Manila no Thrilla

From Eric's Philippines Pics

From Jamie's Philippines Pics

Jamie and I slept in this morning but decided to venture out into the city of Manila to see the Intramuros which are the old city walls as well as see a couple of churches.

Traffic in this city is terrible made even worse by 1000s of tricycle motobikes and the dreaded jeepney. Granted, these are rather cheap modes of transportation, but we have determined that if they would be better of utilizing busses or more light rails. We don't run the city, so to each his own.

We are staying out of the city; so in order to get back we could either take a very expensive cab ride or do an alternate route of tricycles, jeepneys, walking, and light rail transit. We opted for the cheap way since we are on a budget for this trip.

We finally arrived at the Intramuros, but wasn't all that impressed. The Manila Cathedral was impressive as was St. Augustin's Church, but overall the area was dirty with the constant hassle of tricycle drivers wanting to show you around. We opted for walking.

We decided to call it an early day instead of seeing some other Manila sites. After the hassle of getting around, we decided that it was just too hot and not worth it. Already, Manila isn't our favorite city, but we knew coming to the Philippines that Manila wouldn't be the highlight.

Nonetheless, check out the pictures in our Philippines August 2009 photo album. I took quite a few of the churches which are worth looking at.

Tomorrow, we go to the famous Taal Volcano, which is has a lake within a mountain with a lake within a mountain, or so our friendly hostel says.

The second pictures is a video and is outside one of the light transit rail stops and us walking through the sidewalk of vendors. They didn't hassle us, but the beggars wanted money for us walking on their little planks to keep us out of the water. Just click on the picture and it'll take you to the video.

The picture is of Seymore on top of the city walls of the Intramuros.