“The Magic Is Here!” so goes the slogan of Enchanted Kingdom, arguably the country’s most well-known amusement park. This 17-hectare park is located in the city of Sta. Rosa, Laguna and its Space Shuttle roller coaster (a Vekoma Boomerang model) is quite visible from the South Luzon Expressway about 300 meters to the west.

The park is divided into several sections: Spaceport (where the Space Shuttle and kart race course is located), Portabello, Brooklyn Place (the Rialto can be found here), Victoria Park, Boulderville, Midway Boardwalk (get seasick at Anchor’s Away here), and Jungle Outpost (home of the Jungle Log Jam). And every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night at 10pm the park puts up a fireworks display. (I wonder how they can afford to pay for all that.)

Anyway, there’s ton’s of information over at the Enchanted Kingdom official website if you want to learn more.

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No first-time visit to Baguio City will be complete without going to Burnham Park at the very center of the city. To the northwest is the City Hall and off to the northeast is the famous Session Road. Standing imposingly on a hill to the east is SM City Baguio.

Named after the city’s planner, American Daniel Burnham, the park’s centerpiece attraction is the approximately 2-hectare man-made lagoon where people can hire boats and row around. To the southeast of the lagoon is the city’s popular skating rink and south of that is an Olympic-sized track-and-field oval and an Olympic-sized swimming pool. To the northeast is the park’s soccer field and grandstand, where concerts are often held. The street to the southwest of the lagoon is a popular bicycle area, besides which is a large children’s park, and to the west of the lagoon is the Orchidarium, showcasing many varieties of flowers and plants that grow within the region.

See more websites about Burnham Park in Google or view some pictures from Google Images or read and improve its Wikipedia article.

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In Daraga, Albay is the famous Cagsawa Ruins, probably the most photographed location in Albay. On February 1, 1814, Mayon Volcano erupted and buried the town of Cagsawa in lava flows. About 1,200 people perished and many of them sought refuge in the town’s church, thinking they would be saved. Now all that remains is the church’s bell tower, the area around which is now developed into a popular tourist spot.

Anyway, on Google Maps, the bell tower is the “tree” with the longest shadow. Well, there are actually plants and shrubs growing on top of the tower (as can be seen from these ground-level photos) so it does look like a tree from up above. And yes, there’s a swimming resort to the east as well as souvenir shops to the southeast.

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To complement our previous post on the northern end of NLEX is its sibling, the southern end of the South Luzon Expressway, or Exit 50, located in Brgy. Turbina, Calamba City, Laguna. From here, motorists going further can turn east into the heart of Laguna, like Los Baños, Pagsanjan, Sta. Cruz, and Lake Caliraya. Motorists can also head west into Batangas to go to the Batangas Pier (for Puerto Galera) or drive to Quezon and the Bicol Region.

There are plans to extend the South Luzon Expressway to connect it with the Southern Tagalog Arterial Road, or more popularly known as the STAR Tollway. Spur routes are also planned to provide high speed routes to Batangas City and Lucena City.

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Our first featured sight from the new satellite images is the Academic Oval of the University of the Philippines, Diliman. (Okay, so I’m a proud alumnus.) The Acad Oval consists of the Osmeña, Roxas, and Ma. Regidor avenues and it surrounds The Oblation, Quezon Hall (aka Admin), the U.P. Lagoon, Gonzalez Hall (aka the Main Libe), and the Sunken Garden (supposedly officially called the Gen. Antonio Luna Parading Grounds). Around the Acad Oval are the colleges and schools of Mass Communication, Music, Engineering, Law, Economics, Business Administration, Education, Social Science and Philosophy, and Arts and Letters.

The Acad Oval is the central activity area of the whole U.P. Diliman campus. All of the six U.P. jeepney routes pass along portions of the oval and the oval becomes a virtual family park on Sundays when Roxas and Osmeña are closed to vehicular traffic. You can almost always see joggers going around the oval and quite a lot of people sit in and around the Sunken Garden area.

Some Acad Oval trivia (not all certified true) usually given to the incoming freshmen:

• The Acad Oval is 2.2 kilometers long.
• There are 16 humps around the oval.
• There are 281 acacia trees lining the oval, 109 on the outer lane

• The lampposts on the oval light up at 6 p.m.
• The western end of the oval is Kilometer 14 while the eastern end is Kilometer 15.

