Day 138: Over to Palawan

In the wise words of Homer Simpson: "so long, stinktown"! Had our hotel breakfast, bummed around in the room for a little bit longer then checked out at about 11am. Uber to the airport was pretty quick, again due to the public holiday so very little traffic (our trip was about 25 minutes, I've heard it can sometimes take 3 hours!!!).

So we were very early for our flight at 1:45pm, and annoyingly we were in Terminal 4 which is basically a shack with only a couple of food options. I picked a "pizza baguette" from the French cafe which would probably have made a French person shudder, but at least the food was edible and reasonably cheap.

Before long there was an announcement that our flight was running late, and that the new departure time would be 3pm. Sigh, but it's AirAsia - you get what you pay for. In their defence, we've done nearly 20 flights with them on this trip and their on-time record has been pretty decent after a few early hiccups. So we just sat there with a few hundred of our best friends, waiting and waiting. Lots of locals had huge boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts which I guess aren't available on Palawan? Interestingly, one guy had a stack of five Pizza Hut pizzas which I'm fairly sure would be available and even if they aren't - would you want to eat a pizza that's been transported several hundred miles by air? That's a serious craving.

3pm came and went, as did several other AirAsia flights to different destinations. Finally our boarding call came at 3:30pm, the aircraft filled up pretty quickly and we were soon moving. After a ridiculously long taxi, we spent 15 minutes waiting to take off in a corner of the airfield, obviously because we'd missed our slot and had to fit in around the already-congested airspace. So it was that our 1:45pm flight finally lifted off at around 4:10pm.

Very short flight to Palawan, only about 1 hour with barely enough time to serve refreshments (which we didn't purchase as usual). On arrival we were a bit disconcerted to see all the ground crew (baggage handlers, maintenance people etc) were all dressed in Halloween costumes as zombies, ghouls, vampires, witches and so on! We took a photo with them as did a few other people; thankfully the pilots were dressed in their usual suit & tie!

Our resort had a van waiting for us, poor guy had been stuck there just as long as we'd been waiting in Manila! All for a 10 minute drive as well. Checked in with no problems, though we'd run out of cash and wanted to book some tours for the next couple of days which required a large-ish sum of cash. So after putting our bags down we jumped on a trike (motorbike with an enclosed side-car) and went to the mall 5 minutes away, where we used the ATM and grabbed a takeaway dinner from the supermarket.

Another trike back to the hotel where we finished booking our tours, ate our dinner, had a beer and did some writing! Early start tomorrow, we're going island hopping at a place called Honda Bay and the van pick-up is between 6:45 and 7am - eep! Fingers crossed for good weather too, it's been raining a bit here today and the forecast isn't promising.Read more