A short and Inexpensive trip to the Bahamas

The Bahamas. It conjurs images of clear blue waters and white sandy beaches as well as luxurous rooms and meals in fabulous restaurants. All of that is real and wonderful but you need not spend massive amounts of money to enjoy a trip to the Bahamas.

My wife and I recently took a cruise to the Bahamas that was incredibly inexpensive without being cheap. If you look around and do your research you can find ways to bring down the cost of a trip. You can book solely with budget packages, you can make it a point to go during off season or you can get in some cases look at property packages in the area. All are valid ways to travel for less. The last one would probably get you the best deal from a price perspective but will also entail your sitting taking a tour of some kind and then listening to some pretty high pressure sales pitches.

Consider a 3 day cruise for the easiest and most inexpensive experience. If you cruise out of Fort Lauderdale, Florida you can easily have the cruise experience as well as the experience of being in another country very easily. Nassau is an overnight cruise. You leave Florida late efternoon and are in Nassau just after breakfast the next morning. Nassau is a beautiful city with freindly people and good food. You will find food of all types and you can find the Straw Market just minutes from where many of the cruise ships dock. The Straw Market is what would be called a Flea Market in the United States and has vendors of all types hawking their wares.

You can take some form of transportation, and there are a number of choices, to see more of the island if you like. There are beaches that you can can enjoy and there is the Paradise Island Resort not far from the docks which you can visit. You can also just tour the entire area for a an hour or so to see what you can see. Please take advantage of the things we have quite close but ar still other countries. You really have no lived until you have experienced other cultures at least to some degree so you can see what some of the rest of the world lives like on a daily basis.

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Vacation Spots in the Philippines

Welcome back. We have had our trip over, we have spoken of Manila and of Filipino food. Now we shall speak of locations to take a vacation.

The Philippines is a country of enormous beauty. It is also a country of extraordinarily friendly people. Any place that I went in the country I was made to feel very welcome. I will say that the big city is the same as other countries. You do have some bad elements that are bent on causing trouble because in the Philippines, just as in all other countries, there is the minority who feel that they are owed everything they want so you will want to pay attention to what goes on around you just as you would in public anywhere. I had an experience myself that gives you an idea of what I am speaking about. I and 2 of my friends had gone out to a local bar to have a few beers after work. We had a quite pleasant time talking to the people around us and listening to a rather good local Metal band playing. As we were finishing up I went to the restroom. When I can out I saw my friends had paid the tab and were headed to the door where they would wait for me to go out. As they stood up and walked to the door they passed a table with 4 young men that eyed then and then stood up together and headed out the door after them. I followed close behind and came upon my friends waiting for me just outside the door. I asked them to wait for a moment or so. As we waited the guys that left waited for a little bit but were pretty conspicuous since they just stood and glanced in our direction every now and again. I told my friends that there was going to be a reception committee for us not far from the bar if we walked back to the hotel so we called the hotel and they sent a car over the bar immediately. As the car pulled up in front we went out and climbed in. Our friends were standing just inside an alley near the bar watching this as it went down.

I am truly not trying to scare anyone off but to let you know that you are on vacation but you are not at home nor are you invincible due to the money that you bring to the local economy.

That bit ok unpleasantness out of the way, on to the goal of this segment of the blog.

If you like the beach and the tropics you will absolutely adore Borecay and Cebu. They are both vacation resort islands that will leave you breathless. Near pure white sand to walk on and relatively shallow very clear water to swim or snorkel in gives you a beach paradise to enjoy. The accommodations are very nice and have all the amenities that you would want in your hotel room with the fabulous sites and experiences of a tropical paradise right outside your door.

If you are going to be in the Philippines you absolutely must schedule a little time in one of these 2 resort areas. It is as close to heaven on earth as you will find in my opinion. Do a little research and find the hotel that you prefer and then save up for the trip and have a blast. It will be the most pleasant vacation you have ever taken. The Air Fare to get there will be the most painful thing because once you actually get in country things are much more inexpensive than in the states.

