Looking back at 2012

Happy New Year to all! It's already 2013, but I got to revisit my trips for 2012 only now since I was traveling up until the last day of the year. In fact, I have passport stamps for the first and last day of the year, and arrived home at exactly 12 midnight with no second to spare!

While 2011 remains the benchmark year for international trips, last year was not far behind. I spent a week in South Korea with UP AIT at the start of the year for Woosong University's Winter Culture Camp (Daejeon, Seoul and Muju). In March, I stayed in Singapore for a week, exploring many new attractions. 

Summer saw me back in Europe with a three week trip to the United Kingdom, which took me through many cities in England (London, Oxford, York, Lake District, Liverpool, Manchester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Cotswolds, Bath and Stonehenge), Scotland (Edinburgh, Highland Region, Isle of Skye, Glasgow) and Wales (Cardiff). 

The afternoon I got back, I switched terminals to fly to Malaysia and catch the Mount Kinabalu Expedition 2012 in Sabah. We also joined EVA Air's trip to Taiwan (Taipei and Hualien) in May.

A weekend trip to Thailand, a week in Myanmar (Yangon, Mandalay, Inle Lake and Bagan) and four days in Sri Lanka (Dambulla, Sigiriya, Polonnaruwa, Kandy, Colombo and Negombo), plus transit in Malaysia all happened in July. I had to beg off from international travel from the rest of July to November as we prepared for the very well-attended ICOMOS International Cultural Tourism Conference in Vigan. And the effort was all worth it.

Pleasant surprises followed with back-to-back long-haul trips to Canada as part of the maiden flight of Philippine Airlines to Toronto, and ten days in Southern Italy (Alberobello, Matera, Naples, Pompei, Sorrento and Capri), Sicily (Taormina, Agrigento, Palermo and Cefalu), Rome and the Vatican City for Christmas until the New Year. 

Local destinations were exciting too! I realized I revisited many of our country's major tourism destination (Bicol, Bohol, Boracay, Cebu, Davao, Ifugao, Vigan, Palawan and Puerto Galera among many others), returning to some of them twice or even thrice this year. 

Here's my Travel Year 2012 album. I'm definitely looking forward to 2013!