Amazing Palawan!

Finally! Finally! I almost kissed the ground when we arrived at Puerto Princesa Airport. After a disappointing doctor's order, a regretful cancellation, refund and rebooking...we finally arrived.  You know how it feels when you got your first Nikes? The one you never thought you'd ever, ever have? That's how it felt like!

 

What made it more seemingly impossible to get to Palawan was an impending Typhoon! But the heavens really do answer prayers.

We were picked up at the Airport by a friendly staff of the Puerto Pension, a small but wonderful Inn in the City Proper of Puerto Princessa.  The place was very clean and orderly.  An a/c room for 2 costs around P1,500. Check-in time was 2pm, but since we arrived at 10:30am, they took care of our bags while we got ready for our island hopping trip to starfish and snake island.

 

Since it was too late to join any tour group (who usually meet at 7am), we decided to just take a tricycle going to the wharf, the jump off point going to any island, including Dos Palmas.  For contracting our tricyle driver to bring us to the wharf and back to the hotel, the rate was P600.   Deciding to go at it on our own was a good thing as we didn't have to keep on waiting for a lot of people.  At the wharf, we were instructed to proceed to the office of the coast guard to contract for a boat which costs about P1,400 and can accommodate up to 8 persons.  It was a huge banca so no need to fear.  The sea was also calm.

First stop was at Starfish Island.  Absolutely serene.  There was a small hut selling some nibbles and could also serve you a simple lunch.  When I asked them if they had some crabs, a guy went to the sea, pulled out a net with 3 live crabs. Wonderful! And if they had some squid to go with that...my life would be perfect.  Ofcourse they had squid! They gladly steamed both the poor crabs and squid and served them to us with a heap of newly cooked rice, soy sauce and calamansi with sili! All for P200.  I almost had indigestion!

(Magagalit sakin si Alpha nito dahil puro siya ang nasa photos! Hahaha!)

Moving on... next stop is Snake Island. No... there aren't any snakes in the island.  Its just that the shape of the island is like a snake...so there you go! We did some snorkeling here.  There are so many kinds of fishes.  Schools of them.  One kept bumping me on my leg. I think they call it the Territorial fish, for obvious reasons. Just be careful when snorkeling.  Don't go too far off if your not a swimmer. The water can get instantly deep.

(This can be an Alien...for all I know...)

                                                                      (Yes, Pigs do float!)

After the amazement, the swimming, the too much eating, the snorkeling and the boat rides...you'll surely be exhausted at around 3-4pm.  We went back to the hotel, cleaned, rested and got ready for dinner.  We took another tricycle ride to the City and decided to try the food at Balinsasayaw (which is an indigenous bird of Palawan) Restaurant.  The place was great with good tasting food at affordable prices.

On the second day of our trip, we joined a tour group going to the Underground River.  Before reaching the port, we stopped by Ugong Rock.  Here, we went very HIGH UP a cave (i cannot emphasize it more than that) and went back down via ZIP LINE! It was exhausting, scary, jaw dropping but also exhilarating and exciting!!!

(I never thought I'd fit in this thing!)

(Up, up and up!)

(Uuuuuuuuugh! Everything but my thumb hurts!!! But it was great!)

After Ugong Rock, we proceeded to the port in Sabang, where we rode another banca to the island where the Underground River is located.

(Touch down!)

Welcome to the Underground River!

You'll still have to walk through a forest with a path going to where the river is located.

At last!

(Very beautiful....)

If you think your banca days are over...well...you're wrong! The scenery was really amazing but beware of the smell.  Bat poop abound in the cave and the water smells acidic.  I got dizzy from the smell and the slow rocking motion of the banca.  The inside of the cave was like no other, but photos won't do due to the darkness.  Also, I missed to mention that the road going to Ugong Rock and the Underground River is zigzag all the way! So it would be good for you to be ready with the ever handy bonamine!

The above activities are enough to keep you dizzy for the remaining hours of your day and night.  So off to the third day!

On day 3, we went to Dos Palmas for a day trip.  This costs around P1,200/person.

This is also a wonderful place. Everything is provided for you.  From your welcome drink to snorkeling gear, volleyball, bicyle, and a sumptuous lunch buffet! Sulit na sulit.  

