- Back to the Philippines

 

From the time we landed in Cebu, the heat, the dust, the rampant poverty, the crowds, the traffic--oh, the traffic--yet I missed this place.

Well, we had a safe trip, not without a few mishaps. In Columbia when we were checking in, the attendant told us that the Philippine government demands an on-going or return ticket before entry. While that's true in most cases, they allow a balikbayan privilege: if one of a husband or wife is a returning Filipino, the other, the foreigner, can stay for one year without a return ticket. The attendant was nice and polite, but also very helpful. While I desperately looked for a throw away ticket to buy, s he stayed on the phone with her superiors for about twenty minutes until she got the answer we needed. We could proceed.

When we got to Atlanta, without our prior knowledge or consent, they told us that because of weight considerations, our luggage would not be travelling with us. They did not know when it would arrive.

Sure enough, when we arrived in Cebu from Seoul, South Korea, we had to stay three days at our own expense before our luggage arrived. I had no change of clothes during that time. Lyn washed my outfit every day.

Lyn's sister-in-law, Lolit, and her niece, Kaye, met us there, and we were able to do a little sightseeing, particularly in SM Seaside City, one of the largest malls in the world, and Magellan and Lapu Lapu monument.

In SM Seaside, one of our favorite restaurants,
 the Buzzz of Bohol from Bohol Bee Farm,
 with 15 exotic flavors of ice cream.
Lyn chose dragon fruit and charcoal.

Jollibees at Seaside has robot servers that bring the food to your table

From Cebu we headed to Cagayan de Oro by ferry, 9 hours overnight. Going to the ferry was too far for me to walk so Lyn found a wheelchair. However when we got to the ship, the only way to board was by climbing five steep flights of stairs. Thankfully four crew members volunteered and tipped me back and carried me all the way up. 

The ferry looked like a scaled down and older version of a cruise ship with one huge difference. Instead of staterooms designed for two people, these rooms were crammed with 60 - 80 bunk beds filled with passengers.

Lolit and Lyn

Cagayan de Oro, the "City of Enduring Friendship", the largest city in Northern Mindanao, has a population about the size of Washington DC. It has a downtown and an uptown -- quite literally an uptown. While most of the city is built on the coast (downtown), the uptown is only a few kilometers away but about fourteen hundred feet higher in elevation.

This is where we rented an apartment, a studio condo unit on the ninth floor looking out over the city below. As I type this I can see much of the uptown and downtown, the ocean and the downtown to the left and the mountains to the right.

The condo has an indoor swimming pool, a massage spa where we both got an hour long massage for $7 each, and several restaurants including Korean, Italian, and MaQueen's, a health restaurant (no sugar, low carbs.) We are about 200 yards from a large mall, SM Cagayan de Oro City Uptown. The rent for our fully furnished condo unit is $300/month.

We like our condo very much!