San Pablo

Heading out of Manila!

We'd been living in Manila for nearly two months, and haven't left the city before! Even with all the waiting (1 hour sitting in the bus at the bus terminal, while the driver waits for the bus to fill up before deciding to leave), and 2 hours crawl out of Manila, we were pretty excited to arrive at San Pablo, at midnight ... in one piece!

Even more excitingly, we rode those little motorbike tricycles for the first time ... We must've overtipped as the driver seemed too happy in receiving the money ... :P

So we were finally standing at the gates of Casa San Pablo past midnight ... waving off mosquitos while SMSing the host of the accommodation (everything was arranged via SMS!) ... and the security guard lets us in ...

Relaxing ...

Next morning, we managed to take a good look at the place we were staying at ...

 

For someone who doesn't normally eat breakfast ... this was a little too much for us ... The Filipinos seem to have an obsession for corned beef ... (we were previously served corned beef in the hotel we were staying in) . We also had scrambled eggs and garlic rice -- we were wondering whether it was breakfast or lunch we'd been served!

 

As I didn't get a good sleep (our room was connected to another home with a family with four little girls that woke up at 6am!) we found some hammock type things and caught up on much needed ZZZs.

To burn off our morning gluttony, we decided to have a bit of wander about the place ...

We rescued a frog from an empty swimming pool which was drying up in the hot sun ... and carefully dropped him into the small creek nearby.

... found some cats lazing about like us ...

We found other couples on the resort ...

 

And then it was lunchtime!!

That's me enjoying a nice clear, tasty, mussel soup, grilled tilapia wrapped in a leaf, spring rolls, and rice (of course).

That's one of the drawbacks of staying in a Bed & Breakfast (& Lunch & Dinner) ... you have to plan your day around meals! :P

During lunch, our nice hostess came over and suggested a few things that we could do in the area ...

One of which is to take a nice cruise on Lake Sampalok with her friend Mandy ...

 

Mandy has been encouraging eco-friendly uses of the lake ... Lake Sampalok previously had restaurants, noisy nightclubs and was overfished and polluted. Over the years, the cleanup had paid dividends -- as the smell and rubbish slowly disappeared, the residents slowly returned to the lake to relax, picnic, etc.

 

It was soon time to return to the resort for dinner ... I didn't get round to taking photos -- I think it was fried chicken and beef soup ...

We went to bed early because we took hostess' sugestion to check out another lake which was meant to be more pristine ...

Lake Pandin, then home!

We ate a little bit of breakfast at 7:30am (waking up early is too new for us, and we normally don't have an appetite first thing in the morning) and then we were off to Lake Pandin ... via tricycle! Whee!!

Luckily we had a nice tricycle driver who brought us all the way to the lake (we had to turn off into a secret lane, walk some dirt paths that forked several times). If we'd caught a jeepney instead, I don't think we would have found the place!

We were soon on a "boat" (make that two plastic barrels cut in half, and strapped to two bamboo poles) and our lovely rowers took us for a cruise around Lake Pandin ...

 

As you can see, it is very peaceful here ...

 

Our guides also brought us to the twin lake of Lake Pandin, Lake Yambo, which was on the other side of the hill.

Happy that we've witnessed and experienced the nice parts of the Philippines, we headed into San Pablo City for lunch ... After lunch, it started to rain, so we decided to head back to Manila ...

Luckily, our tricycle brought us to the bus just as it was about to leave ... and the skies really opened up ...

Entertainment on the bus was a karaokeing bus conductor!