Manila - 24 hours

We arrived in Manila in the evening and waited in a chaotic and very slow moving line to go to the airport. It seems like all the taxis have broken meters, because the few times we took a taxi they had "broken meters" and gave us a flat rate. We actually insisted on a metre going from the airport, but the driver told us to get out if we didn't like it, no joke! We were tired and not in the mood to argue, so we talked him down by 25% to a more reasonable  price and we were off to our hotel. I've found that a good  strategy is to look up estimated fares on Uber for the distance we are driving and that way have an idea of what the fare should be. If course, ideally we'd take the Uber, but I've found that very often the app either glitches or they are not available.

We checked into our hotel, the Pinyo Pamilya - a very cheap and basic hotel which was clean and comfortable (except for the ants in our towels). We chose the hotel because of its proximity to the airport and we had been warned of ridiculous traffic in Manila so we didn't want to go far. After checking in, we headed off to the Mall of Asia for a look around and some dinner.

The Mall of Asia, also abbreviated as SM MOA, is a shopping mall in Bay City, Pasay, Philippines.  It is currently the 4th largest shopping mall in the Philippines and the 13th in the world.  It was huge.  We only browsed through a few shops, had dinner and went home because we were pretty tired and had a long trip ahead of us the next day.  The way things ended up, our flight was cancelled due to a typhoon coming through the Philippines and in order to get home the same day we purchased new tickets for a flight on Cebu Pacific which was flying direct to HCMC just before midnight and keeping our fingers crossed that we would see the refund promised to us by Air Asia (we are still waiting, but we are hopeful...)  It was a really, really long day, because we didn't get home until about 2am, but we were happy to be safe and home with lots of memories of an amazing holiday.

Christmas is a huge holiday in the Philippines.  We learned that preparations for the holiday begin in September.  At the MOA, the countdown was on!