Philippines

On a purely superficial level, when you tell people that you’ve been to the Philippines, the first thing they want to know about is what the beaches are like. Or rather, to be more precise, they want to know about one beach in particular: Boracay. To be fair, I...

I'm sure that Bacalod is a lovely town. In fact, if we had managed to see any of it in our three days there we probably would have liked it. However, the annual MassKara festival was not quite what we expected, and overshadowed every aspect of the city.

We had been in Dumaguete for three days and were looking for something to do outside the city. The noise and the heat was getting to us and we were itching for a good day trip. I had read that there were a couple of really great waterfalls not...

Trite as they may be, sometimes there are real pearls of wisdom to be found in the old bromides we break out when the seas of life get choppy. When our first attempt at snorkeling in the Philippines left us rather underwhelmed, rather than hanging up our mask and...

Check any guidebook and it is likely to describe Dumaguete, the capital city of the province of Negros Oriental, as charming. Full stop, no qualifiers. But chances are that if you are the kind of person who would benefit from a guidebook, your definition of the word “charming”—like mine—is...

Enough preamble—we've read your comments and we know that all you really want to know about the Philippines is what the beaches were like. Can't say we blame you, as when we headed to Bohol, we were planning to spend scads of time lolling about on white sand beaches...

Before we left on our Big Trip, the Philippines was a place we casually considered visiting, but it never officially made it onto our itinerary. Truth be told, the only reason we ended up there is because in our desperate bid to get out of China, it was the...

We landed in Manila just after four in the morning. After a restless flight from Shanghai, stuffed into overcrowded and under-cushioned seats, the adrenaline of our "escape" from China had worn off and we were in a fog. Bleary-eyed and fatigued, we shambled off the plane and down the...