Day 152: Back to Kuala Lumpur

Sadly not so much relaxing today! Time to finally bid farewell to the Funny Lion, to Palawan, and to the Philippines after almost six weeks (minus our quick jaunt to Hong Kong). Although our flight wasn't until 9:50, we got picked up by our complimentary shuttle at 7:30 after our last buffet breakfast. The drive to the airport was very rough, over gravel roads, cattle grids and gigantic potholes. Thankfully the driver was pretty chilled out and didn't drive like a maniac.

We arrived at the airport by around 8:15, so plenty of time to spare. Luckily there was wifi in the terminal so I used my laptop for an hour or so. The plane was late arriving (it's great how they always blame "late arrival of the aircraft" for delays, as if that makes it okay), and we didn't end up taking off until nearly 11am. Small propeller plane for the 50 minute flight back to Manila.

When booking this connection we'd had a dilemma - AirAsia runs two flights per day between Manila and KL, one at 12:30 and the other at 5pm. Knowing what Manila airport is like, we decided against doing the shorter connection and just as well - by the time we got off the plane and made our way to the AirAsia check-in desk (our flight from Coron was with Philippine Air), the early flight to KL had closed. I asked if they could move our flight from the late one to the early one but no dice.

So we checked in anyway, wandered over to our gate and got comfortable for a 4 hour wait. Shandos did some work, I did some writing and finished off (and posted) my Palawan video which was got a good reaction online. After a couple more delays our plane finally arrived, we boarded and eventually took off after what felt like the typical endless taxi at Manila (the airport is laid out extremely poorly).

Long 4 hour flight and touchdown around 10pm, where we grabbed a taxi to our hotel in the city. Finally checked in around 11:30pm, a long 16 hours after we'd left the Funny Lion. The new hotel is quite nice, just a street back from Jalan Alor where the street food market is. Good little find by Shandos!Read more