The colonial city of Vigan is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, for good reason. It is one of the few Spanish colonial towns in the Philippines to remain relatively intact. Its unique architecture fuses native Filipino and Oriental building styles with more typical colonial Spanish features.
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It must be museums week at Travel with Me, because after taking you to Manila’s Ayala Museum a few days ago, today I want to introduce you to a couple of museums we visited in Vigan. Although my usual preference when travelling is to be out and about absorbing local colour, time spent in a smaller museum in particular can be a very rewarding complement to this.
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It has to be said that Manila is not the most appealing of cities. While the largely reconstructed old city of Intramuros has its charms, much of the rest of the city is a sprawl of modern skyscrapers, older housing, near-slums, and very congested traffic. It is the world’s fourth largest city and one of its most densely populated. However, there are gems to be found half-hidden in the sprawl.
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There is something about a ruin that speaks to me as a photographer. The stories the old structures could tell of people and events from the past sometimes seem more vivid than those of a better-preserved or reconstructed old building. And where better to explore some ruins than among the temples of Angkor in Cambodia?
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You can live in a city all your life and never uncover all its secrets nor learn all its history. There are always new places to discover and explore. A very recent outing of discovery took me from my home in Ealing, west London, to a park in Abbey Wood on the city’s eastern fringes.
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Much of Manila is modern, manic and frenetic. While there are sights to be explored these are scattered and separated by long drives in slow-moving traffic. But Intramuros is different. The name means ‘within the walls' or 'inside the walls’, for this is the small historic walled area where the city began.
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The Louvre Abu Dhabi displays art from very early civilisations up to the present day, in chronological order. And unlike many others, it presents various contemporaneous cultures alongside each other. You follow a thread from early self-contained kingdoms through conquest and expansion into empires.
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I’m not a fan of living in the past. Nostalgia can be a dangerous exercise and too often people look back with rose-tinted glasses at a past that never really existed. But I do enjoy looking through sepia-tinted glasses from time to time!
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Bodie is a former gold mining town, now a ghost town which, as the state park website says, has been ‘preserved in a state of arrested decay'. It looks largely as it did when the last residents left, its buildings still furnished and stocked with goods, offering a unique glimpse into the past.
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Planning our California itinerary was a bit like playing join the dots! There were plenty of places we knew we wanted to go to, sights we wanted to see. The great national parks, the giant redwood trees, the Pacific Coast and inland landscapes. Once those were plotted, we had to find the best routes between them. But what is best?