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I wasn’t expecting it to arrive so soon, but Google Maps now has the same new satellite imagery enjoyed several days ago by Google Earth. Quite a lot of places in the Philippines now have high-resolution photos and the map below shows their locations.

Some of the covered cities include: Laoag, Vigan, Baguio, San Fernando (La Union), Dagupan, Angeles, Olongapo, Balanga, San Jose del Monte, Metro Manila, Antipolo, Cavite City, Naga, Legazpi, Calbayog, Tacloban, Cebu, Mandaue, Lapu-Lapu, Danao, Bacolod, Puerto Princesa, Butuan, Bislig, Cagayan de Oro, Iligan, Zamboanga, Cotabato City, Panabo, and Davao.

Two of our previous sights now have high-resolution imagery: San Juanico Bridge and San Roque Dam.

Now would be a good time to bring in those submissions!

Dedicated to Jose Rizal in 1979 is the Dr. Jose Rizal Park on Beacon Hill in Seattle, Washington. To the northwest of the park is the massive junction between Interstates 5 and 90 and across 12th Avenue to the east is the headquarters of Internet giant Amazon.com.

The park is a popular lookout point among locals and is a popular meeting place among the Filipinos in Seattle, who number around 30,000. The park offers amazing views of the surrounding area, especially of downtown Seattle and Puget Sound. See these pictures from Seattle Views. You may also read up on the history of the park or go see its official page maintained by the city government’s Parks and Recreation agency.

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Update: June 21, 2006. The new imagery from Google Earth has now arrived in Google Maps. This means you can no longer see the dam under construction in Google Maps.

While not as provocative as the destruction of Porta Farm in Zimbabwe or as heartbreaking as the devastation of the tsunami in Banda Aceh, we can still have relevant before-and-after comparisons of places here in the Philippines.

The San Roque Dam in San Manuel, Pangasinan is the controversial public works project which aimed to dam the Agno River to provide 345 MW of hydroelectric power, to prevent flooding, and to provide irrigation to tens of thousands of hectares of agricultural land.

The indigenous Ibaloi people, who live upstream of the dam in Itogon, Benguet have been fiercely opposed to the project. The dam, they said, would disrupt their communities, inundate sacred sites, and force resettlement of hundreds of families who were already disturbed with the construction of Ambuklao and Binga Dams in 1954 and 1961 respectively. Nevertheless, the project was completed in 2002 and a reservoir now stands on the Agno River basin. See the official website of San Roque Dam or the Wikipedia article.

The picture below shows the San Roque Dam and reservoir area during the dam’s construction (left half, around 2000) and after the reservoir has been filled (right half, around 2004). These images are possible because of Google Earth’s imagery update last week. There is an interval between when the imagery is introduced to Google Earth and when the same imagery is updated in Google Maps, so using Google’s products, we get to see before and after images of sites in the Philippines.

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TheCoffee, a friend of mine, has told me that Google Earth has updated its satellite imagery. Metro Manila, Cebu, Bacolod, Davao, and Zamboanga, among others, finally have high-resolution images! See this Google Earth screenshot of the Quezon Memorial Circle. For more excitement, head on over to this thread at SkyscraperCity.

I think we can expect to have these updated imagery in Google Maps within one month. Expect a ton of updates for this blog when that time comes. =)

The Davao International Airport (IATA code DVO, ICAO code RPMD), officially known as the Francisco Bangoy International Airport, is Mindanao’s busiest airport. Pictured in the thumbnail is the new modern-looking terminal, completed in 2003, which can handle more than a million passengers yearly.

The airport features a 3-kilometer long runway and currently serves domestic flights to Davao City for the big four (PAL, Cebu Pacific, Asian Spirit, and Air Philippines) as well as international flights to Singapore, Malaysia, and Indonesia. It is publicly operated by the government’s Air Transportation Office.

On Google Maps, you can spot the old terminal just across the runway directly to the east. The difference is striking. Some travellers have commented that the Davao’s new terminal is even better than NAIA’s Centennial Terminal. There’s more information about the airport over at Wikipedia.

So who is Francisco Bangoy anyway? The web doesn’t provide direct answers, but careful looking seems to point out that Francisco Bangoy is the patriach of the prominent Bangoy family of Davao City.

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