This evening I’ve been playing with Google Earth and Google Maps, set off when I noticed that the coverage of Kaduna had gone from uselessly blurry to “I can see your house from here” level.

So I’ve made a map showing some of the places I mentioned during my time living in Kaduna. You can see it online at Kaduna Places or look at it in Google Earth: Kaduna Places.

My copy should be on its way to me now, I’m really looking forward to seeing my photos in print. I suspect the money I’m being paid for the photos is going to be spent furnishing my new apartment, when I finally find one, maybe I should have asked Bradt to just pay me in IKEA vouchers…

In the last few weeks I’ve been looking for my next apartment. The people I’m subletting from are coming back from Denmark in August, so I have to have somewhere else to live by then. Finding an apartment isn’t all that easy, and with many of the property companies involves queues and points, all very northern European.

P.S. If you’re extra observant you might have noticed that the picture filenames have ‘Linkoping’, with an ‘o’ instead of the ‘ö’ (they’re different letters in Swedish). This is one of the many horrible lingering effects of most computer technology having its heritage in systems invented by people who thought that just the letters A-Z, numbers and a bit of punctation should be enough for anyone. There are several different ways of representing the letter ö — to make matters worse when I’m typing it here I have to use ö.

The lake he mentions is this one:

it looks much nicer at sunset!

By the way, I’m still intending to post some pictures of my apartment in Sweden and things like that. I just haven’t got round to it yet.

I’m renting a furnished apartment until August, so that I can take my time looking around for a more permanent apartment that I can then furnish exclusively from IKEA. In fact I’ll be going in there tomorrow for a few things I need right now.

The overnight bus trip down from La Union province was much as expected: freezing cold (air-conditioning vents that you can’t turn off) and lacking in sleep.

Anyway, once I get back to Stirling this coming weekend I’ll upload my pictures and write more about what I’ve been up to in the Philippines.

So after a long day on cramped buses I arrived in the little town of San Juan, just north of San Fernando. It’s full of surf resorts, so I just wandered along the road until I found one with a room at a decent price. I ended up with a nice little en-suite room right beside the beach for P500/night at Hacienda Peter’s Surf Resort. They also do lovely meals for only P50 and there’s a fridge full of beer, you just have to tell them how many you’ve drunk.

I had a very relaxing few days there, lounging around, occasionally swimming and watching the surfing. On Friday, when I was leaving, they were holding a surf competition on the beach. Of course, that was the day when there were almost no waves at all, I felt sorry for the competitors bobbing about and desperately waiting for a wave before their time ran out.

Late on Friday night I caught a bus to Manila, the start of my journey back home.

Baguio’s an interesting place, once the American summer capital of the Philippines it has pleasant peaceful areas as well as the jeepney-clogged, grimy, polluted areas. It was only really a stopover on my way further into the mountains though.

I then spent a few days in Sagada, one of the tourist centres of the Cordillera. It’s a nice little town, with plenty of hotels, cafés and restaurants and you can get a really good cup of local coffee there. Unfortunately the cost of guides to go and see most of the local sites was beyond my budget, but I did spent a morning sightseeing. Sagada is famous for coffins, both hanging off cliffs and stacked up in caves, as well as the rice terraces found all around that area.

Not having had enough of rice terraces yet I made my way up to the village of Batad, via Bontoc. It’s the most famous of the terraced areas, and a little difficult to get to. From Banaue I hired a tricycle, which took me along the terrible road to Batad junction and then struggled up through mud and rain (with me pushing some of the time) to reach the saddle from where I walked down into the village. The weather was terrible while I was there, almost constant rain and low cloud, but I managed to wander around a bit and visit a nearby waterfall. I stayed in the only house in Batad village with electricity, owned by Gilbert who runs it as a homestay. On the evening of the first night we joined his next-door neighbours as they made the local rice wine.

I probably won’t get a chance to upload pictures until I’m back in Manila, around the 23rd.

Marebec met me at the airport with her niece and took me back to her parents’ house. We went into town, where we kept bumping into people Marebec knows, met her sister and had dinner at a restaurant there.

The next morning we took a bus to Malaybalay in Bukidnon province, where we met Tanya (another former VSO) and her friend Mavic (a former colleague of Tanya’s) at a nice café. There are some nice caves in the area, so the following day we took various buses and jeepneys to reach the ‘blue water’ cave.

The next destination on Marebec’s plan was Camiguin island, just off the coast near Cagayan de Oro. We took an early bus to the port, then a very slow and rusty old ferry across to the island. We ended up staying at the Caves Dive Resort, their cheapest room was right by the beach (admittedly with a shared toilet and no air-con). We spent the afternoon lounging around or in my case mixing lounging around with trying to get through to Qantas’s office in Manila. On our second day on the island we hired a ‘multicab’ (a small truck with a minibus body built on the back) to take us around the island. Highlights were the Santo Niño Cold Water Spring (nice for swimming but quite cold), the ruins of a church destroyed by a local volcano and the Ardent Hot Spring, where we stayed for the night. On the way back from Camiguin we were incredibly lucky and saw some dolphins.

Back in CdO we had a free day to do laundry, drink coffee, do a bit of shopping and buy tickets back to Manila. Then in the evening Marebec picked us up and took us to the company she works for: MORESCO UNO. As the culmination of their company sports competition they were having a cheer-dancing competition and Tanya and I had been roped in as judges. It was one of the more surreal evenings of my life, sitting watching teams of electrical company staff performing their dance routines and having to award points.

On our remaining days in CdO we went to see “Sweeney Todd” at the cinema and spent a morning rafting on the Cagayan river. Then I had a much less worrying flight with Cebu Pacific back to Manila.