Warrior Pilgrimage

Featured in Blogspot on September 23, 2011

IT WILL BE A SUPER hot day today. This is a Friday, April 9, 2011, the anniversary of the Fall of Bataan. I will not be commemorating our heroes today but I will facilitate a training program for a supercharged group of mountain climbers preparing for a Lenten climb to Mount Pulag in Benguet.

The route will be one-half of the Freedom Trail, the full stretch of Kilat Trail, a part of Lensa Trail and the remaining arc of Bebut's ...

Featured in Blogspot on July 23, 2011

CAMP RED, FOR A change, went on a guided eco-tour of fourteen social educators from Denmark on February 5, 2011 at the foothills of the Babag Mountain Range, Cebu City. There were thirteen female and one male participants; I am the pointman; Boy Toledo as lead pack and Ernie Salomon bringing up the tail. Wil Rhys-Davies of bushcraftasia.com lights up the party in the middle with anecdotes and short tales.

Along the way, I introduced ...

Featured in Blogspot on June 23, 2011

I AM ON THE TRAIL once again on this second day of 2011. I will not be alone but will have with me Boy Toledo and Ernie Salomon of Camp Red; Randell Savior, Ian and Tonton Bathan of Tribu Dumagsa; Rowel Seno of Timex Outdoor Club; Dondon of Zubu Ecological Tour Society, Inc.; and Ms. Aisha Ronquillo, the only rose among the thorniest of thorns. Like me, all of them decide to burn whatever party fats they have accumulated during the holiday season. ...

Featured in Blogspot on June 7, 2011

I WOKE UP WITH a fierce hangover of last night's party as my Motorola V3 screamed its existence at 5:00 AM of December 19, 2010. Nevertheless, I scrambled up from a drunkard's bed and settled myself in the bathroom for a quick cold washover. Expertly, I dash back and forth the width and length of my house and up and down my stairs and round up the things I need today.

This is the most important day in the lives of the children ...

Featured at Blogspot on June 16, 2011

ONCE UPON A TIME in Banilad, Cebu City in September 2009, I meet two foreigners inside the Gustavian Restaurant. Both were very amiable and they look like veterans of sleeping more than a thousand nights under the stars. One is an American who goes by the name of Thomas Moore and the other is Welsh, William Rhys-Davies. Both are old-school outdoorsmen in the purest sense of the word.

Over swigs of beer, we were talking about ...

Featured in Warrior Pilgrimage on February 7, 2011


FOR FIVE STRAIGHT weekends, I was frozen in my workplace and family. My mind is somewhere else but my butt is glued to my office chair and the living room couch until a slight breakthrough came in on September 19, 2010. Previous to those weeks, I thought I need to explore a trail I found somewhere in the fringes of the Buhisan Watershed Area.

Two presets of alarm went past unnoticed. And as the heat of the day ...

Featured in Warrior Pilgrimage on January 22, 2011.

I HAVE FOUND OUT that charity can be very contagious but without the mortal gravity of a viral endemic that I have known happening then and then again on the different parts of the globe. What it lacked in lethality though it gave up with more empathy and compassion...and much much love...

It all started as a one-man social action center in the hinterlands of Guadalupe two years ago and it won converts from Boy Toledo ...