12.10.18 - 15.10.18 Above All to Legazpi

Once again, we had planned a fairly long distance, divided over two days. And once again, everything turned out differently than expected. In the morning, we split up at our resort in Biliran. Mathias rode the moped into town to return it, and Lea took both big backpacks in the jeepney. After overcoming the obstacle of an empty tank, Mathias and I met again in a relieved way at the bus station and were immediately loaded into a minibus, which took us to Tacloban at breakneck speed, where we had to change buses. Everything seemed to go smoothly here too, so we had a little time for lunch before the next van was supposed to leave. At the stated departure time, the van was only half full, so we knew we would have to wait a bit until it was a little fuller. As it turned out, the bus driver was very eager to fill all his seats, so we waited and waited... by the way, in the Philippines, you don't express your displeasure in public, but somehow we seemed to be the only ones who were really annoyed by it. So, three hours later, we finally started, first to the gas station, as the engine runs continuously during the waiting time to keep the air conditioning running. Since we didn't know that our van would take us all the way to our destination, we were loaded off the bus after 4 hours, only to be informed of this and loaded back in. So we arrived at the harbor in Allen at around 9 pm, completely exhausted, after 14 hours for 425km. After paying the surcharge for the additional distance and trying to explain to the bus driver why we shouldn't have to pay extra for the seat where our luggage is, which he reluctantly accepted, we checked into the harbor hotel, which thankfully had a 12-hour rate, as we wanted to continue early in the morning, and looked for something to eat, which ended in rice and soy sauce for Lea for the second time. So we went to bed early and tried to ignore the sounds of the karaoke bar beneath our room.

Since, once again, it wasn't quite clear when the ferries would depart, but allegedly they were supposed to leave every two hours, we got up early again... only to find out that the next one wouldn't leave until 11:30, even though there was one announced for 8:30 on the schedule. So once again, it was a matter of waiting... 4 hours. We spent the time writing our resumes for Australia. Finally on the ferry, it took another hour before it finally left. Fortunately, we were able to watch the sinking of the Titanic on the ferry's screen, comfortably docked in the safe harbor. The film selection always makes us smile. The ferry took us to the last island of our trip in the Philippines, Luzon. When we arrived in Matnog, everything went well... after two more buses and a tricycle, we arrived in Legazpi and, with only a little guilty conscience towards our travel budget, checked into a much too expensive and fancy room.

Quite exhausted from the travel stress, we thoroughly enjoyed this room and contented ourselves with a few small walks in the city. The cityscape of Legazpi is characterized by the very perfectly shaped volcano Mayon, which was on the brink of eruption earlier this year but then decided against it. Originally, we wanted to swim with whale sharks in Legazpi, but we didn't consider that they don't stay here at this time of year. So there was no reason not to take it easy before heading further north to Manila.