A Ferry Ride

As ever, my email is full of travel deal offers. Nowadays, very unlikely of me, I proceed to deleting them instead of rummaging over them in search of a fitted deal for my frequent family trips. A huge change  has gone over my family this year, which technically glued my feet inside our home to solely take care of my girls. I'm parenting 24/7. Alright, not fair to claim the credit all by myself. Husband actually, has never gone. He's still very much around. Thu' not so much physical but definitely 100% "around". In all aspect..


 
... virtually.everyday.7/24 during working days and yeah 24/7 on non-working days.

But him not physically around has put limit, if not totally ceased our little family adventures. If before with him around, he had already put limitations to what/where only was allowable, now I don't want to send worries to him by taking the girls on trip without him. If you're a family friend, you should know how oa protected this dad is to us.


 

But malls bored me to death. I don't shop. I mean shopping doesn't amuse me. Buying pricey bags, shoes, clothes would just end my day with heavy heart for slashing my wallet and after all would find no connection at all to these "lonely mom's toys". Long gone are my materialistic years. In my marriage and mom's life , a new matured me has emerged.

Now spot the difference of this photo of me and that of me in the previous one above. short and long hair? erk# haha. Seriously. Nothing has elated me so much as a nature trip. Need I say more?

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But for the meantime, I got to put my favorite activity on hold. While we are still in transition.  
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Meanwhile, traveling through my antiquated photos fill in the gaps.
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Ok, not that old actually. Just a tad over a  year old. Photos I hadn't posted yet but were somehow promised.
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Ready or not, let's go for a boat ride in Mindanao...

I never got bored traveling by water. I hail from a country with 7,107 islands. I practically have no choice but to have fun riding a boat to have reached some of them. # never as  pilot thu', haha. I just took the driver seat while he was still out.

 Mostly, I rode a local version of a boat called a "banca". A passenger boat/ferry  like that in the above photo is a typical boat used to reach a certain island here in our country. You can't simply jump out of an airplane to set foot in an island here. You have to add on a boat ride upon exiting an airport gate.



The interior is usually like this. Open air where passengers could enjoy the view of the sea. This kind is mostly used for short trip to a particular island coming from the mainland. Like a 30minutes to an hour long ride.

Personally, one of my favorite past times while riding a banca is to stare the parts of the boat which are called the "outriggers". I easily get lost in watching them slapping the blue sea water, until it's time to alight.




That.. in the absence of a perfect blue sea and whitish blue cottony sky. This was like less than 30 minutes away from the mainland Davao city.

Passing numerous islets in the middle of the sea  made this boat ride interesting.

More so when we passed near and had  better look of the islets. Look at the slides. It would be fun to make a stop here and swim. I almost forgot, this one wasn't an island hopping ride.I was bound to alight in one of the famous island resorts in the country.

Approaching my destination, resorts here and there were visible already.

However, a sad fact of being a third world country doesn't limit in the streets of the mainlands of our country. Right there in the middle of the sea were the versions of the street children/beggars. Throw a coin and they would swim deep to catch it. I don't know, but instead of getting entertained, my mother heart pitied these kids risking their lives to earn a living. Well, to console myself, I reckoned they must be excellent swimmers anyway.

I knew I was about to alight already when this beautiful facade of the resort appeared right on my very eyes.




How about staying a night or two in one of those pretty stilt cottages..

Well, have I mentioned that it was at The Pearl Farm in Samal Island, Davao? It was. Hop on there.

Flower Power

Just this morning, husband emailed me this postcard perfect photo of flowers he took in the park where he biked around earlier on today. So pretty. Today is the first day of September. Down there where husband is currently based, it's the opening of the season of Spring. Husband said he didn't notice or hadn't seen these flowers the last time he was there which was two weeks ago and winter yet. Then he realized "it's indeed spring already". Then he thought of me and sent me this photo. Fyi : I'm never a flower lady and he knows it well, he never gave me a single flower in the course of our #decades of marriage cos he knew I would never appreciate it.

But this photo? Whose wife is not going to melt by the gesture and the beautiful flowers. I'm enthralled <3. Besides, I'm not really anti-floral through and through. I also get to appreciate and like some flowers. Mostly wild and not as common as roses. Those flowers in the photo are just my type. I also happen to like orchids cos they got lots of character and mostly distinctly exotic.

Hence, I guess I could no longer ignore the piles of orchids photos in my files and just let them get wilted and withered by time_ not posted. Right in this post would be beautiful photos of orchids  I had long ignored in my files. I made a total of 3 posts on SG Botanic Gardens ( here, here & here ), not yet including this one. Not up and until this day that I found the interest to do a post on this beautiful and exclusive part of SGBG which is called V.I.P Orchids. This is one garden there that has entrance fee. Exotic orchids being exhibited inside are named under famous people like presidents of different countries, celebrities even royal families. I have to confess thu' that most names were unknown to me or somehow not of importance to me, hehe. I actually just wanted to see two orchids_ of Princess Diana and Pres. Cory Aquino. I thought I hadn't seen not even one of them but when I checked my photos, I found out that I had Princess D's orchid.



