Up in the morning for the trip to Paksanjan falls. The tour party is divided roughly into groups and I'm in a minibus with four other Koreans, a guide and a driver. To get to the falls it takes about half an hour to get out of Manila and then and two hours or so through various small towns and villages. Always people, people, people everywhere. Not actually noticeably more crowded than Seoul, but there’s of course much more poverty in full view.
After about half an hour along the freeway, which looks pretty much like a freeway anywhere, we head off into the countryside. Much smaller roads (although disturbingly the same number of lanes of traffic) winding through lush green vegetation with rice fields in the lower flatter areas.
In the towns, the roadside is jammed with a mixture of small shops and stalls, car repair places, junk yards and food shacks. In the countryside between, there are fruit sellers' stalls every couple of hundred yards but not much else.
Eventually we arrive at Paksanjan where we're greeted by Koreans who seem to be running a canoeing outfit.
After a slap up feed of Philippine food with added kim-chi, we're grouped into threes and dispatched upriver in canoes, each group of tourists with two native boatmen providing the motive power.
The leisurely trip to the waterfalls lasts about an hour with a stop half-way for a drink. The boatmen manhandle the canoes up the shallow rapids and paddle us along the wider flatter bits. The valley becomes a gorge and we're surrounded by clouds of azure dragonflies and yellow butterflies while all along the banks rafts of lilac water-lilies are flowering.
At the falls we're lashed to a raft and hauled across the pool to have the water rain down mightily upon us.
After this humbling experience we head back downriver at a quicker pace, shooting the rapids this way and arrive back in about half the time, for a shower, a change of clothes and a coffee before being bussed back to Manila.
We arrive in Manila about rush-hour time, just as the monsoon breaks. Now the rain in Korea is about an order of magnitude harder than the rain in the UK. But the monsoon is an order of magnitude harder still.
