At least four people are dead after Typhoon Hagupit sent more than a million people into shelters in the Philippines over the weekend.
Shallow floods, damaged shanties and ripped off tin roofs were a common sight but the storm did not hit the central part of the country.
Observers said the storm had weakened today and had caused no major destruction after it reached Eastern Samar and other island provinces.
The typhoon, which made landfall in Eastern Samar late on Saturday, was moving slowly at 10kph and was dumping heavy rain that could possibly trigger landslides and flash floods.
Traumatized by the death and destruction from Typhoon Haiyan last year, more than one million people fled to emergency shelters and safer grounds.
Hagupit was moving across a string of island provinces and would be near the bustling capital, Manila, by early Tuesday, according to government forecasters.
Manila Mayor Joseph Estrada said more than 5,000 residents of a shantytown on the edge of Manila Bay have been evacuated due to possible storm surges.
He told The Associated Press: "We've prepared and trained for this."
Metropolitan Manila has a population of more than 12 million people.
Like villagers in the central Philippines, Estrada said Manila residents were readily moving to safety because of troublesome memories of Haiyan's devastation last year.
"That's still very fresh in their minds," he said of Haiyan's tsunami-like storm surges and killer winds that left thousands of people dead and leveled entire villages, most of them in and around Tacloban.
Two people, including a baby girl, died of hypothermia in central Iloilo province Saturday at the height of the typhoon, disaster-response agency chief Alexander Pama told a news conference. Another person died after being hit by a falling tree in the eastern town of Dolores, where the typhoon first made landfall, according to Interior Secretary Mar Roxas.
Displaced villagers were asked to return home from emergency shelters in provinces where the danger posed by the typhoon had waned, including Albay, where more than half a million people were advised to leave evacuation sites.
Nearly 12,000 villagers will remain in government shelters in Albay because their homes lie near a restive volcano.
Army troops deployed to supermarkets and major roads in provinces in the typhoon's path to prevent looting and chaos and clear debris, all of which slowed the government's response to Haiyan last year.
