Manila Life

Our first real brush with "real life" in the Philippines happened when we had to hire a new van to take us to Tia's town.  The one arranged for us did not have any seatbelts and we were not ready to allow Katy to drive three hours through Metro Manila and its outskirts without a seatbelt!  This delayed our journey a couple of hours, which we thought would not be a problem.  After finally negotiating this first setback, we set off still in good spirits, enjoying scenes of interesting incongruencies of Manila life.

Walter Mart!

Heavily laden homemade tricycle contraptions.

A bunch of dudes enjoying a wading pool and a few beers on the side of the highway.

All went well until we were almost at Tia's when we literally ground to a halt and we were stuck in a five hour traffic jam along a tiny two lane road.  We ended up having to take the dirt shoulder on the wrong side of the road, otherwise we would have been stuck there the whole night.  As it was, we ended up arriving at 11pm after leaving at 5pm.  Google Maps said the journey should have taken about an hour...