Of General Cleaning and Finding our Palawan Tour Guide's Contact Details

The best part about doing a general cleaning is finding things I forgot about or do not even know I own.  Te he!  That's my usual realization every time I engage myself in this tiring yet rewarding task.

I am due for a week-long vacation in Aklan on the 22nd and so today, I rummaged through my closet, cabinets, drawers and boxes to look for things I bought a few months back for my loved ones.  True enough, I found a malong for my mom, shirts for my dad and brothers and nieces, unused bottles of perfume, cologne and lotions for the female members of the family, toys and books for kids and an unopened box of an iPod shuffle, which is a freebie received when I bought my Canon Powershot G12 last December.  I packed all these, gleeful that I now have more pasalubong for them.

Among my finds is a calling card of our tour guide when we went to Palawan in 2008.  Most of the comments and e-mails I receive on this blog is about that trip and so I am posting Ate Alma's contact details here.

Alma D. dela Rosa
Mobile: +63921-437-0599 (Smart)
             +63917-545-0265 (Globe)
E-mail: aldrosa21@yahoo.com

I am not sure though if the above is still updated so I might as well add the travel agency that she is connected to.

Sanctuary Tours and Travel
Room 203, 2/F Corporate Center Building
Rizal Avenue, Puerto Princesa
Palawan Philippines
Telefax: +63948-434-8363
24-hour number: +63948-434-7673
Mobile: +63926-701-5269
             +63919-350-3279
E-mail: sanctuarytours@yahoo.com

And I also found photo of her.  I remember asking for her permission to post her photo in my blog so I might as well post this here.

Ate Alma during our Mangrove Paddle Boat Tour

To add as this is also one of this blog's frequently asked questions, we only availed of the city tour and the Underground River Cruise from Ate Alma.  Our island hopping was arranged on our own, as said here.

Alcohol

I am on graveyard shift today and the staffs and I had a bellyful of laughter because of our incident with "alcohol."

At past midnight, our telephone operator radioed our housekeeping staff if we have "alcohol."  The latter answered they had none so I radioed back and said Front Office has a bottle of "alcohol" that we can provide to guests who were asking for it.  It's already half-consumed though so I added that if the guests want, they can buy a new bottle tomorrow at our souvenir shop.

And so I asked the bellman to deliver the GREEN CROSS ISOPROPYL ALCOHOL a.k.a. "alcohol" to the guest's room.  But the bellman came back laughing.  As it turned out, the Japanese guests want ALCOHOLIC DRINKS and so he just directed them to our restaurant.  But what amused us further was the fact that when the bellman was about to give them the "alcohol" that he brought with him, one of the guests said, "Can we drink?"

LOL.

I am Back

After more than a year of not posting in this blog, I decided to blog back.  Sorry for the very long hiatus.  I got busy with work.  I was promoted to Duty Manager in the hotel that I work for and the demands of my new position took its toll on me and so the past year was spent learning the ins and outs of hotel operations.  My love affair with blogging and writing was thus relegated to the sidelines.

Also, the past year, I got busy sating the wanderlust in me.  My job was kind of stressful and so whenever I had time, I traveled.  I had been to Bohol, Camotes Island and Hong Kong.  I had also gone home to Aklan and visited Manila.  After these travels, my work would take much of my time and so I failed to update this blog on my adventures and misadventures.

As much as I want to continue this blog from where it ended, which is on my Singapore trip, I cannot since last June of this year, my laptop crashed down and everything on my hard disk got wiped out.  Sniff.  Sniff.    About two years worth of travel pictures and blog drafts went down the drain.  Some of my pictures were actually already posted in Facebook but my heart breaks for the total loss of my Sagada, Bohol, Bangkok and Villa Escudero trips photos, including the random shots I had with my loved ones and friends. 

Oh well, I guess it was a reminder for me to always have a backup for all of my files, which I now have, by the way.

That said, from hereon, this blog starts anew.