Outdoors

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on November 8, 2009

IT IS FATHER'S DAY, June 21, 2009.

I am going up to Mount Babag today and I am alone.

Yeah, alone...

...again.

I have no problem walking alone. I find good therapy in the silence and I love the sound of my voice. I talk to myself. Yes, hum a song. Imitate a bird call. That's what you do when you're bored.

From my home, I rode a public jitney in the ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on December 8, 2009

AFTER AN ABSENCE OF more than a month, I am reunited again with Boy Toledo, of Ernie Salomon and, later, with Manwel Roble. Here we are again, maintaining our physical conditioning program walking the mountain trails of Napo to Mount Babag in the middle of an ongoing tropical depression! Just three has-beens so madly in love with these trails. The same three has-beens that would shame guys 25-30 years our junior in a test ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on November 1, 2009

IT HAD BEEN RAINING when I took a standing breakfast in the early morning of June 7, 2009 at an eatery in Katipunan Street, Tisa, Cebu City. Boy Toledo and Ernie Salomon were with me and they did likewise. At the end of this day, we will be completing the last leg of this “freedom trail” which will be used during the First Philippine Freedom Climb on Philippine Independence Day on June 12.

This is the trail ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on October 16, 2009

MOUNT BABAG IS ALWAYS there and I have no excuses why I shouldn't go there. It's only 752 meters above sea level and eleven kilometers away from downtown Cebu City if you draw a straight line. It's just a pygmy if you consider it against other Philippine mountains and a molehill if you have Mount Everest in mind. Nevertheless, it is MY mountain and you would find me and others tackling her trails there every weekend. ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on September 21, 2009

THE TENTH DAY OF May 2009, Mother's Day to all mothers, found me again training with Boy Toledo and Ernie Salomon along the trails in between Guadalupe and the Babag Mountain Range. We three just had a successful night navigation training on April 25, 2009 wherein we followed the Babag East Ridge Pass for the first time and stayed overnight at Manwel's Peak.

We three decided to go by that trail again, this ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on September 1, 2009

ROAMING AROUND AND anywhere is something that my physical body is well attuned to. My genes, for a good part, might have dictated my love for walking and hiking on trails; but it is the value of my personal freedom of movement that have goaded me to climb mountains where, upon its ridges, slopes, forests and crags, I become one of its myriad elements.

There is no description, whatsoever, of the joys I have ...

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on August 17, 2009

INSPIRED BY MY SOLO trek in the dark on April 4, 2009, Boy Toledo and Ernie Salomon decided to try night-trekking along the trails between Napo and the Babag Mountain Range. They are, to me, the finest specimens of our kind who walked with me and I know the level of their physical conditioning and I have confidence that both can tackle navigation in the night with such ease. I opted to use this activity as an experiment in ...