Author: Nina Fuentes

  • Get inspired to travel with Pinterest

    Get inspired to travel with Pinterest

    I’m one of those millenials, the ones who grew up on the Internet. I practically live online — my work is based online, most of my friends now, are those that I met online, and I keep in touch with them and my family online. My hobbies for the past 20 years have been influenced…

  • A new travel companion: the Asus Zenfone 2

    A new travel companion: the Asus Zenfone 2

    My Nexus 4 started sputtering the Saturday before Mother’s day, and finally gave up on the 11th. I was phone-less, and while I prefer to have it repaired and keep on using it, I know I may have to look into buying a new phone. But which one to buy? With a limited budget (I’ll…

  • Indie Singapore: Free walking tours of the Lion City

    My brother has been living in Singapore since 1996, and I have been visiting him and his family since 2000. During that first visit, we made rounds of the tourist attractions every weekend. The next time I went there was in 2006, when I started traveling. Singapore has changed a lot since then, and in…

  • Travel Expenses: Matnog Island Hopping

    I’ve visited the Subic Daco beach and the Juag Fish Sanctuary back in 2011. It was cloudy then, and the waves were pretty big, so it wasn’t quite as pretty. We were awed, but the photos aren’t too impressive. Subic Daco It’s now the beginning of the summer season in the Philippines, and despite the…

  • Falling in love with Hanoi the second time around

    The first time I went to Hanoi was in 2010. It was the last stop in my 10-day trip in Vietnam, and after going from Ho Chi Minh, Hoi An, and Hue, I’m ready to just take it easy. Fortunately (or unfortunately), Toy Story 3 just came out, so instead of sightseeing as all the…

  • Bantayan Island Travel Expenses and Notes

    Last August, I finally bit the bullet and booked a flight to Cebu to finally make it out of the city and explore Bantayan Island. It just so happened that I won Airbnb credits at a contest, and there was a beachfront house listed. Perfect. Traveling for almost 12 hours from my house to Sta.…

  • Of pearls and vendors

    How do you deal with touts when you travel? In my years of travel, I’ve learned to ignore them, as engaging them (or in some extreme cases, just having a brief eye contact) leads to non-stop badgering to buy or contract their services. Unfortunately, I wasn’t share this advice to my cousin, so she got…

  • Review: Harolds Hotel in Cebu City

    In our family Viber group chat, my brother expressed his interest in joining the Cebu Marathon in January 2015. He’s excited by the lechon-shaped medal, but he laments that the rates for the good hotels are all too high. I told him to look for Harolds Hotel. He searched for the hotel on Agoda, and…

  • A birthday treat at Edsa Shangri-La Hotel

    I love getting e-mails from Hong Kong, because that meant good things were coming. And I was right — with it came a question: am I traveling sometime soon, and can Shangri-La assist with my accommodations? My travel plans at the time were non-existent, but I knew I wanted to have a special treat for…