The back story

It was New Years eve 2022 and we were all down at Currumbin to catch up with the surf crew for a New Years eve surf and some dinner. It has been a bit of a tradition for many years to finish and start the New Year in the way that you would like it to continue. Christine and I were talking with Scotty and we all decided that we needed to have a 2023 adventure. Scotty was looking at Bali, however Flo had just come back raving about a paradise on Earth called Cloud Nine in the Philippines. I was concerned that staying in a luxury hotel where they provided you with a 6 pack of beer and breakfast each day that it wouldn’t be overly conducive to the healthy lifestyle that we were seeking. Christine and I did a bit of research, questioned Flo some more and came up with a surf adventure to Siargao. We tried to rally the troops into gear and although many wanted to come we ended up with Christine, Byron, Scotty, Mum and Myself all going to meet up with Flo and Richard who were going to be in Siargao when we arrived. 

Scoot

We found the cheapest tickets that we could which did not include checked baggage. This was ok as we wanted to pack light and didn’t really intend to do much shopping. We took it as an exciting challenge and scouted out Bags that were light weight and designed to be exactly the right size to fit the carry on baggage requirements. When we originally booked the tickets they included Byron’s girlfriend at the time. We had checked to see if this could be changed if required, and it could for a fee of $150 each way, well this is what the Scoot Website said. This would turn out to be misleading and deceiving. Hidden in a dark shady corner of the Scoot website there is a clause that says that the ticket change will be $150 each way plus the difference between what the ticket had cost when we purchased it and what it would cost now. Read the difference between what you paid for it, and an arbitrary figure made up of whatever they think you can afford, this will not bear resemblance to the going price on the website so don’t even try to figure out how they calculated it. Long story short I paid nearly twice as much for mum’s ticket as I did for the others. I suggested to the airline that with this kind of wind fall they could potentially help out by sponsoring the Spanish program that I was trying to launch at the school where I work. Needless to say they were not overly interested. 

Now when I was thinking cheap tickets, I had no idea that they wouldn’t include anything other than the flights, not even a glass of water. Thankfully mum was with us, and she was organised, mum had brought a plastic drink bottle and we were able to fill it up at the gate lounge. This gave us some water to get through the 8 hour flight. Needless to say we learned our lesson on the journey over and made sure to load up on food and water for any subsequent flights. I did buy Byron a meal, if you could call it a meal, it was $13, had what appeared to be rice with possibly some yellow dye, I think they called it a curry. Not quite what he was expecting, it didn’t even come with a knife and fork or even chopsticks for that matter. Just picture Byron after four hours of not eating staring forlornly at his yellow rice without the required utensils to even eat it. Ok go ahead and laugh, I find it funny looking back on it as well, I can assure you it wasn’t funny at the time, Byron was about to ask for a parachute so that he could get off this hell flight and find some food, I think he had seen a couple of crocodiles circling in the ocean below and was thinking that they could make a tasty snack. I think the flight crew saw Byron weighing up his options and decided that they had had their fun and it was time to find some utensils. We did make a nuisance of ourselves by getting up at regular intervals to do laps of the plane, punctuated with push ups, squats and lunges. We were starting to wear thin by the time we arrived in Singapore. I am not sure how I am going to handle a flight to Europe or the US. 

Over priced currency 

Everyone warns you about the touts and con artists that you come across when you are travelling. I can assure you that they have nothing on the airlines and the currency exchange agencies back home. We lost the greatest amount to shady dealings before we even left the country. Let’s start this saga with the prevailing exchange rate of 39 Philippine pesos to 1 Australian dollar. We did some research and found that we could purchase currency from Travelex in store with a spread of around 5 Pesos giving us 34 pesos to the AUD. I called the bank and they said that that we could buy Pesos off them at the prevailing rate, 39 pesos, with a 3% fee. On the currency I wanted to purchase I was expecting to pay a fee of around $60, this sounded reasonable enough. The catch was that I would have to come in to the branch to sign the order, and then return to the bank to collect the cash, banks close at 4pm, I am pretty sure this is designed so that the majority of working people are not able to get there in person. Thankfully I was able to get away from work and make the mad dash across to the bank on the two occasions. On the first occasion the guys at the bank had to hunt around to find the code to the portal so they could place the currency order. This should have sounded the warning bells because it indicated that the bank was not selling foreign currency, and had not done so in a long time. 