The flower is named Denrobium Memoria Princess Diana. The princess hadn't seen the flowers cos she died before she was able to make the trip to Sg and should have had seen the actual orchid.

In sync, I gathered from the news that Aug. 30, 2012 was the 15th  death anniversary of the Princess and in this regard the Duke and Duchess (Wills & Kate) are coming to Singapore to see Princess D's orchids and also have orchid named after each of them. photo source

I have to warn you thu' that that's the only V.I.P. orchid I'm naming here. Come on, don't make me work on this, haha. I just wanna share you the beautiful images of these exotic orchids. The followings would have no captions but they would surely capture your eyes :

aww, so cute. . well this is a little distraction if you were like me who easily get overwhelmed ( in a negative way) when surrounded by lots of pretty flowers..

forgive me, for not being "so girls love flowers". I'm just like these  little kids by heart. I'd rather have many other things than flowers.

I'm so unlike of my girlfriends who are so girly flowery women. My bestfriend here who has been living in Singapore as expat for decades now, is one flower lover. Whenever I get to visit her in SG, she would always want to take me to Botanic Gardens cos 1}. it's like in the next avenue from her neighborhood, so pretty accessible and 2}. she loves the orchids there! But me would always like, no more Botanic Gardens, I've been there once and that's quite enough. Ofcourse, that's an alibi. You can't tour the whole place in one visit, it's so huge.



Okey, before I end this post, here's another one for you.

Now, if you'll excuse me.. can I go now to some art exhibits? outta here :)))

Busay

Can't still have a good grasp of it # the mighty sun has been playing so elusive since the first of August, had given  Manila daily burst of massive rain, not less than 3 typhoons, torrential/monsoon serious flood BUT!! yesterday 'till today_  the sun has been up and shining !!!! Are you kidding me?? After I had cancelled two scheduled trips for this month, now you're giving me this " beautiful beach weather". Nohurtfeelings. I heard another typhoon is coming, so really I'm just happy to wake-up with the sun beaming at me, which is a rarity now a days.

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I'm just saying.. my last out of town was as old as the last time a whole week the sun continued to show. As far as I can remember, that was like sometime in June this year. Cos after that, it has been all raining and just small peeking of the sun, and the only place I've been to were malls' supermarkets to buy groceries. then stayed home under roof being hammered by the heavy downpour of the rain_everyday!

Sometime in June, we had our short visit of my hometown and before exiting, we decided to eat our lunch at one of the countless waterfalls/river resorts a little bit away from the town.

See how cheap the entrance fees are.

From that opening, we walked and passed some houses, really rural. I enjoyed some rustic scenes like the kid bathing himself in a basin. He didn't care at all about a bigger body of water just across his house which was the resort we were going. Or maybe, he had too much of it already.

Few feet across that little boy in the basin, there was this man made small bridge with water flowing on it.

It wasn't a pass thru bridge where one can walk to reach the other point. It was more it seemed a water container. Unseen from the photo above, there were couples of women washing clothes right at this spot. Making use of the free flowing water. This also served as the entrance of the resort.



From up there, we went down and this what caught us in surprise. One solid massive rock with water flowing happy. For P20 entrance fee, where could you steal such a nature treat, if not in gifted rural town such as Guinayangan Quezon.

We couldn't help ourselves and went straight up to the rock.

The water was coming from the river behind the rock. I wasn't so solved about the staircases. They lessen the rustic appeal of the falls and made them looked  man made. In fairness, they made going around the falls real easy.



Neither the painted stairs appealed to me.



That time, the resort was relatively had just opened for business. We also caught some locals having photo shoot for the beauty contest of their barangay fiesta.

The place spelled nature kiss. We almost forgot why we dropped by there. Not to swim! We didn't bring any swimwear.

But to eat our packed lunch!!! We weren't asked to pay for the cottage since were just there to eat and not to swim. Yah, I looked funny there,haha,



Nothing could beat a nature stop when you're up for a long road trip (like 5-6 hours) back to the tiresome city.

Torrential Rains

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Photo of Manila City Hall area taken two days ago. By now more horrendous under water Manila+nearby Luzon provinces photos are allover the net. The flood source is a news in that sense that it wasn't a super typhoon at all. It was caused by  "torrential rains" following typhoon Gener which later had gotten different international names. Torrential rains?, now we have added a new word in our local weather experienced dictionary. I'm quite 'omg' to what next.

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Marikina residents waiting to be rescued. The same city which was so much affected by "Ondoy" had again went through the same ordeal. This makes me hundred folds thankful that my family is residing in Las Pinas which is so lucky not to be a flooded-prone sub-urban city. If there were flooded areas in Las Pinas, they were only isolated cases and had not reached our area. So far.

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Having been safe and well had made me so thankful but never joyous. My heart goes to the thousands of displaced victims of this latest catastrophe in our country.  Many are temporary housed in evacuation centers around the city up to this day.
The sun is a little up today. No one will surely know if it would stay up there for the whole day. But for the victims it needs more than a beaming sun to alleviate the difficulties they are going through. They need HELP!
For those who are like me who wish to extend a hand to our affected kababayans, you can visit the website for links to relief operations and evacuation centers.
God bless us all.