Tuesday, February 26

A lot of things have happened since my last blog:

We had a sleep over at our cousins house.
We went to Tali to relax and see our beach lot.
We went swimming and sailing a lot in Tali.

We had to wake up at 06:00 to leave for Puerto Princesa. The flight takes one hour. We are going to go snorkelling from island to island and going to visit the longest underground river in the world!

Corregidor, February 20

We woke up at 06:00 this morning to go the second most bombed island during the Second World War after Malta, It is called Corregidor. We took a boat from the capital, Manila to Corregidor. It took such a long time to get there, one and fifteen minutes to be exact.

When we got there we got a tour bus and a guide. It’s built on a massive volcano and has lots of Japanese caves in which they hid from the Americans and the Filipinos. Our guide was called Armand and (if you understand Filipino) he was very funny as well. He first took us to some batteries. Massive guns which needed 14 men at the very least. However, battery hearth, battery smith and a few others could fire up to 17 miles and needed 24 men to work it. The guns were quite clever and were extremely well hid from bombers. The guns would move back, then move forward and up, fire and back down again so the bombers wouldn’t know what had happened or where it had come from.

We also found and went in the Malinta tunnel that was originally an American tunnel until the Japanese took Corregidor and made it theirs. It was a hospital and a good hiding place until the Americans and Filipinos fought for it and Corregidor back. The Japanese also had a saying that said that they should commit suicide instead of being captured. So hundreds of Japanese blew themselves up. Nowadays you can still see the marks on the walls and dents in the ground were they did blow themselves up!

We also saw a light and sound show of the Malinta tunnel where the guide showing us to the next line in the dark tunnel fell asleep standing up!

Tuesday, February 19

Today we went to play golf at Fort Bonifacio. We had to have caddies who carried our golf bags and helped us improve our golf. The course was quite difficult with lots of dips, uphill places and bunkers. We played a nine-hole course except we skipped the eighth hole because we were so hungry. All of us played well, especially my dad, he got +2 over par. After our immense golf match we had a delicious lunch of garlic bread, root beer and two pepperoni pizzas but we only ate one of them. It’s cool in the Philippines because you can take home leftovers. Then we went to a fruit stall with different fruit in it try to spot the different fruits in this picture:

I was quite sad when we got back to Rockwell because it was too late to have a good old dip in the pool. Even so we had another good day and although we went to bed at 20:30, I had a good night’s sleep.

Monday, February 18

We’ve just left San Pablo and got some bad news along the way - we weren’t allowed to go and ride the rapids due to the rainfall. So we went back to Rockwell (our hotel) and had a lie down with our cousin Sari.

We are going to have lunch with our cousins and then either go to a golf driving range where there are machines that put the golf ball on the tee for you or go to see our cousins Mika, Gio and Sevi.

We are going to make a TV video so look out for a TV advert ‘cause we might turn into TV stars!

Sunday, February 17

We are in San Pablo. Sadly the sun didn’t come, it was pouring with rain instead! Even so we got to see our cousins and managed to go on a long hike up a mountain! It was extremely fun and we got to find lots of coconuts, bananas, millions of trees and some plants with sticky, spiky balls - apparently if they get dry they get really spiky and so if they fall into your shoe and you step on it, it will really hurt! It was like a jungle on a mountain in fact, it was one!

After our hike my brother (Euan) ,dad and myself took a risk and dived into a freezing cold pool! Trust me, if you ever want to kill yourself, jump in that pool!

We eventually went to bed at 11:30pm. All in all it was a fab first day in San Pablo and we look forward to Monday.

Saturday, February 16

We arrived in Manila yesterday feeling very tired. To wake us up my dad took us to the Pancake House and also on a walk to the Kodak gallery.

Today we are going to San Pablo for three days; we should have lots of fun swimming in the pool in the burning heat.