A Girl's Trip to the Phillipines

I left the family and ran away to the Phillipines for 5 days, and while it was a lot of fun I did miss them. We were in Manila and Puerto Galera, and everyone was friendly and the food wonderful.

There were the three ladies, myself, Liz (fellow tatoo enthusiast) and Mila (who brought her son Matts). The background picture is of Manilla (which is twice as big as KL and has worse traffic!). There's the picture of our temporary tatoos (henna), and then the sea snake we saw as we pulled into a beach (luckily non-poisonous), myself at the harbor for a day of snorkelling (it was amazing fish and coral) and then the rest of the crew on White beach which was quite crowded.
Mila has a reputation for showing her guests an exciting time. In the past one group was kidnapped and held for ransom and another couple got caught in a military coup. We escaped relatively easy; there were apparantly anti-Canadian demonstrations during our visit over the incident in Quebec of the teacher calling a young girl uncivilized for eating with a spoon and fork. I must say that most of this part of the world eats that way, and we find it very civilized... I did feel it appropriate to apologise to everyone we met about the incident and prudently removed the Canadian flag luggage ID from my backpack. Not a proud Canadian moment...