Philippines Day 1: Manila Airport Extravaganza (Read: Possible Fiasco Averted)

My first foray into lone-traveling, and I’ve already learned a few good things... I never knew I could be so patient, so ready to learn, and so laid-back, as I am traveling in a foreign land for the first time. It’s the way you have to be, or you’ll go crazy. There’s no point in letting things get you down, so you just go with the flow. Even if the flow seems sometimes ridiculous and full of completely unforeseen stumbling blocks.

One of these stumbling blocks was that Monday, the day of my departure, was a Korean holiday for the Lunar New Year. Hence no restaurants by my apartment were open for me to get some food before I left, and the banks were closed, meaning no money-changing to be had. This is where it would have been nice to have someone who worried about things more. But as Bret Davis would say, it’s only money. So I ate what little leftovers I had in my house, packed up my cat to take to stay with West Virginia, and hopped in a cab. After I dropped her off, I was on my way to Gimhae Airport.

My flight from Busan to Manila left at 9:30pm Busan time, and arrived in Manila at 12:30am Manila time. The airport security here in Manila is pretty extreme - you can’t even enter the airport without a your itinerary printed out. So my original idea to just arrive at the airport and immediately buy a ticket to Boracay and stay within the airport overnight was thwarted, to say the least. Also, the Domestic Departures part of the airport is a few km away from the International Arrivals area, not just one gigantic airport as I had assumed. So after retrieving my backpack from baggage claim, I found an airport transport service that took me to an extremely seedy looking travel agency (subsequent to taking me to exchange money in an even more seedy-looking money exchange place) to book my flight for Boracay. It was a little more expensive to go straight to Boracay and to take the earliest flight possible, but as I had already decided that finding the hostel I had booked in Manila and getting a flight later in the day would waste valuable beach time, I booked the 7am flight. This gave me about 6 hours to kill. Yep, I was a time killa in Manila.

My driver apparently did not understand that I needed to go to Domestic Departures Terminal 3 (which turned out to be very similar to any other airport I’ve seen in Asia, save for the extreme measures of caution to even get into the door), and he dropped me off at what I have to assume the Mesquite airport would look like, were it located on the seediest part of Maple Avenue. It was TINY, and without even a shop or anything to eat within, but across the taxi-parking area there was a tiny hut which sold some snacks and cokes and things. There was a wooden, painted sign that said “Waiting Area” and about 5 rows of plastic chairs, outside, but covered like an outdoor picnic area, the chairs filled with sleeping and not sleeping Philippinos presumably 'waiting’.

As I went up to the entrance to the ‘airport’ (looking for a power source so I could continue watching movies on Maxine), the security guard informed me that I needed Terminal 3, and I should take another taxi there. I had not mastered the exchange rate by this point (and, let’s be honest, I probably won’t bother), so I pretty much was at the mercy of the cabbie, but after a short drive, we arrived at what looked much more like what I had been expecting. A modern, albeit pretty much empty, airport where I would be spending the next 4 or 5 hours of my life. I curled up in a corner near a plug (Philippines trivia: they use the same plugs as in the US here), and hunkered down for a few more hours so I could board my flight at 7am and arrive in fabled, gorgeous, heavenly, utopian Boracay at 8:10am on a Tuesday. Then I’d be just a ferry ride away from paradise. And I like ferries.

So here I sit, typing in a corner next to a fire extinguisher (fire hazard?), at 3am in February, beginning another little adventure. This time on my own. The two overwhelming feelings I'm having right now are: pride - look at me, I can do anything! And my rear end is completely numb from the hard floor.