So I took a few days off from my trip to go visit my sister, Laura, in the Philippines. My sister is volunteering at a maternity clinic in Davao City serving as a midwive to the pregnant women that can't afford proper medical attention. It's part of a program she is enrolled in.
Basically she delivers babies.
As I said, she lives in Davao City which is apparently well known for the infamous death squads that were put in place by the mayor who was elected three years ago. The intersting part is that they are not out to kill opposing parties or revolutionist (although that's a good possibility that occurs as well) but drug dealers and otherwise criminals so it's kind of like a "boondock saints" put in place by the government.
Well I was here, one girl mentioned she was out and seen a large crowd outside of the mall and after asking what was going on, she was told the DDS (Davao Death Squad) had killed a well known drug dealer.
So she booked an awesome little trip for me while I was here. She booked me a room at the BS inn... still wondering if there was alterior motives behind that. It was like a motel 6 but only about $9/night. My hostels in Europe were cheaper!
I met Laura's friends, seen where she worked and had thanksgiving dinner with all of her co-workers.
Then we went and played 3 hours of badminton at the local gym. I was wrecked by the time we were done. These people are crazy good at this "sport?"
We got everywhere by these "tricey's" which is a motorcylce with little cab on it as show below or just a motorcyle.
The cool thing about Davao was the lack of tourists. I seen only a handful of white people which was cool because of the attention we recieved everywhere we went. People stopped and starred, school kids yelled and waived...it was crazy....but cool.
I took a short video from the motorcycle ride that gives a tast of it:
So the first day, we went to the market and I tried cocunut juice just poured from the coocunt...FYI, it tastes horrible!!
Then we took a trip to the island of Samal to check out the beaches and the falls. We took the motorcyles and there was 2 of us + the driver on each bike..so people on a two person bike.
The hills were not exactly smooth asphalt either so the ride was a trip in itself.
We made it to the beach where we swam, ate lunch and I was conned into trying coconut juice straight out of the coconut and it was still horrible!!
We then jumped back on the bikes and headed to the falls. Pretty awesome and fun to say the least.
And here are a couple of the guys we paid to drive us around all day:
After that me and my sister headed to Paradise Island which is a local resort which is pretty cheap and still really well done. It was very high standard but by Philippino standards, not U.S. standards.
Here's the accomodations
We had dinner and played some ping pong and I crashed early. We woke up at around 7:00, had breakfast. My pineapple juice was litterally an actual pineapple that the turned the inside to juice and served as a pinapple..check it out:
Then we went snorkeling and took a nap on the beach, I managed not to get burned. The interesting thing about Philippinos is that they thing white people are beautiful and try to avoid tanning to get darker and actually have "skin whitening" soap and body wash.
In America, it's the tanner the better so it was nice to have a few days where I was the desired colored vs the red haired, freckled guy.
It just goes to show you the grass is always greener.
Here's Laura playing with some kids.
and some pictures of us with the underwater camera:
I think that's about it for this leg of the journey. I'm heading back to Bangkok to catch up with Bill and his buddy for the rest of the trip.
