Road Trip to Palaui (January 2010)

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A crosspost from my old repository of memories of the past, a.k.a. my Multiply site. For those who are unfamiliar, Multiply was THE thing during our med school years — everyone was on multiply, posting albums and albums of pictures, notes/blogs. This was our home, our network away from our books and transes. Of course these all happened before everyone jumped-ship to FB, and before multiply became the E-STORE that it is now.

But even now that multiply’s hayday is over, I still maintain my multiply site from time to time. I uploaded almost all of the pictures I took from years 2004-2009, making my site my virtual hard drive, a back-up system.

Hence this post. A glimpse of a memory made last January 2010, when my high school friends and I made a tireless journey up north (all 600 KM of it!) and returned in just 2 1/2 days!

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January 1-3, 2010

Palaui Island & Anguib Beach in Sta Ana, Cagayan
Callao Caves in Penablanca, Cagayan
Magat Dam in Isabela

Moviefriends’ Roadtrip to the North! This is actually our second long-haul drive to the north, the first one was our Ilocos adventure last 2005 (grabe, 5 years ago?). But since Meiling, who now secretly does research for a super secret IT company in Japan, came home, of course we needed to travel! By hook or by crook, kahit san man, kailangan matuloy!

Pero sa totoo lang, muntik nang di matuloy. Just 2 days before our departure date of JANUARY 1 (of all days, kailangan New Year talaga, haha) we still didn’t have a place to go to. On the top of our list was Baler, Aurora to do surfing and whatnot. But I soon found out that we needed a 4×4 to go there dahil nasira daw yung daan dahil sa Ondoy. Ok, so Aurora was crossed-out from our list. I suggested we drive to Banaue Rice Terraces instead and do spelunking in Sagada after. Well, gusto pa rin ata nilang magbeach so kailangan may beach.

We still did not have any destination until 1 day before leaving, I browsed my handy Travel Map of the Philippines (thanks Maan! <3) and saw that in the Northeastern most tip of Luzon is where Palaui island is located, the game fishing capital of the Philippines, and it also has a lot of tourist activities like snorkeling and a nearby whitesand-like-Bora beach. I researched the place in the net and saw this:

We’re definitely going there!

We left QC around 10PM on the first day of 2010, armed with a CD of 17 of JA’s latest mixes (including Party in the USA of Miley Cyrus, haha) and of course the Glee soundtrack (unending “Just a small town girl…”), and much of Eheads and other 90′s music, we traversed the NLEX-SCTEX-Tarlac-Nueva Ecija-Nueva Viscaya-Isabela-Cagayan route eventually arriving at San Vicente, Cagayan (the jump off point to our destination – Palaui Island) at around 11AM of January 2! Not bad. 642km in 12 hours = ~50kph, ang bagal pala namin, hahaha.

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Dinner Date

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Dinner cooked and prepared by my personal chef named Maan :)

Fried eggplant + salted egg with tomatoes + smoked boneless milkfish + slices of oranges

(pritong talong + itlog na maalat at kamatis + tinapang bangus + sunkist oranges)

Definitely beats being stuck in traffic on a busy and rainy Friday night! TV series marathon to follow! :-)

The Makings of a Master Surgeon

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For the past two days the second and third years have been attending surgical skills workshops organized by the department. We’ve been practicing vascular and bowel anastomosis on rubber tubes and cow intestines hopefully developing our skills and building confidence when the time comes when we’re the ones who’ll be doing these on actual patients.

These two essential skills of any surgeon, are probably the two toughest to master. So many morbidities, even mortalities, come from the “poor surgical technique” factor, begging the importance of these two workshops.


While med students practice on pigs legs on basic suturing, we residents also have this. Hehe

We’re also very honored to have been taught by the masters, Dr Concejero for the vascular anastomosis, famous for being one of the vascular surgeons of the first liver transplant in recent years; and Dr Dela Paz showing his superb skills on bowel anastomosis.

This is definitely a milestone in the makings of a master sugeon.