Adventure Accounting

Tucked away in Northen Samar is a paradise. I heard about Biri Island from a fellow traveller in my Palaui Trip last April 2010. I googled about the place – the pictures are jaw-dropping. This is in the Philippines??? I promptly added it in my travel bucket list. The pictures made me restless for weeks. One year later, I landed in this secret paradise. Funny how FB can bring travel enthusiasts together to help one another cross out those places in your bucket list. Biri Island is a municipality is Northern Samar. Information is quite scarce. This is the most detailed blog post I’ve seen and we basically patterned out itinerary here. We landed in Catarman airport just before 8am. A bunch of trike drivers swarmed us. A friend of mine accompanied us to the jeepney terminal. The “standard fee” was Php 100 for the trike’s trip from airport to the jeepney terminal.

A lot would think one has to be rich to travel. Not exactly. But you do need the funds to travel. When the travel bug bit me , I knew I had to allocate my income accordingly. Or else I will be booking all the seat sales out there. There are quite a handful of blogs and forums discussing personal finance management. It is actually quite overwhelming. Despite being an accountant, it took me six months of reading and researching before dipping my toes in investing. I’m not going to discuss that in detail here because that would warrant another blog. After some tweaking around with my budget, I baked the ultimate budget pie. Let me discuss with you the flavor of each slice:

I discovered Sonya’s Garden way back in 2006. My first visit was with my family – so we had a car. They didn’t have a website back then. I had to rely on the scarce information in the blogsphere back then to know more about this place.

Sagada was in my “Must See Places in 2010”. I just had to do it. There's plenty of information available for a DIY Sagada trip. But I don’t have the guts to go solo and I wasn’t feeling so optimistic that I could drag someone to join me in Sagada. So I opted to join the TF trip as a solo participant.

I woke up to with aching legs. I had a snoozefest with my alarm. It was a freezing morning in Sagada. Can’t blame me for wanting to snuggle under the covers. We paid Php 250 to use the van since we didn’t want to walk. :P We dropped by Lake Danum since we skipped this in Day 1. I was in the Low Bat mood – didn’t feel like getting down and taking pics.

I poured time and effort in researching the proper spelunking/caving attire. I browsed forums. I read blog posts and studied what they wore. Seriously. Wa-poise galore yata ito, so kelangan bumawi sa outfit. I found this post in SAGGAS’ website the most helpful. They maintain a pretty neat website as well. Go check it out. Cave Connection Outfit:

If you are scared of heights, darkness, drowning and bats, banish all of them for a couple of hours. This adventure is not for the faint-heart. The next adventure for Day 2 is the famous Cave Connection adventure of Sumaging and Lumiang Cave. It is a self-inflicted torture worth four hours that necessitates you to climb, crawl, rappel, slip, slide, squirm and butt-walk through cave ravines, underground streams and numerous types of cave formations. With raindrops of Guano (bat poop) along the way. For the love of photo op, we managed to smile all the way. I never thought caves could be so enchanting. Caves are supposed to be this dark and cold place but Sagada changed all that. Too bad my point and shoot camera is lousy in these types of settings. I found Lumiang Cave more enthralling than Sumagin Cave – more challenging too. For the not-so-fit adventurers, the cave connection is not recommended – for safety purposes as well. Sumaging Cave exploration is more appropriate. Pose pa rin! ...