Little travel mistakes when leaving the Philippines
Ninoy Aquino International Airport
Gate 9, Cebu Pacific Flight 5J 931 Manila to Bangkok
Manila, Philippines
Little travel mistakes when leaving the Philippines
There is such thing as a bad day of travel. The clincher a few moments ago was that I realized that I had lost a small stash of U.S. bills that I had kept in my passport pouch. I pulled out my passport several times today to look at my airline tickets. The passport and e-tickets are in one ziplock bag; the bills were in another; I must have inadvertently pulled out the bag with the bills with the bag with the passport and tickets; this could have happened in the internet cafe or the taxi.
Generally I make little "mistakes" like this when I am tired. "Mistakes" are when I misplace or drop something, or leave my daypack pocket unzipped, or leave an extra bag of snacks behind at a store. When I'm tired I do this sort of thing constantly, which is why it helps me so much to get some rest while I'm travelling and try to plan rest into my travels. These little mistakes can turn into really unpleasant situations where one is missing one's passport or airline tickets or money. More often I cannot find something that I just purchased or some other little inconvenience. Every time I pull one of these on myself I feel like I have had a tiny failure and that I ought to have better concentration.
I was distracted by the taxi driver. I tried to save some money by not taking a taxi from downtown Manila to Ninoy Aquino International airport during rush hour. This is possible by taking the elevated train to the last station of Baclaran and then getting a taxi from there. You pass above all stopped traffic below. You can take a pedicab to the domestic airport -- it is very close -- or a regular taxi to the international airport which is several kilometers away.
It was raining and the taxi driver took me for a stooge. I asked him to turn his meter on -- he wouldn't, which should have been a tipoff. He said we should settle on a price. How much? I asked. He wanted me to name a price but he finally said, a hundred U.S. dollars. I just laughed. Perhaps I should have gotten out there. But it was raining outside and I had boarded on a busy street. He went down to twenty dollars and then ten. I finally told him I'd give him five dollars. It was almost as much as I had paid for a taxi from the international airport to downtown when I had arrived in Manila -- it was about eight or nine dollars. So I did not save much money in the end. But then at this point of course I just wanted to get to the airport and I am not a hard-headed enough traveller to change taxis and get the best price.
Mixed with all of this is a general sadness I feel at reaching the end of my travels. I will fly to the U.S. on Tuesday morning. I have really liked the Philippines. The parts I have seen are beautiful and I can tell there are many other beautiful parts left to find. The dissonant tone in the beauty of the Philippines is that so many people here don't have much money, from what I can tell. Things are not that cheap here -- I think the Philippines has been battered by inflation until recently -- and compounding that unemployment seems to be high. There is the flight of young people from the countryside to the cities to look for work, which I also saw in India and Thailand. So it is a beautiful place but the economy is not as it should be. This makes me sad when I meet people who will not get what they want: money; to go to another country; to get married and have a stable family life.
Little travel mistakes when leaving the Philippines
