Cause of my tiny school backpack taxi drivers wouldn’t believe I was going to the airport and thought I’d just be off to school or a mall.
When I started blogging intermittently when i was about 16years old on my now-defunct Multiply site, I wrote about topics ranging from night outs, jokes, girly stuff and gasp! Twilight.
But the real kicker was my 1 week solo sojourn to Sagada when I shared all of my travel photos in an album plus a long litany of my adventures in Multiply I was pleasantly surprised to see it got about 50 comments and was even tagged at the FAQs section of the Sagada Genuine Guides blog page under the question, “Is it safe for a solo female traveler to go to Sagada?” Then afterwards i got to travel more with a good friend Marky going on random buses to beautiful virgin beaches.
I really thought that was an isolated incident but nope, I’m still prone to doing stupid stuff like this.
I remember not even bringing cameras during my early days and just used my lame 2mp Iphone camera. But upon Marky’s insistent prodding I slowly started to post my adventures on my first ever formal weblog: www.pandelicious.wordpress.com, named after my character in the online game Ragnarok.
Then I became part of a lovely group called Pinoy Travel Bloggers– the coolest Filipinos are members and if you are not here, then you are probably not cool, or a travel blogger. Or a Filipino, don’t take it personally.
After my inauguration trip to Pahiyas Festivalthe people who I was with spawned a spin-off group called PTB Bagets, where only the coolest of the cool are allowed to join.
While there I read more blogs and learned loads, consequently my traveler’s itch got worse and now I can say that i’ve happily stepped on Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao, and even on a few places some could consider as hostile I still wore my high heeled boots and bug-eyed sunglasses with panache.
1. Thanks to PTB, I got my first article write-up in a Class A-B Travel Magazine. And few publishing gigs here and there. It’s not through the roof yet, but I can only blame my non-existent work ethics.
2. My blog (back then was called Junk and Crunk by Pandelicious) was nominated as the Best Newcomer in and International Travels Group based in Europe: Travel Bloggers Unite I didn’t win, but it was nice to have my barely updated blog be recognized in the global network.
3. I got paid online with $. I was so psyched to even get what my colleagues could refer to as chump change because I barely even update my blog (note to self: must change that soon)
4. Self-improvement. Various skills go hand in hand with travel blogging but sadly most of them are overlooked. Computer literacy is expected to be on a higher level. I found myself studying about codex and CSS and more things up to know I still can’t understand because I want to make my blog better.
5. Finally there’s that realization that I’m just doing it because I irrevocably love traveling… and writing. It was certain to me from the get-go that I won’t have much readers, I won’t earn anything or gain anything from this apart from experience and practice. There are buckets and dozens of other travelers in the blogosphere who are better in every conceivable way but I’m fine with it. I get the ultimate high on the road anyway and anything more than that is just gravy. 
This angry blogpost is for the PTB blog carnival, sure it seems like that but it’s probably just done because I’m bored and hungry right now.