Back In the U.S.A.

Thanks for everyone who was concerned about my safety while I was away in the Philippines. Evidently there was an big earthquake while I was there though I knew nothing about it until I started receiving text and emails from concerned friends. It happened the day I was leaving the mountains of northern Philippines and heading to the nearest airport for a flight to islands off the west coast of the central Philippines. The earthquake in question was in the very southern part of the Philippines and thus far from me feeling it. The entire archipelago of islands however is on the Ring of Fire so earthquakes can happen anywhere in the chain and indeed a really large one occurred in the area I spent most of my time back in 1990 so not ancient history. I was just fortunate to be in a different part of the country when the earthquake struck.

I had a great time in the Philippines. I visited some new territories to me as well as visited some that I visited back 23 years ago and even reposted some posts of those places while I was gone. I'll have plenty to blog about in the upcoming months and will hopefully be able to compose some new "classic" posts on the subject.

My last trip to the Philippines was eight years ago, my longest absence by far since I met the woman who became my wife. There was a pandemic and also some Visa constraints that played a part in that fact. In my long absence, parts of the Philippines had changed dramatically. There is a lot more signs of increased wealth everywhere I went though crushing poverty is always within sight too. I see bigger houses and more private vehicles and yet hired people who were bring home 400 pesos ($6.50 U.S.) a day in wages. In ways, it is much like the U.S. where the chasm between the wealthiest and the poorest is only growing deeper and wider. 

Some highlights of my trip in no particular order were:

• Visiting the rice terraces near Sagada in the northern Philippines
• Having my van driver invite me to his home and pick apple-mangoes for me out of his tree in front of his house.
• Being able to spend time with people I haven't seen in over a decade and in some cases two. 
• Arriving back home to a world full of things that I take for granted but were missed daily while away.

I am still getting caught up on a mountain of "life" that happened while I was gone and so don't have any pictures uploaded yet but I will get some soon. Until then, I will share with you a picture that I pasted in my journal before I left and filled out as I traveled around the country to give me and now you a sense of location of where I spent time or in the case of the earthquake, something notable happened while I was there.