Toto, I've a feeling we're not in Manila anymore: 26 places I want to revisit

When I was younger, I was lucky enough to be advised by a mentor that to be a good writer, I must: 1. Read a lot; 2. Write a lot, and; 3. Travel a lot.

I have taken all this to heart and if I am asked what is the one vice that I cannot give up, it would be travel.

Whether on a working trip, or a backpack budget, or one that I have really saved up for to indulge my own preferences, I always leave my biases behind — it makes traveling lighter.

 “We travel, initially, to lose ourselves; and we travel, next, to find ourselves,’ says the writer Pico Iyer. As itinerant souls, we wander through places that feed our minds and open our hearts.

Here are 26 places that I’d like to visit again.

1. Jukkasjärvi. We landed in Kiruna at the tail-end of winter more than a decade ago. Our destination: Jukkasjärvi, 17 kilometers from the airport. This is the Swedish part of the Artic Circle (along with seven other countries — Norway, Finland, Russia, the US, Canada, Denmark and Iceland).

Instead of getting on a bus, we hopped on snowmobiles, wearing heavily padded snowsuits, and drove across the Swedish laplands. We stopped for lunch in a tepee, rolling-hot soup with tomatoes and game meats warming us.

It is a beautiful place, a place of solitude. The gleaming laplands spread out very peaceful, very still.

Finally we reached our destination: The Ice Hotel, a hotel that is built every year at the beginning of winter and melts away into the Torne River in the spring. Just like that. Every year, different designers (artists, architects, sculptors) design the rooms and the only constant apart from the reception and chapel (yes, they do hold weddings there) is the Absolut Icebar, where the vodka is served in glasses made of ice.

The temperature inside the hotel is -5 Celsius, the temperature outside is about +1. Guests sleep in sleeping bags on top of ice beds with preserved animal hide in between. A separate, “normal” hotel is just outside where you can leave your luggage or rent a room if you change your mind about sleeping on a slab of ice. It is not unusual for guests to back out.

Three of us girls were seriously contemplating whether we should stay in the welcome warmth of the normal hotel. We pondered this for some minutes, silent, fighting thoughts of discomfort. 

I remember thinking with amazement: I’m in the Arctic Circle! Wow.

We didn’t come all this way to sleep in a normal bed, we decided. We put on our thermals and headed to our rooms inside the Ice Hotel.

Boracay: The scene in Boracay, whether in habagat or amihan season, is vibrant and alive.

2. Boracay. I have been to Boracay thrice this year and each visit is a different kind of fun. There is still nothing as vibrant as White Beach with all its charms and culpabilities.

Paris: The City of Light as seen from the Jules Verne Restaurant in Paris. Yes, the restaurant where the now divorced Tom Cruise proposed to Katie Holmes.

3. Paris. It’s embarrassing how much I love Paris. The city fills me with giddiness and wonder each time. Two months ago, I went with colleagues to the Jules Verne Restaurant on the Eiffel Tower, and I looked down at the cityscape and said, “Do Parisians know how lucky they are to be born to this, to be living here?”

A day later, I asked a Parisian the same question. He said, he had never thought in terms of being lucky to be living here, that he appreciated it, but just took it for granted because it has always been there. We took a walk on the Right Bank, looked at the people living on their boats on the Seine, and watched the sunset caught right between the posts of Arc de Triomphe and casting yellow light down Champs Elysees. I was regarded with amusement as I let the pedestrian light turn red three times before crossing the street.

I have so many great memories of this city: Standing for half an hour at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, looking up; being broke with only a baguette and cheese to eat the whole day; getting drunk on a bateau cruising the Seine. They were all hopeful moments.

This is the Paris of Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Woody Allen, Audrey Hepburn, Hugo, Amelie, Fred Astaire, Van Gogh, Robert DeNiro, Jim Morrison. The list is endless, the quotes plentiful.

In Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, a Hollywood hack comes to Paris with his fiancée and every midnight he is transported back to the turn of the century when Hemingway has just written one book and the surrealists are lost in their own imaginations, and a Matisse costs only 500 francs.

It is a world the writer thinks is better than his own. But above all, it is about his love for the city. “There is no city like this in the world,” he says. “There never was.”

His fiancée says with disdain, “You act like you’ve never been here before.”

And that, in essence, to me, is Paris. Every time is the first time. 

Lisbon: Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to Discoveries) in Portgual.

