A couple of weeks ago, a English friend of mine, Ben, came to the Philippines for a 2 ½ week holiday. Ben has been in South-east Asia for the last six months or so, doing charity work in Thailand, Malaysia, Borneo, and Indonesia (most of his work has revolved around helping out with tsunami relief), and will be doing much of the same over most of the next four months. As such, he decided to take a short vacation from all that hard work and spend a couple of laidback weeks in the Philippines.
He didn't really know anyone else from here (he knew Omar, but well Omar is in London) so I came up with a list of suggestions of what he could do while he was here. Once I came up with that list, I suggested an itinerary for him which he thought was really cool.
Now during the course of this planning, the fact that there was still a lot of places in the country that I haven't been to and wanted to see was reinforced. So I figured it would be good for me to take some days off of work and accompany Ben. After all, once I realized a few years ago that I had seen a lot of places in other countries but not enough of my own, I decided to visit at least one new place in the Philippines every year. Plus Ben gets a free tour guide and translator.
So this is how the final itinerary looked like:
First stop - Boracay. He spent his first night (Monday) in Manila before heading to Boracay and spending 3 nights there. I would have gone with him if it were not for the fact that this was the same time as the SNS offsite in Shenzhen. I also had too much work to do during that week that I couldn’t take a couple of days off. Didn't matter. Boracay is very tourist-friendly so Ben didn't have problems going around, and I've been there a few times before so not a huge deal that I missed it.
Second stop - Cagayan De Oro. We met up on Friday night before splitting up again - I had dinner with Joh, Raffa, Chris, Shar, Meann, Hannah, and Paulo while he hung out with some new found friends at the Fort. As such, we had very little sleep since our flight to Cagayan De Oro was at 510am on Saturday. Spent the day white water rafting then headed back to Manila on Sunday.
Third stop - Coron, Palawan. I couldn't take Monday off since I still had to finish a ton of stuff, and I ended up working til about 430am on Tuesday but I did manage to sort everything out before leaving. We got there on Tuesday right before lunch and returned to Manila on Friday. I was supposed to have a meeting on Friday afternoon which was thankfully postponed because my flight was delayed by 2 1/2 hours and I would have missed it if it pushed through.
Final stop - Metro Manila. I took Ben to Malate on Friday night. On Saturday he watched a couple of UAAP games (UP lost to FEU, unfortunately). On Sunday he joined the other Bukas Sarili people for the celebration breakfast right after the marathon. On Monday, he played basketball with Chris and his friends (Basketball is Ben's sport and wanted to play it here, so when I found out Chris was playing on Monday, I managed to get Ben to join them). And on Tuesday, his last night here, he watched my band perform.
(Btw, the night that we hung out in Malate, the song 'Call on me' by Eric Prydz played in the bar we were in. He mentioned to me how it was a popular song in England and how the video was so hot. So I searched for it in the internet and manged to find it. And I have to say that it is the hottest video of all time!!! Haha, at least for me. Anyway (well, I guess only if you are a guy) I suggest you try to find it in the net. Note that there is no nudity so don't think I'm some perv hehehe. So now, whenever I feel a bit stressed at work, I just watch that video and I feel re-energized. =))
The details of my rafting and Coron trips will be in latter posts (can't fit them in here anymore). But after Ben left Manila last Wednesday, I felt pretty cool at how I was able to organize a full itinerary for him that represented the Philippines pretty well - great islands and cities to visit, cool places to hang out in, Pinoy food (adobo and adobo flakes, sisig, and even balut!), watching and playing our 'national' sport, and listening to amazing live music (of course it's amazing, it was my band playing! =)). He thanked me for sorting out his trip here and suggested that if things don't pan out for me in IT, I could work as a travel agent. =)
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