Last Tuesday, our first day in the Philippines, I declared on Facebook: “Tom & Helen are enjoying the sun in Manila”. Nothing would give me greater pleasure than to tell those of you suffering a cold winter in Britain and America that the weather continues to be wonderful here. It pains me to admit that such is not the case. Since that first day, we have seen precious little of the sun.
Yesterday the weather was the worst so far. We had a short flight to make from Manila to Dipolog City: 70 minutes for the 440 miles. We left on time, but shortly into our flight ran into some rather nasty turbulence. Worse was to come as the captain’s voice came over the tannoy to announce that poor weather in Dipolog meant that we could not begin our descent. The captain told us the visibility was so bad at the airport that he would have to wait for an improvement in the weather before landing. Meanwhile we would hover at about 10000 feet. A few minutes later the plane’s monitors showed our plane circling. How long, I thought, would we have go round and round in circles before it would be safe to land ?
I used to be aerophobic and didn’t fly for 25 years, but I was cured of this inconvenient affliction by a brilliant one-day course at Norwich airport in 1996. Since then I reckon I have been pretty relaxed about flying, and probably less nervous than the average person. But yesterday for the second time in a week (the first being our flight from a snow-bound Heathrow) I did feel a tad anxious. Nothing too traumatising, but definitely apprehensive. What if the weather didn’t improve ? How long could we go round in circles before running out of fuel ? Would we be forced into making a potentially dangerous landing with limited visibility ? I picked up the safety folder and studied the “brace position”.
We circled for about 20 minutes or so. Then the captain told us we were about to land. Dipolog is on the northern coast of Mindanao, a large island in the southern Philippines, so you are flying over the sea until seconds before you land. I just hoped that if we did go down in the water the pilot was as good as the one who recently landed a plane on the Hudson ! But, after all that excitement, we had a perfectly normal landing.
The rain had stopped when we landed. But later in the day it got worse and worse and we had several torrential downfalls which lasted for hours. But the good thing about Philippines weather is that even when it is very wet, it stays pretty warm. Temperatures have been a very pleasant 27-30 degrees Celsius (80-86 Fahrenheit) since we arrived. I tend to get chapped hands and lips during a British winter. That was my physical state when I arrived in Manila. But within 48 hours or so these minor, but irritating, ailments had gone. February is supposed to be the start of the dry season in Dipolog, and there has been no rain today (though little sun) so I am hoping the weather is on the mend. Even as it’s been, it’s much better than the snow and ice I left in England.
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