19th - 21st March 2012
We settled in to wait for the next ferry to Roxas, Mindoro at a restaurant in the port, I took the opportunity to write a few more postcards and after stocking up on dressings for my leg, Kate and I went to watch the sun set from the harbour.
Time for the ferry rolled around and we got out tickets with the help of some charming and hopeful Filipino guards, the ferry to Roxas, Mindoro took about 5 hours and to our surprise Kate and I got rather a lot of sleep. We woke up just after midnight and walked off the boat to be met by the owner of the hotel we'd booked rooms in and were taken direct to bed. Heaven.
The next morning we had a lay in, as Djalma told me quite grumpily, he'd not had any room to stretch out and fall asleep. After a sickly sweet pork breakfast with rice and a fried egg and something from the bakery for Kate we piled in the back of another minivan for the ride up to Puerta Galera. Just before left some guys strapped a goat to the front fender to be delivered at some point between here and there, I didn't stop thinking about that poor goat the whole way there especially when we drove roughshod over unmade roads and when it started to really pelt it down. We dropped the poor little thing off, which was fine, a couple of hours into the trip none the worse for wear, physically anyway – I'm sure it now suffers from trust issues and traffic.
We were dropped off at a junction in some town and crammed into a Jeepney going past some waterfalls on the way to Puerta Galera. Both Kate and Djalma love waterfalls, and they were beautiful unfortunately for me, I was a little too grumpy to enjoy it much. It was raining and I was hot and sticky, sometimes I really am not the best travel companion. We had some cold drinks and snacks, Kate and I wandered off to take photos, there were some great water droplets on leaves and the views were beautiful. We caught another Jeepney going into town, Kate and Djalma had lots of fun hanging off the back of the truck, something they weren't lowed to do later on in Manila.
We arrived in the main attraction of Mindoro, Puerto Galera, well the town proper and not the beaches. The weather was awful so we ate in our hotel and afterwards, still not satisfied, I dragged Kate around in the rain to find some good chocolate. We spent the afternoon watching Made in Dagenham, a film to make a woman proud of her sex (and of being English).
The next morning we had breakfast at the hotel again and then rushed off to the jetty where boats for Tagatay, Luzon left from, only to find that the next one wasn't for more than an hour. So we cooled our heels and chilled out, the boat left early anyway and we were in Luzon in under an hour. The ride was nice, Djalma spotted some dolphins but the boat was too fast and we'd them behind before Kate and I had a chance to see them.
We spent most of the ride playing squares on a grid that was too big to be interesting for much of the game. Once on Luzon we navigated our way through the greedy tricycle drivers and found one who wasn't such a cheeky bastard. He took us to the drop off/pick up point for Jeepneys going to Talisay and we hopped on cramming our bags into the tiniest possible spaces to make enough room for all the other passengers going the same way. It was about half an hour and we were let out in town. We bumped into a traffic policeman who gaily abandoned his traffic direction to help us find a place to sleep. We got a couple of rooms right in the lake and said goodbye to our traffic directing friend, actually Kate and Djalma said goodbye to him, I found him a little strange. We walked around and found a small Filipino place serving up good food, complete with some banana flower salad so we ate until we were about to pop.
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