With "hanging coffins" as the big claim to fame, Sagada isn't really a destination but more of a side trip and since we were in the general neighbourhood it seemed like a worthwhile effort to make. After enduring the mountain goat roadway system from Banaue, we wanted a bit of a break so we dropped in on the Bontoc In Museum which had guidebook endorsements as a place of interest. It did have a mildly stirring collection of old photo's but it wasn't...

Two years ago we were in the Philippines with every intention of visiting the very famous rice terraces in the north of the country. At the time, however, this part of the country was in the middle of a very severe drought and everything was either dead or dying. The normally stunning visuals would have been impacted but more importantly the hard working people of the area were suffering greatly and didn't need another overfed tourist wandering around complai...

Having seen most of the sites of Manila a couple of years ago, we are just planning on using the city as a hub to connect to parts of the country we hadn't yet seen. Unfortunately we've now dropped one of those destinations, Palawan, because apparently there's a lengthy waiting list to see it's big claim to fame: the mile long Puerto Princesa Underground River (since it recently made that cheesy list of Top 7 Natural Wonders of the World, tick-in-...

To get back to Manila we had to connect through Guam so, in the finest tradition of travelers with no specific place to be, we decided to stop in and have a look around. We had been forewarned that Guam was effectively a U.S. military base with all of the good and bad that comes with that much American influence. Nonetheless it was as though we had entered some sort of Star Trekian worm hole when we left Yap and arrived in Guam- worlds apart despite the proximity...

Another United Airways flight and another mechanical problem. Time wise, this 4 hour delay out of Palau was a vast improvement over the 21 hour delay into Palau, but given that the flight was scheduled to leave at 1:30 in the morning (and the benches in the Palau airport are based on a similar KGB design used to extract confessions from Capitalist sympathizers), it was one of the longest 4 hour delays ever.Our biggest reason for visiting Yap was probably to confu...