View from 54North

The best way to get around Puerto Princessa or ( I expect ) many other small towns in the Philippines is by Trike. Trikes are small motorcycles with a side car type of structure built on or over them.  They are small, bumpy, very noisy and a lot of fun.  They are also cheap, and surprisingly efficient at moving people around over short to medium distances.

To get around the few miles of Puerto Princessa costs 15 to 50 peso a trip, 15 is for locals, foreigners are going to get charged more. But 50 peso’s is about a buck so don’t complain.

Normally a trike will take 3-5 locals … or one of me and Billie. I climb in and take up the entire back seat.  There are no doors or seat belts, but you seldom get above above 20kph. As there are seemingly, millions, of them, you can always flag one down.

Okay, so I have been back over a week, and I haven’t posted much of anything.  Well, I had to fix the internet link first, and I’ve been slowly wading through my pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/54north.ca

It’s going to take me a while to caption and tag them all … a long while I think.  I have however started to caption them, and I’ve started to winnow out the worst of the “noise” ( pictures of my shoe, everything black, out of focus etc.)  I uploaded pretty much everything as a back up just in case my laptop or memory cards got fried, lost or stolen.  Fortunately none of those things happened, but it means a lot of crappy photos and raw video got uplinked. I’m also trying to update the map of the trip that you can see here: http://54north.ca/blog/?page_id=333

In the meantime, here is what we left to come home ( for $138 CAD per night no less! ):

From 2010-02-25

Some travel video has been posted to youtube:

So, it’s taken me a week to get some video online. Turns out that (duh!) video files are a lot bigger than even large picture files and take a loooong time to upload or transfer. And I run into a what looked a lot like a bandwidth throttled connection at the hotel. Smaller files good. Youtube uploads … slowed to a stop after the first few MB.

That said, even at home, it took close to 20 minutes to upload this and I had to load it onto the network so I could move it to another comp for editing.  On t bright side; it is actually edited even if badly There will be more uploaded to youtube, right now this is a proof of concept while I learn how to get familiar with all this moving picture stuff.

The keeper is giving a little talk on the zoo’s gorillas, actually interesting I thought…