The Weekend Trekker

The last time I visited Boracay was with my wife Gail during our wedding anniversary vacation trip last November. It was more of a time-off from work. We needed a weekend getaway break so badly that time. But we made the mistake of bringing a laptop so we ended up doing a bit of work under the Boracay sun. Here’s another photo which Gail took (using her Canon Powershot G10) from that trip:

Boracay Sunset (Photo by Gail dela Cruz-Villanueva)

Nina Fuentes of Justwandering.org, one of the best travel blogs I love reading is doing this What’s Your Best Travel Photo Contest. To join the content, you simply have to blog about your best travel photo and share something about it. So what made me join the contest? ‘Coz Nina mentioned:

“To celebrate another great year, I am giving away signed copies of Robert Alejandro’s book, The Sketching Backpacker: Southeast Asia and parts of China, Jetro B. Rafael’s Backpack Photos postcard book and the gift of flickr: a one year Flickr Pro account, which gives you unlimited uploads and unlimited sets and collections.”

Yup, those are nice prizes to win. I do love taking photos from sports to practically anything that’s worth taking a photo of. And since I’m starting this travel blog you’re reading, I’ll be taking lots of photos of the beautiful places we will go to. I really don’t have too many “best” photos yet, but among those shots I took from our Coron, Palawan trip, this one stood out. And here’s my official entry for Nina’s What’s Your Best Travel Photo Contest:

Photo by Gail dela Cruz-Villanueva

It was around 5am in the morning. All of my travel mates were still asleep. I decided to go outside of the Novita house we were renting for a morning walk and to buy hot pandesal. It was raining quite hard outside. The wind was so strong and gusty an umbrella seemed useless. The weather was so bad I was almost sure that we were going to be stuck in this place for at least a couple of days more. This place is frequented by typhoons that is located in the northernmost part of the Philippines. We were in the province of Batanes.

A few weeks ago, I had the privilege to visit the beautiful islands of Batanes together with my wife Gail. We were so stressed with work and this was our November weekend getaway. We spent the weekend there together with a group of fellow bloggers. This trip was made possible thanks to SEAIR and Columbia Sportswear. We stayed at an ancestral house turned into a sort of apartment for rent called the Novita House in the town of Basco.

Welcome to The Weekend Trekker blog!

This blog is basically an extension of several blogs I manage. I started out with MarcVillanueva.com as my first personal blog having no direction at all. I practically blog about anything under the sun over that blog. I’m killing that one for now and maybe will resurrect it someday to be a photo gallery. Hmm, will have to think about on what to do with it first. Okay, so after a while I found my niche and came up with Spikeithard.com, a sports blog about volleyball.

Then after some time, I realized it’s time to branch out and setup a new travel blog of my own. Enter ‘The Weekend Trekker’ blog. Every once in a while (our target is to do this on monthly basis), my wife and I make it a point to go on an out of town trip to relax and unwind. The goal is to visit and explore as many places in the Philippines as we could. And blog about it.

My wife and I have been busy for the past few weeks. We make it a point to go travel once in a while so we can get out and relax. So this month, we’re going to the exotic island of Batanes. Yup, you heard me right. We’re off to Batanes along with a group of fellow blogger friends.

Batanes is located at the northernmost of the Philippine archipelago. It’s a province by the way. When you watch the weather portion in the news, that’s usually where the reporter points to where typhoons and storms are headed going out of the country. They say it’s very rough there. On the other hand, Batanes is also one of the unexploited and unspoiled places in the Philippines. For sure, a lot of exciting things await me and my friends. I heard that the Ivatans (Batanes folks) are very interesting people, so I’m eager to get to know them.

So why the hell do I want to go to Batanes? It’s simple. I want to go to Batanes because I’ve never been there. I want to see places that are not the usual spots in the Philippines. And Batanes is something to look forward to.