Riverbend Journal

  After two nights of sweltering in the heat of the lowland rice country, we were ready to move on and the plan had been to drive north to visit the Hundred Isles regions of the Philippines. We did drive north but we fell just short of the Hundred Isles. Perhaps due to the less than desirable sleep, we didn't get as early of a start as we had hoped. Above you can see why traveling can be slower than expected in the Philippines because when you are not in traffic, you are still sharing part of the road with rice being dried by nearby farmers. The fellow above was using a tricycle arrangement of some sort to stir the rice as it was drying in the sun. During my time in the Philippines, I see very little infrastructure for vehicles and humans that we take for granted. There are very few parking lots and in most towns, you simply park in the lane closest to the buildings along the road. That lane of the road also counts as a sidewalk too as there are no dedicated places for walking and ...

  After three nights on El Nido, we had the waiters float our breakfast on the tiny pool just so my daughter could get a pic for her feed and then they carried it inside where we ate it and then headed out the door with our bags. Julie our van driver was already waiting for us to take us to the airport. We arrived about 15 minutes before our flight's listed boarding time which turned out to be about 10 minutes more time than necessary to get through the check-in process. I could get used to life in the islands. We waited for ten minutes and then were boarding the plane and after verifying there was no caribou our chicken on the runway, we were in the air and heading back to the main island of Luzon and the former Clark Air Base, now known as the Clark Freeport and Economic Zone. As we neared the coast, we flew over what appeared to be huge fish farms and indeed, in the coming days I would drive near this part again though I really never got a good photograph. Photography has always...

  The morning of our second day in El Nido turned out to be one of the highlights of the entire trip and happened quite by accident. The previous day our driver had mentioned that he had an apple mango tree growing in front of his house. I had never heard of an apple mango which is a variety of mango that looks somewhat like an apple on the outside. Curious, when our driver picked us up in the morning, I asked him if he would mine showing me his apple mango tree and he readily agreed. When we arrived at his modest house, he motioned for us to sit on the front porch in the shade of the apple mango tree and went inside. A few minutes later he came out with a different shirt on and no shoes and before I could comprehend, he was 20 feet up in the apple mango tree with a plastic bag in one of his hands picking the fruit and putting it into the bag. I couldn't help but jump up and go into the lane in front of the house to get a better view of the apple mango picking action. Out of the co...

  Blogger friend Steve Reed posted yesterday (American time and Monday London time) about a painting that he remembered hanging up in his parent's home when he was a child. As soon as I saw the picture and before I read anything he wrote about it, I was first struck about how similar it was to a painting that belonged to my grandparents and now adorns my family room wall above our piano. Steve researched the artist, a Robert Wood, and wrote up paragraph about his findings. Intrigues, I got up out of my office chair, walked into the family room and looked at the lower left corner of it and saw mine too was a print by Robert Wood. What a small world! I left a comment on Steve's blog stating my discovery but thought I would share it with him and anyone else who happened to read his post and also reads my blog. I think he referred to it as sofa art. To be fair, after my grandmother died and we were going through her possessions, I saw the painting and passed it up but my wife grab...

  El Nido is know for the very scenic and protected islands off shore and thus the reason they get a large amount of non-native tourists from all around the world. Indeed we did see more non-natives from around the world on this day than I would see the entire rest of my trip but since we were visiting during the rainy season, it wasn't nearly as bad as it can be. YouTube videos of the harbor beach where people catch boats to ride out to the various islands typically show thousands of tourists. On this particular sunny day during rainy season, there was maybe a couple dozen when we got there. We met our guide on the beach and a French couple from Australia that would be joining our group of nine for the day and waded out to our boat. After rules were introduced and we had a discussion of where we would like to stop since we only had time for maybe five stops out of maybe two dozen places we could go, we set off for the first stop. There is a large lagoon and a small lagoon that are...