Please enjoy your stay in the Philippines. You will not regret the trip!

Food of the Philippines

One thing that I learned to love very quickly was the variety of food available in the Philippines. In manila particularly there is a vast selection of food from all over the world. With many businesses setting up call centers from many different countries you find all kinds of restaurants. From the big chains from the United States to small local eateries that cater to travelers and locals alike.

Aside from the chains there is the food that the people of the Philippines themselves love and that food is magnificent. It is a blend of other Asian cultures along with the cultures of some of the countries that occupied it over history. It tends to be primarily a mix of Chinese, Malay and Spanish with bits and pieces of other cuisine thrown in. I have had the simplest dishes you can think as well as some fabulously exotic dishes. There was an unbelievably good fried dumpling with a filling of Sea Urchin and a dough that was almost completely black since a large portion of the liquid used in the making of the dough was squid ink. I had a green curry beef dish that was hotter than anything I have ever had. The spice made it actually painful to eat but the flavors that came through the heat were so incredibly good that I just had to go back for more.

Pork, chicken and seafood are the primary meats you are likely to find. Another favorite of mine is Crispy Pata which is the front or hind leg of a pig from the knuckles up. It is boiled until tender in a pot of seasoned water and then allowed to drip dry. A liberal layer of flour is sprinkled over the pata and then it is placed in a pot of hot oil and deep fried whole until the outside it crispy brown and delicious. It is then served with a number of dipping sauces.

Sisig is another favorite of mine. It is finely chopped pig parts (the parts that you would probably never eat in the US) that are then fried until crispy and served with sauces.

One thing you will find is that rice is an absolute staple of the Philippines. About a month into my trip I was a bit hungry for something American again so I went to a KFC in Makati. The chicken was as I remembered it. The 11 herbs and spices remained the same as far as I could tell but along with the meal there was a small square paper wrapped bundle with the meal. When I opened it was a block of rice. Rice is served with almost everything.

When you go to the Philippines do not be afraid to try new foods. My outlook on food is that I will try anything once. If I don't like it I don't ever have to eat it again but if I don't try it, it could be something that I absolutely love and I would never know.

Philippines – Manila 2

Welcome back. We have finished breakfast at the hotel so let's see what Manila and the Philippines is all about. When in Manila you have several ways to get around. You can take a taxi. Depending on where you stay and what your budget is you can take a hotel cal complete with driver. You can take a bus. You can take a jeepney. If possible I would take the hotel car for the first trip or so you can get a feel for the area and not get charged extra by the driver. It is pretty much impossible to not stand out like a sore thumb as a foreigner unless you are of Filipino descent.

The most popular form of transportation is the Jeepney. The original Jeepneys started out life as surplus army jeeps after World War 2 that were sold, give to the locals or just abandoned after the war. Jeepneys are hard to miss. They have been outfitted with roofs and long bench seats. They tend to have some pretty flamboyant color schemes. A jeepney rarely stops for more than a few seconds. When it does you hop on and take a seat and then you pass the fare up the line of passengers to the driver. You do need to know where it is going. They have very particular routes so unless you know for sure where a jeepney is headed you probably don't want to get on.

One thing you do not want to miss in Manila is Greenhills Shopping Center. It is to the Philippines what the Flea Market is to the United States. It is a phenomenal experience. Crowded isles with little stalls selling anything you can think of. With regular stores on the outskirts of the stalls, it is a wonderful thing to see and be a part of. I am not a big fan of shopping but I would go again and again to see this.

Philippines - Manila

Sunday morning after almost 24 hours total of traveling and about 8 hours sleep. I woke up feeling almost hung-over although I hadn't had a drop of alcohol since the bottle of wine I had with the first dinner on the plane out of Detroit. It was almost 16 hours since that time before I went to bed so not the alcohol. Jet lag actually is what it is I realize. I am now 13 hours ahead of the east coast of the U.S. I went downstairs to explore the hotel and the surroundings and found that they have a lovely breakfast buffet just off the lobby in a very well appointed restaurant.