They have a diving site for your snorkeling fantasies.  I met Nemo here!

Be sure that you're armed with an underwater camera.  For Nemo, I merely used a protective underwater case for my camera.

You can also Kayak if you're not too dizzy from another boat trip!  Alpha was going at it alone so I need not explain!

(just like a pro!)

e

(hungry?!?)

And then there's lunch! Yey!

The food was great and the staff was equally warm and friendly!

You'll need to walk around after that filling lunch...

At around 4pm, we headed back to the City after a great day in this Island.

Our last day at Puerto Princesa was spent shopping at the City Tiangge.  You can buy Kasoy, Danggit, Pearls and other Souvenirs here.

We also had lunch at the Badjao Seafood Restaurant.  The food was so-so but the view was stunning!

Thank you for visiting this blog and we hope you'll enjoy your trip to Palawan as much as we did. I'll be also showing you some photos of our Zambales Island Hopping Trip on my next post. See you soon!

Life Purpose

Today, I'd like to share with you a very inspiring message from a very successful person.  I hope you find this inspiring...i definitely have.

Find What You Love — Apple Computer Co-founder Steve Jobs


http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html - Stanford Report of Stanford University

Below are excerpts from the Commencement address at Stanford University by Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, delivered on June 12, 2005. See link above for full speech.

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots. I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months. So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates. ... My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.


And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life ... and here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.

If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

My second story is about love and loss. I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? ...


I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over. I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.
During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I retuned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers.

My third story is about death. When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning. It clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor's code for prepare to die.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. When they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I'm fine now. This was the closest I've been to facing death. Having lived through it, I can now [talk about it] with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.

Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

Love and Cooking

Last saturday, I cooked. I cooked breakfast, lunch and dinner. I cooked penne in tomato sauce for breakfast, monggo and fish for lunch, and adobong pusit for dinner.

Corollary to that, I washed. I washed the dishes during and after breakfast, during and after lunch, and yes, during and after dinner.

It’s ok, I’m not complaining. It was actually quite fun. I discovered that I can cook a decent meal and not just come up with one of those burnt, unidentifiable things that you see on your plate but eat it anyway, believing in the saying that what you don’t know won’t hurt you!

I also learned in the process that you can never have enough of garlic and onions! Half of my life during that faithful day was consumed in peeling, slicing and pounding on those things!

The peeling and slicing went like a breeze, but the pounding required intelligence and creativity.

You see, I don’t have any mortar and pestle (is this term correct? I’m inclined to say mortal and kettle…). So I use whatever works.

Before, I used the cutting knief. It was alright until the edges became dull from cutting and so I decided to use a thinner knief, but razor sharp. Therefore, using it solely for the garlic would be a waste of soap and energy as it would add to the pile of utensils to be washed. I tried a spoon. It was ok for small garlic but not for the large and chubby ones. Then, I tried the wooden flat ladle, which I would use also to stir-fry everything. It worked! Since it was flat and wide, the palm of my hand fit perfectly, allowing me to give the right amount of pressure to squish the garlic. Great.

Moving on…..

While cooking, you’ve got to naturally keep on tasting the food, whether it’s salty or spicy or sweet or not to much of it. So you keep on adding and subtracting…until the taste is totally different from the time you started and you’re suddenly no longer sure whether what you’re cooking is mechado or kaldereta, paksiw or adobo or worse, nilaga or sinigang!

I couldn’t eat much of my own cooking. I already felt full from all those tasting and smelling. Tweety likes it though. She says it’s delicious.

In the end, I would like to thank my Tweety for the appreciation and loving praises, but her cooking is definitely much better! Heaven sent ;)

That's the Cooking part.  You ask what has Love got to do with it?

This morning, Tweety shouted..."Kain na! :)"  Now, that's LOVE!

Welcome to my Life!

Everyone is allowed to dream...

In relation to who I am...here's more for your information:

1. MY HOME

2. MY OFFICE

2. MY CARS

3. MY BIKES

5. MY OUTFIT TO WORK

6. MY SHOES

7. MY WATCHES

Well, that's just a sneak peek for now. I'll share more of my life with you very soon!