Riverbend Journal

After completing our rice terrace hike and picking up others in our group who hadn't gone with us, we headed into town for a late supper. We ate at a place that specialized in chicken inasal so I ordered chicken inasal. Inasal is grilled chicken with lemongrass and calamansi which is a native citrus fruit similar to a lime. You can find it just about anywhere in the Philippines though it is known by different regional names.  The next morning we had some local red rice that we had bought the day before and cooked some to try for breakfast. It looks like Spanish rice but doesn't have tomatoes in it. It is a bit fluffier with less chew than say Jasmine white rice. A traditional Filipino breakfast is rice, over easy egg and some sort of pork product. In this case we had tocino which is a sweet cured pork. I already posted another version of this photo but after breakfast as we were getting ready for the day my wife shouted at me to get outside quickly and so I did. In case you mis...

  Above is a picture I took 23 years ago on my first trip to the Philippines. There were a lot of memorable events that happened on that trip, namely that I received an official blessing to marry my fiancée. However in terms of sheer beauty, walking among the rice terraces near Sagada is the event that I only have to close my eyes to remember. Back then, we just stumbled upon a path descending the mountain behind the motel we were staying and came across a native village full of nipa huts and a little girl who guided us further down into the rice terraces themselves. It was a beautiful place full of golden rice and purple mountains. For the next 23 years, I have been wanting to get back to this region before it changed to something unrecognizable and this trip worked out. After breakfast, we drove up the road aways to pullout where guided hikes were offered through the rice terraces to see a large waterfall. Foreshadowing a bit, I think the reason this place remains largely undistu...

  The late summer doldrums are here apparently because this is the first post I've written in a couple weeks now. The last couple weeks of posts were all written maybe a month ago and set to publish when they appeared. There are another couple weeks of posts wrapping up my vacation that will publish in the coming weeks. I do this specifically for times like this when I have a large swath of time with not much interesting really happening. It takes the pressure off of posting something so people don't begin to wonder if I'm still alive. Above is a picture of an origami boat made from a dollar bill. One of my many volunteer activities to give back to my community is to count the Sunday collections for our church about once a month. The sight above is not my favorite sight to see because it slows me down, especially when there are dozens of origami or just tightly wadded up bills that I have to individually unfold and/or flatten so that we can more easily count them and later ...

  Since I still have a number of posts yet to publish on my trip to the Philippines, I thought I would do an extra post this week of my garden as it was a couple days back. Above is our "new" trellis that I erected at one end of our garden. It had been at the old garden but had languished in the weeds elsewhere on the farm until I rented a U-Haul trailer and made the trip down to bring them back up to our urban garden. In the foreground is bitter melon, a Filipino ingredient that is like a bitter tasting squash that they use in several of their dishes. It grows quite well and fast in our climate and has nearly taken over the trellis. Lower down in the middle are cucumbers that my wife planted. They are nearly done producing but this was one of the best years I've ever had growing them. I have enough pickles to last me the next five years. Further down is a failed attempt at watermelon. My wife wanted to plant them on the trellis and I tried to discourage her because I did...

  Twenty-three years ago, my first trip to the Philippines ended with a visit to the Sagada region which is known for their rice terraces sometimes referred to as an eight wonder of the world. It was such a beautiful place and so far away from all tourism because it was difficult to get to. Back then, we spent a long day bouncing over dirt roads scratched into the sides of mountains and through small creeks and waterfalls. Twenty-three years later, the road is now paved though as you can see from the screenshot above from my phone about midway through the six hour drive, it isn't a straight shot. In fact, it is so twisty and curvy and up and down, that our average speed the entire distance was likely only about 35 miles per hour, about the same speed we traveled twenty-three yeas ago, and this time on a paved road with not a lot of traffic! We rented another van from John Wayne, loaded it with some luggage and food and headed off north up the central mountain range of the Luzon pro...