Boarding Gate 101

I know two versions of how the Chocolate Hills came to be. The first one, something retold to every Filipino schoolchildren during grade school, involves fighting giants throwing mud at each other (good thing they weren't fighting using handbags), and the mounds of mud left behind from the fracas became the hills.  The other, not as fantastic as the first but way more plausible, was explained by my Geology 11 professor in UP. In this version, limestone that rose up from the ocean was sculpted by the drip-dripping of rainwater over a geological timescale into the shapes that we see today. I'd pick the first one if you asked me which version I liked better. But magical origins or not, these hills became a must-see attraction in their own right. Panorama of the Chocolate Hills In fact, the Chocolate Hills are perhaps the most iconic of all the attractions in Bohol, rivaled only by the cutesy face of a tarsier. The geological formation, located at the town of Carm...

My heart sank when the boatman told me that the sandbar in Virgin Island would not be visible because it was high tide at that moment. I just returned from snorkeling around Balicasag Island (more on that later) when he told me that, and I felt bummed about it. Despite my slight irritation and not wanting to waste the opportunity to see it,  I still asked him to bring  me there before we go back to Panglao, in Bohol, where we spent the Independence Day weekend. Shades of blue Virgin Island is located about twenty minutes by boat from Balicasag. S everal hundred meters from the island,  a shoal - made of powdery white sand - is exposed during low tide,  like the one in Camiguin . The boat ride going there was uneventful, but the sun was already beating down hard  on us  when we got there even though it is not noon yet.  Seagrass on the seafloor  From a distance we can already distinguish it even though it was submerged in ...

I was inspired to finally post about the Cartoon Art Museum when I got the news  this morning    that Bill Watterson, the cartoonist of my favorite comics, Calvin & Hobbes, came back for a limited collaboration with the artist behind the comics Pearls Before Swine . Watterson retired in 1995, drawing the last Calvin & Hobbes panel. I am such as big fan of his comics that one of my nicknames in college was Calvin, and that my pitbull was named Hobbes. I've also read all the books, and for that I counted myself lucky that I was able to view a Calvin & Hobbes lithograph in the Cartoon Art Museum, donated by Watterson himself. The Cartoon Art Museum (CAM) is located in the Yerba Buena district in San Francisco. I really didn't have any fixed itinerary when I visited SF, only that a museum or two is on my list, and this is the second that I visited, the other being the Contemporary Jewish Museum . CAM, housed in the ground floor of an office building ...