A 7am breakfast with Pastor Gary Visitacion and a trip to the Bacolod Airport for the 10:50am flight to Manila saw us leave the Negros island for the final time on this trip.
It has been an excellent experience in the large cities we have seen (Dumaguete, Himamalayan and Bacolod) and the smaller towns of Amlan, Cibulan, Tanguay, Cubancalan have all had their charms. The people of Negros Oriental, as everywhere in the Philippines, are some of the friendliest in the world. This is a country which much be experienced to be fully appreciated.
Arriving back in Manila in the early afternoon saw us reacquaint ourselves with the Manila smog and the congested traffic, which characterise the city.
With our American missionary contact Joshua Manthe vacationing in Australia at this time, it fell to our friend Pastor Rufo Pong to lead us on the final leg of our basketball outreach tour.
The relatively straightforward journey to play the Cainta Junction at 4pm hit a snag when we encountered a flat tyre half way there. This elongated our journey time but finally arrived just before the start of the match to a covered court right in the middle of this inner-city Manila suburb. With a smaller than expected crowd in the grandstands, we realised that the luxury of large crowds of excited fans does not always extend to the capital city.
The opposing team looked ready to play though. Being Andrew Stock’s birthday, Fletcher found a NBA statistic that the most shots taken by a single player in a game is 47 field goal attempts. Andrew Stock attempted to break this record by shooting anything he could get his hands on. The opposing team did not have much of an answer to inside presence of Fletcher Creelman and the now potent fast-break rhythm of the team following ten days of playing teams together. An eventual score line of 81-57 in favour of the Sports Ambassadors was punctuated by Steve Cressie relating his testimony to the crowd at half-time and a solid performance from veteran Michael Valenti in the low post.
The trip back to the YFC Orphanage saw everyone turn in for an early night with our final day of the tour looming tomorrow.
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