Going Back To Philippines

It has long been planned out that I’d have my holiday leave on October, during which temperatures in the Philippines will go down a bit and the usual rain showers and storms will make brief passes over the archipelago.  And so it has come to pass that I had triumphantly returned to my homeland, with the prospect of re-visiting familiar places at hand.

This is I at the Jackson International Airport in Port Moresby while waiting for the crew of Philippine Airline to get the plane ready for us. People will usually wish you a “Happy trip” when embarking on a journey somewhere. Well, I prefer to fulfil such wishes at the soonest time possible. So here’s a smiling me for all my readers out there. I do feel happy that I’ve decided to finally take this holiday break after three years.

The flight to Philippines from Papua New Guinea takes about five hours to complete. Inside a PAL airplane, you can either sleep through it or spend those hours watching in-flight  movies on a small overhead LCD screens.  I believe I had been shifting constantly between sleeping and watching what was being played on the screen until the dry lands of the Philippines had come into view on the windowpane.

Ah, there’s no place like home indeed.

The food being served in the airplane is prepared with high nutritional value in mind. Those pretty flight stewardesses will usually offer two sets of food comprised of either pork stew or fish stew. After giving it some careful thinking, I have to admit that it is easier to choose pork over fish simply for the reason that the former is less complicated to eat than the latter.

I’ve arranged for someone to pick me up from the NAIA Terminal 2 Airport. One thing noteworthy of being mentioned here is that the person I have contacted for this vehicle through a friend, is a Barangay Captain of Pagas, Cabanatuan City, and he has assigned a Toyota Hiace Grandia Van to me. The van was really huge for the driver and me and there were more than enough legrooms at the back as I chose to sit at the front. The rent was fairly reasonable and it was a comfortable ride all the way through.

One of the peculiarities of Manila and its relative cities is the never-ending queues of vehicles in a bumper-to-bumper traffic. If there is something that I need to share about the experience, it would be to advice anyone to avoid going back home on Fridays if you didn’t want to get caught in a heavy traffic.

That’s all everyone. I hope to share more of my experience during my holiday vacation in the Philippines. Cheers!