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Fraznk's Memoirs: Travel

Manila 1988

 In 1988, Denise and Rod were living for a year or two in Manila in the Philippines, with their two young children, while Rod studied at a University there. It was too good an opportunity to miss. 

So we packed ourselves into our travel bags and set out from Auckland; our first stop was Sydney, where we stayed near the city centre at the YMCA. We hired a car and drove west, over the Blue Mountains, through Bathurst, and on to a little town called Canowindra, where our friends Bev and Les Glover ran a newsagent’s shop. 

After three days with them we left the car at the nearby town of Orange, and caught a slow, mixed train to Lithgow, and then a faster double-decker electric train to Sydney central. 

Then we climbed aboard a big jet, and took off from Sydney Airport (after watching the Bi-centennial tall shops sail past on Botany Bay).  It was a long journey but eventually we touched down at Manila Airport and were met by Rod and Denise and Tina and Mark. They took us home through the busy Manila traffic in their VW beetle. Rod’s mother, who everyone called Neenie, was also staying with them; over the next few days all of us piled into the beetle often and toured the district. 

But there was also the elevated light rail system to get about on. 

They showed us Smoky Mountain, the rubbish dump with scavengers collecting items for resale, and the slum areas with their illegal TV aerials and shonky electrical connections. We visited tourist attractions every day, including the old fort and prison built by the Spanish in the middle of the city, several old churches, and Vila Escadura, a resort just outside the city. 

Julia with Uncle Rod and Auntie Denise

A highlight of our stay was a visit to the palace where we saw Imelda Marcos’s collection of shoes, and Ferdinand Marcos’s million dollar worth of US bills cut up into small pieces. Every day the traffic on the main avenues through the outer city area overwhelmed us. The VW was pretty warm but we managed to keep cool enough with all the windows open! 

We stayed in Manila for two weeks and then took off on the two-hour flight to Hong Kong. From there we flew by 757 of South China Airways to Guangzhou (Canton), where we had a Chinese lunch, and then by another plane to Guilin, a tourist resort an hour or so away. 

 

(to be continued)