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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Please Support Local Tourism

We all love to travel. Filipinos particularly love to travel. That's why our President wants to boost our local tourism industry by giving us longer vacations through legal-holidays and by initiating the RoRo (roll-on roll-off) for those who want to travel by land and sea. Not only that the airline industry such as Cebu Pacific Air offers peso fare for those who want to get discounted airfares. But the question is, our we supporting our government's initiative for local tourism?

There is a nice web-tool for us to determine how much of a local traveler we are. Please take a look at my local travel sheet and my grade - well I'm just a C class traveler.


My Lakbayan grade is C!

How much of the Philippines have you visited? Find out at Lakbayan!

Created by Eugene Villar.

As you can see, I have covered a lot of places in Mindanao (it's my hometown after-all), some places in Cebu region and a couple in Luzon area. As much as I want to encourage my officemates and some friends here in Manila to come and visit the beautiful Mindanao (shame plug-in) I'm having a hard time every now and then defending it. The misconception about the security in Mindanao is really very hard to quell. Another problem I have encountered is the perception that traveling abroad exceeds by a mile than traveling locally. How come? I won't be a hypocrite it's good to travel abroad (have never done it though) but it is - for me - much more worthy if one can visit and appreciate his own backyard first.

I just remembered a discussion I had with my brother. He bought Davao City shirts and I asked him, "Why did you buy those things? You're from Davao!". And he answered me, "Kayanga, taga-Davao ka nga wala ka namang t-shirt" (Thats the point, your from Davao and you don't even have a t-shirt). Good point.

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