So less than a year later, we are back in the Philippines; a country we had never even had on our travel list before. Hurray for new discoveries! Our spontaneous 2 weeks last April only allowed us to visit Manila and one other island, and so this time we are doing a bit of island hopping around the island of Cebu, for the next 4 weeks.

It was an extra long journey from London to Cebu which began on February 19th, and took us via Warsaw and Singapore before eventually landing in Cebu on the 21st. It's taking a few days to get over this bout of jet lag, and so we are sort of sluggishly settling in, and adjusting to our new budget, which is considerably less than what we were travelling on last year. After just finishing 6 months in one of the most expensive cities in the world, we somehow managed to save enough to add an extra $2.00 to our daily budget, which right now stands at $77.00 CAD per day. However, this is already proving to be challenging in the Philippines, mostly due to ferry and transportation costs. The preferred way of getting around here is by renting an affordable motorbike, and although this is tempting, we have seen far too many tourist injuries in the last year and a half to seriously consider this option. So the new plan is to try and recoup the costs back on mainland southeast Asia, and just roll with it!

We spent 2 nights on Mactan Island, where the Cebu airport is located, mostly just to try and sort ourselves out. We had cheerful and helpful interactions with Filipinos on the jeepneys (local buses) when we had no idea where we were going, managed to sort out a SIM card although we have no idea what plan we have bought, and visited the Magellan Marker, where Ferdinand Magellan was defeated by Lapu-Lapu, a Filipino chief in the 1500s in an effort to resist Spanish colonization. And there's your history fact for the day. More blogs and photos to follow where possible as internet is quite limited!