Day 12 - Perth / Singapore / Manila (Phillipines) / Boracay (Phillipines) - Where on earth is Carmen Sandiago (and Yen and Rob)?!

SINGAPORE, YOU ROCK! Any country which has an airline with inseat entertainment, and an airport which doesn't smell and has free internet access (as well as a free 1 minute monorail trip), is okay in my books! Today was just a looong day... but we made all our connecting flights and enjoyed 3 different plane meals and even a wedding cake from Singapore Airlines (complete with champagne and dry ice... champagne and dry ice are nice when separate... I chose to combine the two... try it sometime). Singapore as most knows is just a great airport (I still wouldn't deliberately plan a long stopover just to use their free internet, but it's clean, comfortable and helpful... did I mention the free monorail trip? - yes, I realise it is just to get to Terminal 1, but it's still a monorail!). Manila shows you how spoilt you are in Singapore... somehow we forgot to print out our domestic flight details for Manila to Boracay... no worries, we'll just go online when we get to Manila... "Do you have internet access?" ... "In-ter-net?" ... "Yes, In-ter-net" ... "No" (crap). So we activated our wonder twin powers, picked a random domestic airline that sounded right, jumped in a taxi, made it to the domestic airport, went to the totally wrong airline, went to the right airline, panicked, panicked some more, got our tickets, got our flight pushed forward (which was good because we spent just as long waiting on the tarmac... the tarmac that is shared between 32 seater twin props and 600 seater 747s), walked out on the tarmac, had the staff panick and bring us back into the waiting area, walked back out with assistance, boarded a 32 seater twin props plane... with 2 other people out of a full waiting room of 300 people, laughed as the poor stewardess had to do the whole safety drill to an almost empty plane, cried as we saw the cockpit being kept cool by car windscreen shields, clapped as the plane took off, exchanged nervous glances as our luggage was carried off by a helpful non-english speaking porter out of the shed which is Caticlan (Boracay) airport, relaxed as we saw our names on a board, used up all our smallish notes on extravagent tips to porters which appear out of nowhere, boat trip to Boracay island (no jetty, only beach), mini van to hotel through mish mash of shops, farms and mad tricycles, greated at the Paradise Bay Hotel by our German host, learnt we were tipping 10 times too much, went to our room, collapsed on the bed, got up, turned the aircon on, collapsed on the bed... enjoyed the view from the balcony of the waves lapping on the beach behind the coconut trees.... "Ahhhh.... we made it... remind me again why we choose such out of the way places???" [Wonder twin powers, deactivate].
LESSON FOR THE DAY: Bring your own headset if you want to finish listening to your inflight entertainment close to landing on Singapore Air.