Breakfast in the hotel in Manila is wonderful. Freshly squeezed orange juice, mango juice, papaya juice, and watermelon juice were in large serve yourself containers. There were at least a dozen different kinds of fresh fruit, bacon that was quite good although not quite what someone that lives not far from Virginia is used to. There is a cooking area where a chef will make you a perfectly cooked omelet with any combination of about a dozen filling ingredients. Several types of breakfast meats were around. Some were breakfast meats that I did not recognize but I tried them and they were all awesome. I can honestly say that I still not 100% sure exactly what kind of meat some of it was but it was good so I don't care. The coffee was extraordinary and if you take cream with your coffee they steam it so it won't cool off the coffee too much.

I could dwell on the restaurants at the hotel because they were all very good but please do not be afraid to try food from street vendors. You may hear Anthony Bourdain or Andrew Zimmern extol the virtues of street food on their TV shows and I can tell you from personal experience in the Philippines that they are correct and the food is fabulous. There was one I remember quite fondly. At about 4:30 every morning an old man perhaps in his 70s would come walking up behind the building where I was working overnight shift training. He had a long stick across his shoulders and he was carrying 2 large steaming stainless steel pots. For the equivalent of about 18 cents U.S. you could get a cup with about 8 ounces of hot, soft bean curd into which he would scoop about 2-3 ounces of the most marvelous brown sugar syrup I have ever had and sir it around and hand you the cup of Taho. You could spoon it out if you like but it was soft enough that most of the time you could just drink it. He was there about an hour before the actual food stalls opened. What you got was not really breakfast but it coats your stomach and gives you a bit of a sugar rush to help you finish off the day so you could actually go eat a full breakfast.

This will be all you will hear of my working because this is not about working but about travel so we will move on with the next post.

Philippines Part 3

As we waited for the plane to be made ready for boarding there were over 400 of us waiting at one end of the Nagoya Airport terminal. There were a number of food and drink stands around but almost all in Japanese so I didn't really know what they offered. I pretty much stood and looked out the window across the tarmac at what I was able to see of Komaki ( the city the old Nagoya Airport is in) through the rain.

Finally the plane was ready and we boarded for the final leg of our journey. For this last hop the plane was packed with not a single open seat. Finally around 5:30 PM local time we took to the air again and headed south. We had a flight of about 4 hours yet in front of us. Shortly after the seat belt signs were extinguished we were served a small dinner and everyone sat back to relax. Relaxing is a relative thing in economy class but we make do as best we can.

About 9:45 PM we start our initial decent into the Manila Area. This leg has thus far been extremely smooth although there was a little fuss from a few children who were very tired from travelling for many hours. All things considered it was really not too bad though. As we made our final maneuvers we were actually over Manila Bay which is absolutely beautiful from the air at night. Apparently there are a large number of small fishing vessels that go out into the bay at night and most seem to have lights mounted at the bow of the ships. It looked much like I was looking down on a sea of stars.

We then came in over the city and I got to witness a rolling brown out in one of the outlying areas of the city. I didn't realize what it was until later but as I was watching the scenery I noticed in one area the lights would all dim down and almost go out and then come back up and the next block down would dim and then come back and so on. It was a fascinating thing to watch. I realized what it was later when I found out how fragile the power grid is in some area.

Now we are on the final approach. We come in low over the city and then we pass over the fence and see the marker lights at the end of the runway. This landing was as smooth a landing as I had had up to the point and I have still not had a smoother landing in the years since. I literally did not feel the touchdown and the only thing that gave it away was the small thumps as the landing gear passed over the seams in the concrete runway at just under 200 miles an hour and then the thrust reversers were engaged. We slowed down and then came what was actually the most frightening part of the entire trip except for the air pocket over Nagoya.

