I’d be up for a get-together.
If you visit Cebu the 3 top attractions IMO are the Taoist Temple, Fort San Pedro and the aquarium at SM Seaside.
Take one of the fast ferries to get to Tagbilaran. It’s worth the few extra dollars to go business class.
For a place to stay the Ice Bear Tourist Inn is nice and budget-friendly.
Good tips, thank you sir. I’ll send updates when I know my schedule.
I’ve visited Corregidor twice, and for anyone with an interest in WWII and military history it’s a must see. It can be done as a day trip from Manila, or there’s a small hotel where visitors can stay overnight.
Corregidor is on our list!
Hey, so, we just had a supermini Dope Fest here in the Philippines, @Mr.Duality and me. It was a nice meetup and I look forward to meeting him again one of these days!
➜ (Mini) Dope Fest in the Philippines. Who can join? Mon 28 Dec in Visayas, on Bohol Island ■
I am in Davao now. I flew in today and want to travel to GenSan tomorrow. That’s General Santos City.
I’m trying to find a car for hire on Facebook. An interesting process. I’ve never tried this before. The driver for GrabCar today from DVO airport to my hotel suggested that. I’m looking for someone who knows local sights of interest, and sights of interest along the way and also in GenSan. We’ll see how this goes!
Otherwise, I’ll take a bus.
In GenSan I know someone there and will visit him for a few hours, then I’ll fly back to Manila later that day (our Friday here).
BTW it is 1am here. HAPPY NEW YEAR 2026!
The rental cars here in Bohol are awful. Bald tires and unreliable. I think we’ve rented 3 cars here. One had an electrical problem and another got a burst radiator hose.
Well at least username checks out.
You never gave a followup on the rest of your vacation. What happened?
I want to know too, @Bullitt.
I got home, 3½ weeks ago now. And it took a few days to recover from that jet lag. The vacation was great! 31 days there, all told. @Mr.Duality, when we met up for coffee that was my day 16 of 31, so, halfway through my vacation. It was great to see my mom reconnect with family and old friends. And she hadn’t spoken Tagalog that much in many years. I don’t speak the language but was picking up more words to build my very limited vocabulary. A great thing was connecting with distant family so that if I ever went back I could easily pick back up with them.
The first 12 days were spent in and around Manila. I rented a motorcycle for the month and had that at my disposal. Going for morning coffee runs to different places was a good way to get a lay of the land. I went to a different coffee spot each day, and some were 20 minutes away, while on one morning I was quite ambitious and it was 1½ hours away. It all depended on what the family group had planned for that morning.
All told we had 10 family members in country traveling with my (our) mom, from Rhode Island, Texas, Hawaii and, of course, California where my mom and I are from. My wife stayed home because she was still working through some logistics for a new dialysis place back home. The timing wasn’t quite right for her with what she had going on.
3 of us were with my mom for the duration, the entire month, including my son from Rhode Island and a brother from Texas. Here we are with my cousin (in white) in Manila. My son in back is from Rhode Island and my brother on the right is from Texas.
Here we are at Tagaytay. That’s the Texas brother there. Tagaytay is a city just south of Manila, along the north rim of Taal Volcano.
As I posted above, Taal Volcano and Taal Lake are interesting from a geological standpoint because of the recursive nature of its islands and lakes.
We drove down towards the lake to take in some sights. On the drive down we stopped at a small sari-sari store, the Philippines’ version of a small 7-Eleven convenience store. The shopkeeper sold buko, or young coconut. With a very sharp bolo knife he expertly cut away at the coconut husk to expose the top end, and inserted a straw.
Fresh coconut water, right from the source. With a spoon you can carve out the soft coconut meat. Tasty and refreshing.
His bolo knife is really sharp
In the distance is Taal Lake below us. In the foreground are all the discarded coconut husks and shells that he’s sold.
When we got down to lake level I asked our driver to find an access road leading to the water. I got out simply to dip my feet into the waters. For posterity, I captured the DD coordinates of that boat ramp, in case I wanted to return some years later.
△ Taal Lake waters ▲ 14.0879, 121.00808
Approaching Taal Lake
The small boat ramp
The water looked nice and clean
On a warm day the water was refreshingly cool
Next thing I knew, everyone in our van hopped out to do the same thing. Even our Filipino driver and the Filipina lady who accompanied us as my mom’s assistant. Our Filipina assistant is taking my Texas brother’s picture
I’d want to go back to Taal and do some hiking and exploring. We were all together in our rented van with driver, so this wasn’t the day for that.
