C&CS in Palawan

January 11-12, 2006

Tropical team building

Every year, I make sure to plan an off site team building event with my team at work. Of course, being in the Philippines has the added advantage of being right in the middle of more than 7,000 tropical islands so we always end up somewhere (very) nice. In the past we've been to Cebu, Bohol and Boracay, this year it was time to visit Palawan.

Tiny and rusty. Those were my first impressions when I saw our airplane. I had a hunch it wasn't going to be big when they weighed us at check in "to assign seats to spread the weight evenly throughout the plane". Inside, there was one row of single seats and one row of double seats. The cockpit wasn't closed off - all there was was a narrow board that allowed us to watch over the shoulder of each pilot. They had the window open while they started the engine (show offs!) and inside the plating had come half undone near one of them. The landing wasn't much more reassuring, as we flew over a plane wreck (!!!) and rode off the landing strip onto a rocky sand path...

The resort we went to was called Dive Link - a nice place looking out over the water, complete with cottages, a pool, an open air restaurant and a function room. It wasn't as fancy as some of the other places we had been to but the location made up for that.

The team building events were cool as always with memorable moments like Malong trying to canoo from one side of the shore to the other, but instead ending up going in circles as he just couldn't handle the paddles. We swam and rafted in a stunningly beautiful lakes, AJ showed off his diving skills, I threw over a boat with Tin who couldn't swim - a fact I forgot for an instant, Malong took a picture of Kats and Kawase-san that could go straight into a glossy magazine, Bel was being his gorgeous self as you can see in the pictures below.

Read the full story at the entry for January 2007 (either in recent or in the archives...)