We taxied to the terminal far, far faster that I was comfortable doing and as I looked around I saw quite a few other passengers that seems a bit uncomfortable with this as well. We finally made it to the terminal and pulled up to the gate and began disembarking. I was only a third of the way back so it didn't take too long for me to get up and grab my carryon stuff and head into the terminal. I waited for the other guys and we then headed to get our luggage and go through customs. That went very well and we had our luggage and were through customs in about 45 minutes. As we got near the exit there was a driver from our hotel with a sign that had our company name on it. We followed him and walked into one of the biggest shocks I had had. Remember it is February and when I left Harrisburg it was about 18 degrees so I was dressed for that weather and I kept my coat on most of the flight because it gets cold at 42000 feet. The terminals are all air conditioned so I did not realize what awaited me outside.

We followed the driver through the door and walked into an oven. It was 11:30 at night and 94 degrees with a pretty substantial humidity. Fortunately the hotel van was air conditioned. We put our luggage in the back and the driver headed off to the hotel.

We were being put up at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel in the Makati section of Manila. This is an absolutely beautiful facility. The lobby is black and white marble, or it was at that time, and the staff is extremely friendly and willing to assist. We got checked in and headed to our rooms. I had at this point been up for about 26 hours with a few naps on board the planes. I got into my room, locked the door, lay down on the bed and I was out for a good 8 hours. I rarely sleep more than 8 hours no matter how tired I am. I will end this post here and pick up the next post with the actual time spent in the Philippines.

 

Philippines Part 2

When I left you I was waiting in the Airport in Detroit for a Northwest Airlines 747-400 which would take me on the next leg of my journey. I was still with my friends from work and we had a number of hours to wait as a layover. The Detroit Airport, while not the largest in the world, is certainly an enormously large place. The terminal for Northwest alone had at that time something like 101 gates for planes to pull into. That terminal actually has its own monorail since it is so very long.

Finally the time comes for us to board the plane. This is something that took quite a while since that seat configuration holds 450 some odd passengers and there were very few empty seats. I was fortunate on this flight to have an aisle seat and the two seats towards the window were empty. Ultimately everyone was seated and belted in and the plane finally pushes back from the gate and gets in line for the active runway for takeoff. This took a while since Detroit is a very busy airport and it was the middle of the afternoon on a Friday. We finally reached the runway and there is no hesitation at all for this pilot because the throttles were firewalled while we were still getting straight on the runway. $ engines screaming we tore down the runway and lifted off, again with that slight uneasy feeling that I would eventually get used to. As we climbed out we banked over Detroit just a bit and then headed out over Lake Michigan on the start of our run up across Canada, across the Bering Sea and down the Pacific Rim to our next stop in Nagoya Japan.

As the seat belt signs went out one of my friends who had also never flown wanted to know if I minded him taking the window seat so he could take photos from the air. I of course had no problem with that so he took that seat which ended up providing me with a fair amount of amusement during the flight. One of the first things he noticed was that the wings were no longer sticking straight out but were flexed up by about 6 or 8 feet at the wing tip by the weight of the plane. He was horrified by this until I pointed out that flexing was good because if the wings did not flex under the load they would likely break off which would be a very bad and unpleasant thing to have happen. He finally calmed down and we had dinner served to us with the options being a beef or chicken dish. I opted for beef which was actually quite good. I have heard tails of terrible airline food and since we were flying economy I had not really expected much as far as the food goes. After dinner we had a movie and then the cabin lights were turned off so everyone could try to sleep.

I did not sleep well but my friend beside slept EXTREMELY well. I looked over at one point and he had managed to twist himself around under the seat belt so that his knees were on the floor of the cabin and his head was lying on the seat and he was sleeping quite nicely. I borrowed his camera and took a picture of that for his girlfriend back home. About 10 hours into this flight the lights were turned back on and we were offered breakfast. The choice was of an American breakfast of eggs and potatoes or a Japanese breakfast. I opted for Japanese since we were on our way into Japan. The Japanese breakfast consisted of several Sushi type rolls along with 2 pieces of some kind of steamed sausage. This is good but not something that many Americans will want to partake of because white sausage is just weird to Americans in most cases.

