April 14-17, 2022. The first part of my trip was devoted to spending quality time with my family, celebrating my mom and my brother’s birthdays staying in a proper luxury boutique resort in Dauin, a town south of Dumaguete, and doing day tours in provincial capital and its surrounding towns of Valencia, Bais and Manjuyod.
How we got there
It takes just above an hour by plane from Manila to get to Dumaguete, the capital of the province, and the gateway to all the other places in this part of Central Visayas. From the airport, we had a pre-booked van in order to go to the resort in Dauin, a dozen or so kilometers to the south of Dumaguete.
What we did
For our first day, a friend of my mom’s friend toured us around some parts of Dumaguete. After stopping by a the Catholic church in the center of the city, we went to Valencia to drive around some of the mountain attractions. We made several stops including one at a road side where sulfur steams out from the ground.
July 28, 2020. Two of my LL.M. classmates who had remained in Paris over the coronavirus confinement invited me to a day trip to Compiègne and Amiens, just short train rides away north of Paris. It served as our first reunion, months after our abrupt separation as a class last March when most of the class (including myself) hurriedly flew out of Paris to seek refuge in our respective countries of origin.
So I met my Japanese and Russian classmates at the Gare du Nord in the morning and we all took an almost-empty summer weekday train, first, to the town of Compiègne, which only took less than an hour.