5 do's for Cebu City, Cebu, Philippines

1. Learn more about the special bond Filipinos have to prisoners. Unlike in Palawan where you can go see prisoners work on a farm, in Cebu City you can go watch them hip hop. They promise you mass murderers! Now if that's not an enterprising approach to tourism then what is? Serial rapists square dancing? The show goes on every last Saturday of the month and you can watch them dance to Bonnie Tyler's I need a hero here.

2. Do the sights (shabby castle on the left) in like 5 minutes. Then get completely lost and wander around for six hours in blazing heat. When you finally get to Osmana Fuente Circle, from where you know how to get home, realize that the only proper landmark in the city, the casino tower which you've been seeing all along, is there in the circle.

3. Have one of those only in the Philippines candle lit dinners at a restaurant complex which wants to be a car park. While you eat watch cockroaches climb up and down the wall. And what is that smell, poo?

4. Learn a new way to define fish: "semi-boneless". Dread the prospect of once getting semi-bony fish on your plate.

5. After some serious misbehaving: Retreat! Catch a slow boat to Tagbilaran in Bohol and lounge on the deck beds for the 4,5 hour journey on a calm sea.

El Nido, Palawan, Philippines, 5 do's

5 do's for El Nido, Palawan island, The Philippines. A vintage post from February o9.

View from the tour C.

1. Check into "Alternative", a lovely guest house offering rehab, shiatsu and veggie foods. It probably is just what you need. Then plan a crazy night out after all the early morning snorkeling is done in a few days. Marvel the fact that you actually have to plan to get waisted.

2. Hire a boat to take you island hopping and snorkeling in the Baquit archipelago. Instead of the Art Cafe and their big boats, charter your own or try Sea

Slugs. Wonder why on earth they've named the tours A, B and C instead of, say, The Sunrise Tour, The Blue Tour and the Indiana Jones Tour like they everywhere else in the world. How hangover were they? Anyway, spot coral, cool fish, sea snakes and a television crew shooting Swedish Survivor in the back yard of a luxury resort.

3. Swim into the Small Lagoon on Miniloc island. Then speed back to the boat when a tropical downpour hits your back like bees on st

eroids. Oh, the lagoon was lovely in the rain too. Just gorgeous.

4. Dance the night away in the only club in El Nido. It's a little house, about 50 square meters, made of concrete and imaginative

ly decorated with one single disco ball.

Goodbye snake.

5. Panic as a poisonous snake suddenly appears next to your leg on a boat. Then watch with joy when the boat man gives it the ax. Marvel the irony of encountering a snake on a boat after not seeing any while trekking in the jungle.

5 do's for Port Barton, Palawan, Philippines

5 do's for a few lazy days in Port Barton, Palawan. This is a vintage post from February 09.

1. Finally get some serious tanning done on the picture perfect beach of Port Barton. It was about time!

2. Join a bonfire party of local boatmen and a few random foreigners on the beach. Grill fish and drink rum with Nestea. When sufficiently drunk, sing along to a campfire version of Zombie, the ever lasting Philippino favourite.

3. Try finding yet another waterfall and a white beach. Fail miserably as the thought of leeches still creeps you out, but hey, in the Philippines there is always a waterfall in the next town.

4. Remain in an oblivious state for a few days as there's no internet connection nor coverage for the phone. Wonder when was the last time when you actually managed to stay out of it all for so long. Then gorge on a two day old newspaper, the Philippine Inquirer, when you finally manage to find one. Read about basketball.

5. On the last morning get up before sunrise. Pack your gear in the dark. Wake up the sweet lady downstairs so that she can whip up some food. Have a candle lit breakfast while watching the night turning into morning before embarking on a five hour banca boat ride to El Nido. Try to get some sleep.

Some people do manage to sleep on the bancas. Lucky bastards.

Where to go - some fresh ideas for travel

Where to go after traveling the usual suspects? Here are some new ideas I came up with surfing the net while recovering from a Monday night drinking binge yesterday.

1. Samar and Leyte in the Eastern Visayas, Philippines.

Why: I could use a Red Horse* beer.

The general idea: Buy a motorbike, tricycle or a Filipino style used jeepney that says "Jesus is with me" on the sides and "Guns'n'Roses" on the front and tour these relatively little known islands.

Jeepney, the way to go.

2. Bangladesh.

Why: A detox in muslim country might be welcome.

The general idea: See the Sundarbans sanctuary for tigers, well known for the fact that a person (usually a honey collector) is eaten alive by a tiger every third day. The tourists still claim of course that it's hard to catch a glimpse of one. I can't wait to join their doomsday choir.

3. Papua New Guinea.

Why: The country has a population of 6.25 million. They vote for 45 different political parties and speak 800 different languages.

The general idea:

a) Travel to Wabag. Claim to fame according to the LP: "People sit around a lot."

b) Travel to Wewak. Claim to fame: The Japanese Peace Memorial park, locally referred to as Pis Park. I guess those 800 languages don't help with English pronunciation.

c). Travel to Wau and Bulolo. Claim to fame: Insect Farming and Trading Agency which ships locally collected insects and butterflies to collectors around the world. And I once thought I didn't have a life. I was mistaken.

*If Red Horse is not the most sympathetic beer in the world then I am the queen of Cambodia. The trick with Red Horse is that every casque of twelve beers has one bottle of Happy Horse, which has a slightly different label - the horse figure on the bottle is smiling. And of course it's a little stronger than the average horse.

How to save money: 7 tips before the trip

How to save money and piss your friends off by being cheap - this is the tedious girl's guide to budgeting.

1. Release your inner hippy immaterialist and sell your stuff. So far I've made 200 euros out of my books, 700 euros out of my cd's and vinyl singles and a few bucks out of the few clothing items that were designer wear. Money I made equals three months in India or two in South East Asia.