About 45 minutes to go and we felt the throttle back and the decent start into Nagoya. The captain came on the air and told us the temperature and that there was a light rain in Nagoya. We were at about 18,000 feet when we suddenly found a small hole in the air and the plane just dropped. Only about 20 or 30 feet probably but it caused some screams and I will tell you now that when something as big as that plane just drops it absolutely gets your attention. There were no problems after that and the rest of the landing was actually rather smooth. As we came in on the final approach I was able start seeing Nagoya from the air. I realize that there is a problem with space in Japan but I would not want to live by that airport. We were coming in and we were actually low enough that I could see people's faces. We went over the last row of houses and were on the runway almost instantly. The homes there are as close to the threshold of the runway as they can be.

We landed and taxied in without incident and we got to spend an hour in Nagoya as we refueled and after a flight of 14 hours I am sure we also got a new flight crew. I will leave you now as I look across the rain swept airport towards the lights of Nagoya that I did not have the time to visit and enjoy.

Philippines Part1

Anyone with a computer and the ability to close your eyes and imagine the sights, sounds, smells, tastes and physical sensations of a new place can enjoy themselves with a Virtual Vacation. I fully understand that this is not the ideal and that most would want to actually experience it in person on location. With that being said, today's economy will just not allow everyone to be able to experience it.

With that said we will start with a multi-post journey to the Philippines. I chose this for my first post because it is someplace I have actually had the pleasure of visiting in person and I can thus use it as a basis against which to measure the effectiveness of my research on locations and how accurate they really are. The flight itself will be my actual experience and I will transition into the virtual part of this as we land in Manila

It is the month of February just before Valentine's Day and I am sitting at the bar in the Harrisburg International Airport in Middletown PA getting a little bit of liquid courage at 7:30 in the morning. I am about to take the very first plane flight of my life and I have a doozy coming up. My first airplane trip will take me halfway around the world and require almost 20 hours in the air. With me sit a few of my friends who are keeping me amused with stories of how if anything happens while on the plane it will be catastrophic and I will never know it happened. I feel so very much more at ease after this.

8:30 AM and the announcement comes that they are boarding my flight. I walk down the jet way and find my seat on an MD80 Jet from Northwest Airlines. The first hop is to Detroit and while I have very long legs and would preferred an aisle seat I make the best of the window seat. I am determined to watch every aspect of this flight as we wing our way to Detroit. We push back from the gate and taxi to the runway. The pilot throttles up to full and as the engines scream we accelerate down the runway, the nose rises a bit and the plane takes to the sky and climbs. I am not sure what I was expecting but all in all quite without incident. I bit of a drop in my stomach as we first left the ground because it feels a bit like you are falling forward which, technically I suppose you are. As we gain altitude we bank around to get on the heading we were assigned and the flight actually becomes very smooth and rather comfortable. A little over an hour later I experience my first decent which can be a bit unnerving. We are flying along happily and suddenly we are going noticeably slower and beginning to noticeably descend. Not fast and we appeared to be fully under control but never having flown I was a bit startled by it. It took about 20 minutes to descend and maneuver to the approach path requested by the tower in Detroit and we finally came in over the end of the runway ans seconds later a slight jolt and then a heavy deceleration as the thrust reversers were engaged. We got to the gate and disembarked the plane and I will leave you now as I start the 3 hour layover before the longest part of my journey.

Travel without traveling

In today's economy, travelling for vacation is in many cases now out of the question. With layoffs, downsizing and reduced income for one reason or another the vacation that you want may be out of your reach for at least the near future.

That does not mean that you must completely give up your dream of seeing that tropical paradise or the romance of Paris or whatever your dream was. While you may not be able to actually go to that place, you can certainly find out all you can about it which can be exciting in itself to some degree and can help you look forward to things that you might have missed had you not travelled there in spirit via the web.

In this blog I will be travelling virtually all over the world to show what I mean. A few of the places I have actually been fortunate enough to visit and I will use those as a gauge for how accurate virtual travel can be.

My next post will be about the Philippines where I consider myself lucky enough to have been sent by a former employer. I will use this to see just how accurate online research can be.