Cebu

Back in mid January I went backpacking at Cebu, in the Philippines, for about ten days with a friend and who is also a former colleague back when I was with the press. Everyone has been telling me to travel when you're young, you'll learn lots of things. So this is my first trip and definitely wouldn't be my last =)

Ideally, I wanted to learn how to travel in the first place and not pursuing a photography trip. Hence I ditched my DSLR gears and bring along only my Fujifilm X20 compact camera. Nothing else. I wanna get the full experience of being in a foreign place and not thinking about camera settings, image quality, framing, etc etc.

Touring at the Philippines is all about island hopping so we took a ferry to an island called Bohol. Its a very quiet place with friendly faces everywhere. Not much traffic. We stayed at a place with wooden huts surrounded by coconut trees. There was also a live python for public viewing.

- taken with my phone

There was a fairly small village with only 12 households, next to our accommodation. Friendly faces everywhere. I've even participated their nightly karaoke sessions. During my stay there I met an Irish backpacker who has been traveling ever since he was 18 years old.

After that we went back to Cebu city to familiarise ourselves with the city routes in preparation of Sinulog Festival. You can read about the festival's origin here.

The main attraction of the festival was the massively grand parade with people in dramatic costumes. The atmostphere was crowded with people, full of colours, dances, food stalls and such.

One of my favorites from the festival.

The Fujifilm X20 performed fairly acceptable for a compact camera coming from a DSLR user. There are a lot times where the AF misses but thats just me moving too fast. Every photos you see in this post are edited with Lightroom.


Overall this trip is enjoyable. I need to travel more often. Thanks for viewing.