On the second occasion, when I was collecting the cash, I was running a little behind and I didn’t grab my glasses. This is probably lucky as I didn’t get to see by how much I had been ripped off until I arrived home. It turns out that the bank operates through Travelex, however they had a spread of around 7 pesos giving me 32 pesos to the AUD, and on top of that I had to pay the bank a fee of $20. We purchased around $1 800AUD worth of Philippine Pesos and $200AUD worth of Singapore dollars. Long story short we paid Travelex around $324 in fees on the Philippine Pesos, a further $20 on the Singapore Dollars, and we also paid $20 to the bank.

It would latter turn our that if we had ordered through Travelex on line, we could have picked up Philippine Pesos for 37 Pesos to the AUD and they would have delivered them to the local post office, I could have collected them on my ride home. We would buy more Pesos in the Phillipines in a clandestine operation involving Paige and Western union where we were able to buy Pesos at the prevailing rate without any fee, but that is a story on its own.  As a side note, when I used my card in Singapore to purchase food and services the bank exchanged the cash at the prevailing exchange rate and charged me a fee of 3% so I guess it turns out that the person I was talking to at the head office was not wrong about the cost of foreign currency, it just didn’t apply to foreign cash. Either that, or the bank branch was not aware of the new systems for obtaining foreign cash. 

Customs 

As always the real adventures started at customs. Christine had prepared for the journey to the wild jungles of the Philippines by purchasing insect repellant and sunscreen. What we were not aware of was the limit of 100ml per bottle of liquids and gels for carry on luggage. Had we had checked baggage it would have been fine, but alas we did not, as such security had a great time trawling through our luggage and tossing much of it into the bin. We were traveling very light by the time we finally made it through the various checkpoints to get to the departure lounge.

Singapore airport 

I had been sold this image of the Singapore airport as a monstrous great shopping mall laid out with all manner of food and goods for sale. This turned out not to be the case, so if you have never been, dial back your expectations a little. We found a pizza place that had ok looking Pizza’s for around 40 Singapore dollars. This is where we also discovered that most of our cards would’t work outside of the country. Thankfully this was where our overpriced currency came to the rescue to purchase our overpriced Hawaiian pizza. Christine, Byron and I ate our way through a pretty good pizza, well actually after 8 hours without food or drink one of those cardboard pizzas that you get from Coles or Woolworths would have tasted delicious, so in reality I was probably not in the best condition to comment of the deliciousness or otherwise of said pizza. Scotty did not eat the pizza, he was horrified that we had flown half way around the world to Singapore only to eat a similar incarnation of Italian food to the ones you can find back home. Scotty ordered a noodle dish from a place by the name of large wang, after 8 hours without water we found this rather amusing. By this stage we had lost mum to the first coffee joint we had passed after leaving the arrival gate. Christine purchased some waters, which we would promptly lose going back through the next screening point. Scotty would also lose the sun screen that he had managed to smuggle out of Australia. The small amount of food and drink that we had consumed was enough to get us through the next four hour flight to the Philippines. 

Cebu 

Getting in to the Philippines was a lot easier than getting out of Australia. We filled in one form at a tiny booth with a couple of guards, the form explained who I was and how I could be contacted and this was sufficient for the five of us to enter the country. Christine’s cousin Andy was right out side the front of the airport waiting for us. He had organised a van for us, he also took us to a small booth where we were able to purchase sim cards. The girls manning the booth were experts and our phones were set up with data and new numbers in no time. 

We piled into the van and went in search of food, this actually turned out to be more difficult than expected. Many of the food places had already closed in anticipation of a 12am government curfew. We finally found a small outdoor restaurant called Cocina Gwapo where they were serving fish and chicken soup, rice and fried meats. The food was tasty and extremely welcome to the weary group of travellers. After dinner we we made our way to our hotel, the van driver had waited for us to finish eating. The hotel was in a back alley that mostly comprised shanty shacks, it was a 3 or four story brick place that actually looked as out of place as the shiny new McDonalds across the road from the restaurant where we ate dinner. There was a large church nearby, where we would meet the next van in the parking lot the following morning. We walked up to the reception desk, the good news was that the bloke behind the reception desk was expecting us, the bad news was that almost immediately he let us know there was a problem. He said that the 3rd room we had booked was not available due to an unexpected wedding party. By this time we were super tired and dehydrated so didn’t put up much of an argument. The bloke said that he would get us some portable beds for the evening. Andy was on hand to help us get settled in. He made sure that we were all good and then said that he would be back in the morning to chaperone us to the airport, what a legend. The rooms were small and the bathrooms doubled as showers. The result was that after the first person had a shower, the whole room was soaked. We showed, got organised for the next day and had some sleep.