Traipsing Around Bohol

Like I mentioned here, HP and Intel Philippines flew me and a bunch of IT reporters over to Panglao, Bohol for their annual Synergy event. A couple of days prior to the flight, we were advised to be at the airport at around 6:00am for the 8:00am flight.

Naturally, since I live considerably far, I left the house at around 3:00am, to give myself three hours to get there which I calculated to include the time wasted walking out of our subdivision, waiting for a tricycle to get to the highway, flagging a jeepney to get to Crossing, getting on a cab for the airport and the hurrendous traffic I was sure I’d encounter.

So this is me at around 5:30am already sitting inside the airport, freezing my buns off.

I met Grace, from the PR company handling the event, at the airport’s entrance. Apparently, early bird na naman ako.  Finally at around 6:30am, the other journalists started arriving. We hung out for a while.

And finally, we boarded the plane…

…and arrived at the Tagbilaran Airport in Bohol an hour later.

I write IT and not travel so I frankly know very litle about resorts, hotels their facilities and accomodations. Basta for me, as long as their food and drinks are great and I get to sleep comfortably at the drop of a hat, that place gets a thumbs up.

Here are some pics I took roaming around Amorita Resort.

After finishing off our gulaman welcome drink, we hung around the pool area while we waited forour rooms to be prepared because the some of the guests were just checking out. The area was adorned with gumamela flowers and of course Mick, being the highly inquisitive and entertaining guy, picked one up and quizzed us on the parts of a flower. And he started shredding the flower and naming each part, mutilating the poor thing.

Jen and I could only name the few, basic ones.

 After checking in our rooms, the weather started turning sour…

And then it got worse.

And so we listened to both HP and Intel’s presentations, showing and explaining their green initiatives to help protect the planet without compromising their productions and solutions’ performance and technological advancements.  And I have to admit that its plainly remarkable how they do it, not that I’ve never heard of other companies going with the green IT protocols, but these companies have gone all-out with their efforts. But before this post turnd into one new feature article, let’s go back to the day’s activities.

After the conference, we rested a little and the welcome patry started. They even had a local band called Brownbuds come in and performed two full sets for the night. They play really good reggae, the mainstream type with the dozen covers, but still good. Even the handful of originals songs sounded nice.

 
My ears perked up a little when I heard the words “open bar” but I only got to down three bottle of beer. For some odd reason, my palette was kinda messed up that night because the beer tasted awfully bitter. I mean, waaay bitter than they ought to be. So I ended up ordering sweet cocktails to wash the taste off my mouth, like mango martinis and a host of other fruity concoctions and triple shots of Baileys.

After the initial partying and the band left, they anounced that they had set up a room for the karaoke extension of the night. I joined the others there and gulped some beer. Apparently the cocktails helped because the beer tasted great.

After all the singing, which I naturally didn’t take part in, someone suggested we continue drinking by the pool. Paula from the PR company and I started this short chat about rock music. What started as a few comments about local music ended up hours later where we discussed the bands we liked and it was great to finally have someone to talk to about Pinoy rock and the indie movement and knew exactly what I was talking about. This was something I sincerely miss doing since I started working and have been absent from the underground rock scene.The conversation stretched to about 3:00 am in the morning.

I woke up at 11:00 am the next day. I missed the dolphin watching trip. The beach area was empty as hell, except for the few foreigners loitering around the area. Clearly you don’t come to this area for a partying vacation, you come here for relaxing.

I walked around the beach and found this.