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Off the Beaten Track: Mapun, Tawi-Tawi

By Kin Enriquez
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Guest post by Mara Ione Sarail Mapun? Where is that?” I get this question a lot when people ask me about my hometown. I’d ramble on and on the island (its location and the culture and the pretty spots...) but since the place is not really in any of the Philippines tourist spots and is in the middle of nowhere, I might as well talk about Atlantis instead. But the island does exist.  Mapun Tawi-Tawi or Cagayan de Sulu) is an island municipality in the Sulu Sea on the southwestern extreme of the Philippines, located very close to Sabah. Or from the way I see it on the Philippine map, the island is located on the Philippine’s “armpit”. Mapun is a volcanic island. The picture above shows Mt. Nanggoy, an inactive volcano near the Sapah Lake. The most popular tourist attraction in Mapun would be the three crater lakes on the west part of the island. Legend says that the three lakes were once volcanoes that erupted together. The first two, Danao and Singuwang, becam
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Golden Tara of Agusan

By Kin Enriquez
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One of the main reasons why I am always drawn to museums when I travel is that I would want to see, in real life, the fascinating things that I've only read in books or have seen in the films, such as archaeological artifacts or the paintings of Van Gogh and Dali . Museums give you access to all that. I majored in History when I was an undergraduate in the University of the Philippines. As such, I am always excited to see artifacts and historical curiosities that I encounter during my travels. But sometimes, they also make me sad, like when I saw the Golden Tara of Agusan in the Field Museum in Chicago.  The reverse of the Golden Tara The Golden Tara is a gold statue of a Hindu-Malayan deity discovered in 1917 in Esperanza, Agusan del Sur, in southern Philippines. Weighing about four pounds, the 21-karat gold statue depicts a woman deity sitting cross-legged, ornamented with a headdress and various accruements in the arms and legs. It was dated to early 13
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National Museum of the Philippines

By Kin Enriquez
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It's quite ironic that many people sometimes neglect to see the treasures that are right in their doorsteps. The usual excuse is, "they're just there and they aren't going away anyway."  I sometimes have that problem; I've been inside some of the great museums abroad, but I haven't been to the one just a few miles from where I live. I did try to rectify that last weekend, when I went out of my usual weekend routine of going to the gym and then to the mall. I went to see the National Museum of the Philippines in Manila instead.  Facade of the Old Congress Building, home of the National Museum Known in Filipino as the Pambansang Museo ng Pilipinas , the museum is the official repository of historical and cultural treasures of the Philippines. The museum is composed of several institutions, including the National Planetarium and the Museum of the Filipino People. It also has several branches around the country, the Fort Pilar Museum in Zam
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