Week-ender 2: Kaputian-Peñaplata Escapade (the next huge experience after watching Manny Pacquaio fight)

After a rewarding highland adventure last Halloween, I decided to go homeboy for the next two weekends. While coping up with the usual boring weekdays in the office, there came over me a sudden urge to step out of the borderline I used to draw two weeks ago. And with the temptation of a comrade to spend weekend in an island, I suddenly found myself staying overnight on November 14 at Kaputian Beach Park, a small island resort mostly flocked by weekenders like me.

Indeed, the trip was beyond the usual. Not even the loss of a digital camera could stop me from going there (thanks to Cheryl, I had so much pictorial session). As usual, my company was a blue-chip material in his battle for survival….somebody I used to call half-human half-machine…Gabo and his partner. Equally surprising was the presence of an Augielicious lass, a replica of beauty and fragileness. With her in the sidelight, we instantly got tremendous reasons to charge our camera batteries and got our reserved memory cards emptied. The next big thing after drinking and laughing was pictorials, pictorials and pictorials.

There was really a sort of the so-called emptiness about the venue. We had no player to produce our own brand of music, the food was not really delectable and the place itself is not really gorgeous. What made the escapade beautiful was the fact that there were four people in the place. It somehow filled that miserable emptiness.

After an overnight stay, our next stop the next day was at Hagimit Falls, or Hagimit River for that matter. It is a flagship project of community-based eco-tourism. It is managed by the community living within the area and the government’s role is purely to provide policies and rules which will eventually create favorable climate for eco-tourism. The place speaks for nature, cooperativism and profitability.

Our experience at Hagimit was very light, not until we were bluffed by a scripted false alarm by our two woman companions. We thought it would boil down to a serious scenario, alas, I and Gabo were instant “Innocence Day” victims. Hopefully that would offset the December 28 date.

The very essential part of the trip was the images we heaped to the already-full computer memories, the minimal drinking spree and the success of some fabricated white lies to the persons left in the homeplace and in the house.#