Palawan Expedition




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Boljoon: More Reasons to Return

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8 and 9 June 2007. When editor Kristin Llerin asked me to write about Boljoon for the Cebu Yearbook, I asked, "Why ME?". I'd just written an article on it a few months before for the Lifestyle page (supposedly, it was what inspired the Yearbook editors to feature Boljoon in the yearbook), and I felt I had written all I had in me to write about Boljoon, after years of yearning for it. I'd explored all I wanted to. It was a closed book, as far as I was concerned. "Because you like to travel!" she said. Fine. It was MY Boljoon, after all, so I thought it might as well be me. When I got there on a Friday morning (the first weekend of the schoolyear, and I was already on another "vacation" :P) to interview some government officials, I discovered that there was an archeological dig going on in front of its historic church, and that there were actually still a couple of places I hadn't been to...which some of the locals hadn't even heard of, eit...
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Finders, Seekers

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lost and found #37 by Jeneen R. Garcia to be published on 20 October 2007 (with new column pic at left ;)       It has been a year and five months since I left the routine of office work for a different way of living. And how different my life is now!   Two days of the week, I am in class, either teaching or being taught. Four days of the week, I am in the laboratory searching for tiny corals--one millimeter in diameter, sometimes smaller--that have settled on my experimental terracotta tiles. I fight my way through a jungle of filamentous algae, bryozoans, barnacles, sponges, and other encrusting marine critters, hoping to find the slightest sign of coralline growth.   Hour by hour, I run my thumb and forefinger along the surfaces of each tile as if it were the lip of a cherished lover, feeling intently for a certain fine sharpness that can only be the delicate skeletal structure of a baby coral. Now I can tell, from the look of the jungle-like growt...
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Cambugahay Falls, Lazi, Siquijor -- up, close and personal

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15 to 16 September 2007. My first real field trip as a teacher, and of course, Murphy's Law went into full swing even though I'd called the shipping lines more than a week before the trip and got reserved seats two days before the trip. So half of us got left behind at the pier. By the time we got to the island, the tide was too high for our lab exercise, and some people HAD to go home that same afternoon. No time to do the scheduled itinerary. So I decided to at least let them have some fun after all that stress. I chose Cambugahay Falls, because I had the impression many of them had never been to any waterfall yet. It was also my underwater casing's first time in a freshwater setting (at last! considering that it was a trip to Kawasan last year that convinced me i really had to buy an underwater casing to capture a friend's expression as we rafted under the waterfall). And here's evidence that people tend to have more fun with waterfalls than at sea. (Must be th...
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