One thing we did was visit some of the places and houses where my mom lived in her younger years. At one house the owners have renovated it very nicely. It wasn’t like this when we lived there some 60 years ago. I was just a toddler back then
The owner did very nicely in her renovation efforts and her house is beautiful. She bought the house from a relative of ours, the one that my parents sold to, and that common name formed the basis of our brief conversation when we visited. She generously welcomed us into her house for a brief visit of about 20-30 minutes.
One nice thing about visiting during the holidays is seeing all the decorations. Not just the Christmas lights in the big city of Manila, but also the lights in all the smaller towns out in the provinces. Of note to me were the farols, which is Spanish for lantern.
I’ll start with a couple of web pictures.
To me they’re notable because when I was a child in Upstate New York my parents made two farols. With the Tagalog accent, farol is pronounced parol, and in fact when doing a web search there are sites having both spellings.
Farol being pronounced parol reminds me of a pretty bad Filipino joke.
Q: what do you call two Filipino pilots?
A: a pair of pliers. (Get it? A pair of flyers. Haha, I crack myself up.)
When you’re a kid growing up in Upstate New York, living in the town of Latham near Troy NY, and your family is basically the only family of color amongst all the white families, and then your parents hang two lit stars outside your house at night each Christmas, while, yeah they do look nice, as a dumb kid you’re not truly realizing that this is a part of your heritage.
@Mr.Duality and I met for coffee that one morning on the island of Bohol (pics are over in the Dope Fest thread)…
We had a nice time and he’d picked out a good spot, and he picked me up from where I was staying and gave me a ride back (thank you again, sir!). Before I met that Wyoming guy I read some of his posts and threads to learn a little bit about this guy whom I’m about to meet. In some of his posts he described himself as (and I’m paraphrasing here so please forgive me if I’m misquoting him), he described himself as white on the outside and brown on the inside — basically a white guy who resonates inwardly with the peoples and cultures of the Philippines (@Mr.Duality please revise as needed). Outwardly this dude is a white guy but inwardly he’s probably more Filipino than I am.
What’s a bit funny here for me is that I sometimes describe myself as a coconut — brown on the outside and white on the inside. Outwardly I look like a Polynesian but I grew up in white suburbia in the Northeast US. So I guess I resonate more with white culture. My mother in law who is a white Wisconsin girl has been caught thinking that I’m white. My white wife has had to correct her.
Anyway I digress, but seeing those farols reminded me of the ones my parents made. Many years of harsh winters, and those farols finally gave up the ghost after about 15 years. They’re intended more for Philippines weather than for the snow and ice of Upstate New York.
I want to make a farol or two for my house. They’re made by bending thin sticks of bamboo and binding them together and covering them with colored cloth (or paper), with a light inside, to form a 3-dimensional star.
@Mr.Duality after we departed that day that I met you, my son and Texas brother and I toured Bohol Island. On our drive back that evening along the coast and through the towns of Loay and Baclayon, the beautifully-lit farols along the road were a sight to see for me. Every 50 yards or so, lining the road for seemed like a few miles, there was a lit farol star, each one identical to the next. Beautiful.
Anyway, I’d been told that visiting the Philippines during the Christmas holidays is beautiful because of all decorations, and it was. It really was.
A little about how I look. I don’t really look so much like a Filipino, even though I was born in there, but I think I look more like a native of Hawaii or even Alaska Eskimo. When traveling in Hawaii and in Alaska, in both places the locals there thought I was a local. That’s because of my mix — my mom is half Russian while my dad is mostly Filipino with a sprinkle of Spanish tossed in. In the end, visually, I don’t represent the Filipino peoples.
The rest of the family was there during Christmas week. In black on the left are 3 from San Antonio Texas, with my mom in yellow and the other two are relatives.
Here is my other brother from California, at the back right, and his family
The absolute highlight of the entire trip was a family reunion. There were some of us all there and it was a bit of a party! Most of us got in on the group photo. My mom is sitting in the front row near the center, in dark red; in bright yellow next to her is the youngest sister of my paternal grandfather, who is long since passed
At the party we had lots of good food and drinks, and also the traditional roast pig laid out on banana leaves
We needed a local guy who knew how to chop it up. The roasted pork was delicious. The food was catered but I’ve seen a pig being roasted in someone’s back yard years so back in Upstate New York at a Filipino gathering.
It was great reconnecting with distant family on this trip.
I’ll wrap this up later.
I hope my comment is not misunderstood …
but - you look like a guy I’d be happy to have a beer with !!!
They really have perfected the art and science of roasted pig.
Did you get to see some of the Christmas decorations made from recycled materials? I like the Christmas trees, large stars and so on made from recycled plastic bottles and lit from within.
Unfortunately I missed that!