San Diego, baby! Sagada, baby! Columb... erm... (Part 2 of 2)

Shortly after the Sagada trip, the company sent me to the US for slightly over a week. It was a quick trip, but it felt longer. It consisted mainly of me

a) freezing over, and
b) watching people navigate using GPS systems that never shut up

Those blasted UPS systems are amazing. They command you, demand things from you, basically tell you you’re an idiot when you don’t follow it’s directions, and sometimes even when you do. “Turn left in three meters,” it would say. And there’s a wall to your left in three meters, so you opt to, well, not go left. “Recalculating,” it would say, with some scorn. The device continues to say that for the next five minutes, before it tells you to turn left off of a bridge and onto nothing.

If you’re built to withstand the GPS onslaught, you’d find that San Diego is a really nice place. Offices next to beaches, quick access to everything, wide roads, great restaurants, and lots of places to go see. Columbus was…

Oh, look, gotta go. But pictures ahead.

Blog Entry San Diego, baby! Sagada, baby! Columb... erm... (Part 1 of 2)

I’ve been on what is, for me, a bit of a traveling spree. It started a couple of months back, when we went to Sagada, a quaint little town where the people appear to be from a bygone era, the views appear to jump out of postcards, and shopkeepers appear to be on crack half the time.

The town is proud of it’s heritage, with all the subtlety of a jackhammer - you get a sense, when you’re there, that everybody’s proud of this place on a scale that doesn’t even register on your system. They talk about the history of the place with a confidence that you rarely see, and they are very protective of that place. And there is much protecting to do. One restaurant, for instance, indicates in an obvious manner that there will be “no taking of pictures.”

No, it’s not “do not take photos IN here.” You can shoot yourselves half to death, and they couldn’t care less. There will be “no taking OF PICTURES.” People literally swipe photos off of their walls.

It is rampant enough, it’s so commonplace, that they feel it warrants putting a sign reminding people, say, stealing pictures off of restaurant walls is not very nice.

Now, if you’re wondering, like I wondered, what would motivate people to actually go into a small town, travel hours over hours to get to that place, and literally grab a photo off of someone else’s wall, I blame all of this on yet another proud tradition the place protects, which is pretty much doobie.

But the point is, protective of the pretty place, and man, it is pretty. It’s pretty around the Kiltepan viewpoint, which sets the standard for beautiful places where you can fall to your death. It’s pretty around the Bomod-ok, a waterfall several stories high that will take your breath away. Before you get there, that is - the mountain trek is over an hour, with hardly any flat surfaces. And it’s pretty around Lake Danum, which looks like it was sculpted into reality, and which, for some reason, refused to let rocks float when you throw ‘em at it.

Pictures ahead.

Next up, San Diego and Columbus.