Friday, October 21, 2005

marked contrast

previous night, attack of back pain - likely caused by hours on end sitting in bad chairs (story of the computer-related-employment-employee's life). get some medicated patches, apply a couple to small of back, take a couple of biogesic pills, get some sleep.

awaken late, for some strange reason. hence, breakfast late -- miss the mcdo supersizemebreakfast option, end up with the freshly cooked single piece chicken mcdo with rice. considering the mind is in a breakfast frame, the meal does not go down well: left half of the meat on the drumstick.

late, therefore taxi (if no bus appears).

naturally, all the buses that show up are of the lucena/batangas variety, grab a taxi.

...it turns into the most restful taxi ride i've ever taken (and that's not a bad thing, surprisingly). the driver maintains an unheard of velocity in the vicinity of 60kph. everything was zooming past on both sides -- he also maintained the slow lane on the expressway.

fascinating. most taxi drivers are of the gung-ho variety, for whom every inch gained on any other vehicle is an advantage worth taking to an excess; not this one.

it actually gave me time to think on a short film that might be worthwhile making -- as opposed to paying attention to a driver's lane-wayward excesses.

late to work, yes. and strangely refreshed and unstressed. hooray for 60kph.

Tuesday, October 11, 2005

a palawan adventure ... continuation

strangely enough, the post of which this is a continuation is almost a full year old. "the mind wanders/my very own titanic adventure" was posted all of october 27, 2004.

now, what brings this back to mind? well, looking through some pictures that i'd scanned in quite a whiles back when i was still in the employ of a previous company, i came across some that were taken during that particular holy week trip.

following are some snapshots from that sequence of events...


White Beach, somewhere near Puerto Princesa -- just a single short tricycle ride away. this has nothing to do with the image sequence that follows. just a nice picture, i think.


from image left to right "leo" (refer to post in october 2004 archives) , paul, and me. this is where the trek to the underground river begins. taking the picture is nash, one of paul's then-fiancee's officemates at the legend palawan. why trek to the underground river? hmm. i'll have to think about that.

however the reasoning came about, it was also decided to take the jungle trail, as opposed to the monkey trail (which offered more seaside views, as we found out in a subsequent trip). it was actually quite adventurous, having nothing to follow other than the evidence of a path through the rainforest (and some marked trees) to tell us which way to go. sometime during the trip, we came upon huge boulders (or so they seemed) that flanked the path for a ways... some large enough to have little hollows beneath that could conceivably be used for shelter... for man or beast alike. never thought to check for snakes or other stuff like that.



the rest of the trip was actually quite a blur. i do recall that at a certain point, when the trail resumed going uphill, we four were laughing uproariously at the prospect of an imagined "sari sari store" just beyond the next rise. and the hill after that, and so on. weird, in retrospect, but that's just the way it happened.

ultimately:


the end of the journey is at hand. beyond the ever-downward stairs bridging awesome chasms (awesome to the tired mind, anyways) was the park at the mouth of the underground river. at this point we had also managed to chase away a rather territorial monkey who laid claim to a piece of railing and hissed and spitted (kinda cat-like) as we approached. next time, i'll bring a water pistol.

in summary: a fun time was had by all.