4. New Jersey. What?! New Jersey is on the list? Why, yes! No tax on clothing and accessories. I rest my case.

5. Lisbon. The seventh most visited city in Southern Europe, Lisbon, Portugal, is one of the oldest cities of Europe, older than London, Paris and Rome. Padrão dos Descobrimentos (Monument to Discoveries) is the landmark not to miss. It sits on the edge of the Tagus River, a tribute to explorers who sailed and discovered the world — including Ferdinand Magellan who sailed from Spain and discovered the Philippines for the Spanish Crown.

6. Ho Chi Minh. This Vietnamese city’s charm, as has been pointed out many times over, is in its pace. It is slow when you look at the old men sipping iced coffee on low chairs by the sidewalk, and fast when you look at the dizzying motorcycles that by no small amount of miracle manage to avoid each other. It took me two days to learn to cross the street. In between, glorious, cheap Vietnamese food in the markets and fancy restaurants were had.

7. Berlin. The epicenter of the end of the Cold War, Berlin may be under a united Germany now but my first impression of the city in 2007 was that you could still feel the division between communist and capitalist Germany even without the wall — and notwithstanding a Starbucks at the Brandenburg Gate. Or maybe because it was just because the weather sucked and the haunting Holocaust Museum reminded one of horrific times. At another time, spring, Berlin’s beauty surfaced to me. It was as glamorous as New York, as historical as Paris. My insides were all gooey with love for the city. Or to put it in John F. Kennedy’s terms, it felt like I was “a jelly donut.”

8-9. Singapore and Hong Kong. These two Asian cities are forever entwined to Filipino travelers. Most of our first trip abroad is to either Hong Kong or Singapore — and they are so different from each other. One is fast-paced, cutthroat, the other is more laid-back and grand in every manner that money can buy. Even after several trips, you find yourself wanting to go back: whether to shop, to see the new sights or to enjoy the old ones. And sometimes you get lucky enough to meet people you want to see more than the places themselves.

10. Amsterdam. Weed. Museums. Canals. Tulips in the spring. Houses on the canals. Did I mention weed?

11. Limpopo. This province north of Johannesburg and Pretoria in South Africa is home to Entabeni Game Reserve. In the early 2000s, I accompanied three Filipino university students to Cathay Pacific’s International Wilderness Experience. It was July, winter in the southern hemisphere, the trees were black, the lions on the prowl. Every night, as we zipped ourselves inside our sleeping bags with hot bottles, the safari guides zipped up the tents from the outside (tents had two beds and a shower stall) and warned us, “Do not go out until the morning, until we say it’s safe.”

Entabeni is a Big Five Game Reserve (lion, elephant, rhino, buffalo and leopard). At night, we went star gazing, at the crack of dawn we rode on jeeps to look for the Big Five, and one day, my team and I were tasked to cook lunch. We cooked adobo for no fewer than a hundred people (chicken and vegetarian, the latter using huge aubergines that were as filling as meat).

Several journalists and I left the reserve for two days and went to Kruger National Park, South Africa’s biggest game reserve covering 19,485 square kilometers in the provinces of Limpopo and Mpumalanga. Here, an elephant that felt her young were threatened came close to attacking several cars, including our jeep.  

“Sit still,” our guide hissed.

None of us had ever sat as still in our lives as we did on that jeep.

12. Baguio. Even with the mall-ification of Baguio, the mountain city is worth revisiting. For me, mainly for nostalgia. We used to go here every summer, when Session Road was walkable, the smell of pine trees gently assaulting you everywhere you went, and the Good Shepherd nuns made the best ube jam. We even went boating in Burnham Park once with our labrador retriever, the poor mutt scared out of her wits.

13. Salamanca.This city west of Madrid and near the Portuguese border is said to have the most beautiful plaza mayor or main square in all of Spain. And that’s saying a lot! Madrid’s is beautiful, but Salamanca’s is stunning mainly because of its color. The quarried stone used turns red in the afternoon light and because most of the city was built with it, the whole place is drenched in a beautiful hue.

Savannah: The Bird Girl, formerly at the Bonaventure Cemetery, is Savannah’s most famous icon thanks to the movie and book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. I manage to persuade the guard to ignore the no-photo rule.

14. Savannah. Ever since I saw the movie Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, I had wanted to go to Savannah and see the Bird Girl statue at Bonaventure Cemetery. Two years ago, finding myself in the US, I booked a flight to Savannah for the weekend. My cabbie from the airport must have been a hundred years old with a shock of white hair but he addressed me as “Ma’am.”

Oh, yes, Toto, I am finally in the Deep South.

It’s ridiculous how many town squares Savannah has — 23 of them — and in one Forrest Gump opened a box of chocolates. The streets are tree-lined, bursting with wild colors in the autumn punctuated by Spanish moss that look eerie at night.

Savannah is the only place in the US that I can set down my luggage for good.

