6 Things Nobody Told Me About the Philippines

can you imagine if everyone gave in to the urge to climb things.
teams of guys attempting to climb all the tall buildings ?

this is silly...like the python sketch of guys climbing along a pavement .
remember it ?

Not quite that old,liked Michael palin around the world in 80 days

Sometimes it's better to be curious than correct.

The reason I backpacked around the Philippines many times before I met my wife was to enjoy the Filipino people and their smiles. The scenery was secondary.

Travelling was always what I wanted to do as a young man but now I have to resign myself to life where my nose is to the grindstone because little kids came along.
Such is life, but there are wonderful joys to be had just being in a room watching our children do things as they are growing up.

"6 Things Nobody Told Me About the Philippines"

Positives:

1. Smiles are infectious.
2. Politeness is something that we see there and wish it was in our own countries.
3. Friendliness is heart-warming

Negatives:

4. Queuing is incredibly frustrating.
5. Travelling around with toddlers is a nightmare there.
6. I would not be able to visit as much as I thought I would because flights are expensive.

The adventure travel show was excellent,the Dragcon seemingly wasn't so good (said people queued in the rain?The sky was blue).
https://www.msn.com/en-gb/entertain...guarantee-of-entry/ar-BBZ5yky?ocid=spartanntp

I forgot the most significant thing that nobody told me about the Philippines - that Filipinas are the strongest-willed women in the world.
That the soft and sweet demeanour in the early days will be tempered into an impressive steeliness as the years roll on.
Somebody once told me that the women run the Philippines and I understand this more and more.

I have been following these guys online, it was - 50 at base camp a few days back, I read before they started the local Pakistani porters weren't happy the Nepalese were coming in but the sherpa have more experience due to Nepal having a mountaineering history
https://api-nationalgeographic-com....errer=https://www.google.com&amp_tf=From %1$s

And that mountain scenery is all down to this in the link below. India started life joined to Madagascar. It seperated and moved northwards and ended up shunting into Eurasia to form the Himalayas.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/earth-plate-tectonics-volcanoes-earthquakes-faults

I know a bit about the tectonic plate shift and how the himalayas was formed, if I had been a tad cleverer at school geology would have been something fascinating to study, I found some small fossils in the thar desert once and never even gave second thought as to how they got there.

What were the fossils? Can you remember?

No, sorry, just shells in rock, I know there's a fossil park in rajasthan now so there must be a few kicking about.

In many ways the desert doesn’t have much to offer, being a desert. However there can be more to see than first appears. During quiet moments when drilling Wells in the grade were in limbo I got to explore the Sahara desert a bit. One of the interesting ( or not so interesting for some) things were the flint arrowheads and fossilised trees that I saw which indicated man was in the region thousands of years ago and the region was lush enough to support trees. I managed to bring a chunk of fossilised tree trunk home to the U.K. and would have liked to have brought back an arrow head or two but traded them in for some beer.

Arrow heads are very interesting to me, I am a toxophilite, alcohol however is of no use whatsoever, I would have bought you a few cases of beer in exchange for the arrow heads

It was a dustbin full of home brewed beer! The only legal source available in Libya and then only because the police turned a blind eye to it.

I eventually sold the fossilised tree “lump” ( as I got sick of it ) to someone with a tropical fish tank.

But the arrowheads were pretty fine specimens that fitted in a matchbox and easy to keep.

its because they know they're sitting on a gold mine.

Were they knapped stone?

Oh yes. Looked a bit like this. You can see the working of the spearhead edges. Flint.

Did you get flint in Libya? I can't remember if there was any further west in Morocco but that arrowhead looks superb