraces of Banue with a Pommy guy who actually remembered meeting me in Medellin, Colombia slumped over a bar, chica & bottle of Jack at 7am one morning! ...

So, what happens when in order to leave Asia you take the cheapest flight out knowing there will be a 9 hour layover? Usually you get excited because you know that is enough time to leave the airport, see some sights and then hop back on a plane. That is unless you are in Doha, Qatar where a 14 day visa is 30 dollars and seeing oen fort and the desert is definitely not worth that money. So, lucky for me this airport has free internet (even though you have to stand at the computer) so I guess ...

Manila 29/11/2006 - 02/12/2006 Our budget carrier Tiger Airways, actually stated that their destination was Manila (Clark) so we previously and fortunately looked into this to find that Clark airport is not in Manila but actually in a city called Angeles. We looked into Angeles and to see if that was a worthwhile place to check out but found out that Clark actually used to be an American airforce base so Angelese was set up to accomodate these servicemen and even now is one of the biggest sex...

Week 47 June 20th Fin*lly...I've m*n*ged to book * flight out of here for tomorrow. Not the destin*tion *s pl*nned but still cool. The only one I could get th*t w*s slightly on my itiner*ry w*s to Sing*pore *nd then on to M*nil* (Philippines). From there I'll he*d slowly tow*rds Indonesi*. Typic*l, on my l*st d*y here I've come down with * kind of flu (sore thro*t, sneezing *nd he*d*che)...prob*bly from the excellent but cold Uluru trip *nd the swimming yesterd*y. Feeling re*lly ****** I did ...