On my second day, I found the Bird Girl statue — not in the cemetery but at the Telfair Museum. After the book and movie came out, Savannah’s tourist arrivals — specifically at the Bonaventure Cemetery — skyrocketed and they moved the statue.

“No pictures allowed,” the guard told me.

I pleaded with him, “I flew all the way from Manila to look at this statue.” Well, it wasn’ts not entirely a lie.

He took my camera in his hands and snapped a photo. 

15. Budapest. ….And then there was this other statue. More than a decade ago I saw a Lonely Planet episode where Ian Wright visited the Statue Park outside Budapest. This is where Hungary put all its communist/Cold War-era statues. Whereas other Eastern European countries destroyed theirs — or at least their people did — Hungary scooped them all up and put them in one park.

The statue of my obsession was an unnamed person holding out what seems to be a towel (or a flag), suspended in a run as if passing it on. It’s a humongous statue. My Nike Bowermans were buried in snow, I was freezing. I took turns snapping pictures of fellow solo travelers. (Stalin’s Boots, a complete statue that student protesters in the 1950s toppled, are here — yes, only the boots because the statue broke.)

Buda and Pest, the two districts divided by the Danube River, are stunning.

Of all my backpack travels, this is the one I love best.

16. Alberta. I am not big on nature. But last year, my friends and I went on a road trip that covered Canada’s three national parks — Banff, Waterton, and Jasper — taking the country’s most scenic route. The Canadian Rockies are spectacular, snow-capped all year round — and the best place to take a picture of the mountains is at the parking lot right when you enter the town. 

17. Legazpi. It was perhaps just bad timing that we did not get to swim with whale sharks in the summer. But one of my friends had been here some years ago and described how, in the first 15 minutes, they spotted about 15 whale sharks. Throughout the morning, they swam with more than 40 whale sharks! It is a forgone conclusion that I will go to Legazpi again and hopefully have better luck.

18. Florence. A city filled with art, museums, restaurants and stories. My favorite here is Giotto’s Bell Tower and that’s because of the story behind it. When the Pope was looking for an artist for the frescoes of the Dumo, he sent an emissary to get samples of their works. Giotto drew a perfect circle freehand on a sheet of paper. The Pope got it.

19. Prague. I was here for two days (though less than 24 hours), having booked passage at the last minute. No hotel, no contacts. Flanked by retail stores, Prague’s Stanislaw Square is one of the most beautiful in Europe, and its Old Town, with the Astronomical Clock Tower and Kafka’s Museum, is a must. An amuse bouche of a trip — next time, the whole menu.

20. Venice. The Bridge of Sighs, where prisoners about to be hanged got a last glimpse of Venice, at St. Mark’s Square is just one of the many bridges, winding roads and canals of this storied city. Hemingway’s Harry’s Bar is another story.

21. London . If cities were people, London may be the coolest nerd with its abundance of clubs, pubs, West End and museums. It is cool, hip, smart, and intelligent. It is the nerd that gets the girl in the end.

22. Warsaw. I saw the Polish capital when Europe was under a cold snap and through the eyes of a fellow journalist. We walked through the city and he explained both the sadness and triumphs of this country that was wiped off the map by several empires. I couldn’t have asked for a better guide.

Bellarocca: Marinduque’s luxe island is patterned after Greece’s Santorini. The waters here are some of the clearest in the country.

23. Bellarocca. A beautiful, elephant-shaped island in Marinduque, Bellarocca was inspired by the white houses of Santorini, and on one travel survey conducted by an Australian publication, it bested the original Greek isle.

Snorkeling in Bellarocca made me want to take up diving. The waters are so clear it’s like watching TV below. The corals are in fantastic shape and the fish are abundant. So I thought, if snorkeling in Bellarocca could give me such a high, what more would diving bring? To this day, I have never seen visibility as clear as Bellarocca’s waters.

24. Angkor Wat. It’s beauty of the ancient world preserved. Stories of ancient art and spirituality, and also of modern pillaging and of first-world countries coming together to restore all this. Plus, a real cool Pub St. after those dusty walks around this temple city.

25. Jerusalem. Everything about Jerusalem looks like Old Jerusalem. You walk the path where Jesus Christ walked when he was thrown in prison, where he wept for the city of Golgotha, where Judas hanged himself, and the Wailing Wall where, it is said, God hears every prayer whispered here.

New York: A city that inspires fierce love and loyalty in both natives and transplants.

26. New York City. What can I say about New York that hasn’t been said before? New York is the kind of place that inspires fierce love and loyalty in both natives and transplants. It’s hard to argue against them when they declare New York as the best city in the world. Even you would feel that, too.