i look back to the tree and the wild

sibuyan island, another island within romblon province, is heralded in the lonely planet as the "galapagos of the philippines". separated from any other land mass since the last ice age, a collection of endemic plants, insects, mammals, and reptiles have evolved there. it also has the famous mt. guiting-guiting, 3000-something meters rising basically straight out of the sea. most of the island is still natural forest/jungle and preserved as a national park. i've been wanting to visit it since i got here, but never really managed to get it together until two weekends ago when dee, scott, adam, bec, and i headed over there for the weekend.

since we were limited by time, we decided to just stay in the main port town and visit mt. guiting-guiting national park and go for a long hike on saturday (well that was my plan). due to a bizarre set of events, we ended up staying at an ex-pats beach house – a gorgeous house complete with kitchen, couches, cable tv, and really comfortable beds. these are such unique comforts in my life now – and it makes me laugh at myself at how excited i get over them. if nothing else, i have certainly learned to appreciate a lot of the comforts we take for granted in the states.

anyways, our first afternoon the clouds lifted to give us a view of mt. guiting-guiting. gorgeous.





it makes the backpacker in me regret that i don't have more days left here – it's a day up and a day down to get to the top, so i didn't have enough time, but eesh it was calling to me.

so even though i knew i wouldn't be able to get to the top, i still figured i'd be able to do a long day hike on saturday and dee and adam decided to come with me. we went to the visitor's center to be met with ... a lot of empty buildings and a "ranger" who informed us that we must have a guide and there are no day hikes and there was an entry fee to the park as well even though we wouldn't actually be able to really do anything. i don't know why i expected something different, especially after traveling around this country and constantly facing a general lack of tourist-friendly things, but i was really quite disappointed. the ranger man could see, i think, our disappointment and frustration with the situation and told us we could wander over to a river and then around the complex but not go past the "barbed fence".

so off we go, to a rather boring river and then down a path. and we never saw this barbed fence, so we just kept walking. and after a while we realized that we were probably on the trail up the mountain that we weren't technically "allowed" to be on without a guide (what is it with this country and guides?! the trail was nothing challenging). but, we hadn't seen the supposed fence, so on we went anyways.

and it was cool to see some real jungle. most forest around here has been cut down and replaced with coconut trees. and this jungle is thick - we couldn't see a thing outside our immediate vicinity which meant no views, but still, cool forest. and one of the most interesting bits is seeing all the "house plants" we have in the states growing naturally.





we didn't see any of the weird mammals or reptiles that live around here – but we did see this crazy worm:





bright neon blue! how bizarre.

so it wasn't the day hike i had envisioned, since we figured that we couldn't wander too far up the trail since we probably weren't supposed to be there at all. when we got back we made a quick get-away to avoid being questioned about where we'd been for the past three hours. haha. whatever, we never saw the barbed fence.