2. Lock up your inner bored-to-death materialist and stop buying stuff. It's surprisingly easy and actually quite releaving as you can now pass by all the sale signs without thinking that you should go in and buy something because it's cheap. In the last 7 months I've only bought stuff that I'll take along for the trip. These are:

- New Osprey Waypoint 80 backpack: bought online from a store in Germany. I don't speak German, but if you really want something and the price is right, you'll manage it even if you have to file the order in German. Cost: 219 €

- Haglöfs sleaping bag from a summer sale. Cost: 40 €

- Haglöfs fleece (have mercy on me) from a summer sale. Cost: 70 €

- A mozzie net bought online. Cost: 0 € - cheers daddy-o!

- Samsung NC 10 laptop. Cost: 330 €

3. Cut the food costs. Don't eat out or cook meals for which you would have to buy ingredients such as exotic spices. You won't have enough use for them in the future. Bugger off with diets and eat pasta. See mom and dad a lot.

4. Cut the cost of drinking. Try staying at home on Fridays, Saturdays and all the other days. If it's too hard then stick to beer. I of course saved a billion this way.

5. Never ever say no when asked to work overtime. I've done this once in the past two years and that was because I had promised to meet up with a friend who had just started going out again after an arduous row of cancer treatments. So it was kind of special.

6. Say goodbye to your hairdresser. Now every day is a bad hair day but it could be worse, like I could be a leper. And hey, even Madonna has been spotted with multi-inch roots. Over the past 7 months I've saved 400 euros which, again, equals a month in India.

7. This one is truly tedious but do start keeping a diary of your expenses. Set yourself a weekly budget and stick to it. When buying that one beer, bear in mind that it always takes you 5 euros closer to your weekly limit. In case of the 6th beer, mourn the next morning and promise yourself you'll never ever do this again.

The source of mourning.

Increasing traffic to your blog - 5 random observations

1. After joining Twitter in order to see if you could pimp your blog there, get a new, unknown follower, right after complaining that your personal hygiene is deteriorating due to your blogging addiction.

2. In Blogger, clicking "clear edits" on the edit html page can ruin friendships, if not lives and cause heroin addiction.

3. Archbishop Vincent Nichols of England and Wales claims that sites such as MySpace and Facebook can lead to increasing suicidal tendencies in teenagers. No he is expected to comment on the effects of missing data in Google Analytics reports on adults.

4. On the other hand adding Site Meter probably enlarges your breasts or at least helps recovering from Analytics withdrawal symptoms thus lessening the pressure on giving into heroin abuse.

5. All your friends who complain how boring you've become because of your constant blogging babble are wrong. You've never liked talking to yourself this much.

Missing data in Google Analytics report.

Country bagging: What is a country?

What is a country? Who cares aside from some pompous students of international politics? At least the Tibetans and Taiwanese do. And those who are tedious enough to make it their life project to travel to as many countries as possible. Now that's when the question really begins to have personal relevance - the Tibetans and the students probably don't care so much about the definition, what they want is recognition, the former of their country and the latter of their argumentation skills.

Here are some criteria that I found at Country Bagging (this blog is brilliant. The author, who roars 89 countries deep, has finished a project of traveling countries alphabetically from Andorra to Qatar. In my opinion he's a bit too liberal though, he counts Jersey as a country for example.)

"A country could be defined (at least in my world) by one of the following

- issues its own stamps/currency

- has its own Parliament

- is recognised by the UN

- has its own border crossing

- issues its own passports

- if enough peop

le want to belong to that country?"

The trouble begins, as usual, with history as there are countries which have ceased to exist and consequently been replaced by others. These can be categorized in three groups.

1. Countries, which split up.

Most notably the former Eastern block countries: Soviet Union, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. Soviet Union became 15 different countries, Czechoslovakia two whereas the Yugos are still in the process of multiplying.

2. Countries, which united. Most notably East and West Germany. (Munich Indian in the pic on the left.)

3. Countries, which have changed names. Most notably African republics such as Congo which, simply put, has gone from Congo to Zaire and back to Congo.

How do these countries rate in country count?

1. I've chosen to count the new republics as separate countries even though I visited them in Soviet times. Thus I discount Soviet Union. You can't have both. The same goes for the Yugo states and Czech and Slovakia.

2. This one's a bit hazy. I'd count this as two countries, as in the end East Germany joined West Germany but was very much a different country for nearly 50 years. But if you travel to Dresden and Munich now you obviously don't get two country points. That would be cheap. Now I know that this contradicts number 1, but it's my count, so I get choose.

3. I'd count this as one. I doubt that the average Luba who has never had the chance to leave his home village, cares to join the luxury of country folly by claiming that he has been to at least three different Congos. And if he does, he's more than welcome.

Then there are the diplomatically challenging "countries" as my friends Dara, Reijo and Toxic Waste man have pointed out. Dara wrote: "There are plenty of places in the world which are not part of any sovereign country, and at the same time are not themselves an independent country. Not as many as there used to be, but still plenty. Gibraltar is a good example; Greenland is another. Then you have the Palestinian territories: the only place on earth (outside Antarctica) that are neither part of any country nor belong to any sovereign country."

This one really is a matter of opinion, or of life and death if you ask Hamas. I choose life and after serious reasoning, discounting Greenland. Go Denmark!

The same goes for Gibraltrar, Hong Kong, and Tibet. As to Taiwan I'd be willing to give it thumbs up as it's definitely governed by its own political regime.

I assume using the United Nations list of countries would be the simplest way of keeping track. I kind of like the idea though, that if the country is listed in Wikipedia list of countries, it stands for a flag.