Climbing The Datum Origin

5/15/2014 8:24:26 AM

As yours truly, along with several friends, reached the island of Marinduque for the first time (in my lifetime), we are supposedly boarding a trip to the town known as Torrijos later that day.

Until a sudden change of plan went on, and early in that Friday morning, we hiked up on that mountain known as Datum Origin.

Sounds new to me, actually; I personally have no idea what the place was all about until I saw the historic landmark there. Our crew took about 90 minutes of trekking; with only armed with a bottle of mineral water and a face towel on me.

Gosh, that was really an exhausting one; considering I never experienced climbing a mountain like that!

Unfortunately for me though, my phone battery died out while travelling; which made me unable to take photographs to routing those muddy roads, steep terrain, and hollow-blocked constructed stairs. So instead, I could only rely on other photographs from the World Wide Web (with proper citation, of course; except for the last one which was taken by yours truly on my way back to the Metro).

Plus, the danger of not having somebody to guide around seemed horrifying (I don’t know why the hell we don’t have that, though all I know is that my college friend who used to live on that province seems she knew a lot).

Facebook page: Luzon Datum of 1911-Marinduque

But reaching the peak was always the best part. At around 10:30 in the morning, we finally reached Datum Origin, the geodetically-speaking centralized point of the entire Republic of the Philippines archipelago! All that despite having a tough time to text one of my close online friends to tell the news. 

http://journeyingjames.com/

That Datum Origin of Luzon was formally situated in 1911 in this stone. Still a nice spot after a hundred years, eh? (101 in fact, during the time I climbed the mountain.)

Facebook page: Luzon Datum of 1911-Marinduque

Facebook page: Luzon Datum of 1911-Marinduque

Up there you can see the entire island as well as the wide open seas around it.

http://www.ugnayan.com/

Nevertheless, it was still a memorable ride. Forget the exhaustion, the stinky feeling of sweat all around your body, as well as body aches, and muscle pains on its aftermath.

However, the downside (perhaps, an irony too) is: the longer time you took to climb a mountain, the faster you go down. Yes, as I told earlier, it took us 1 ½ hour to get up there. 

But hitting downstairs? Shoot – only 25 minutes! Yes, 25 freaking minutes! It's like we start trekking up by around 9 AM, reached there about 90 minutes before noontime, and as we got down by 11:15 AM, we were already at the ground level about twenty minutes before noontime (11:40 AM), if I'm not mistaken.

And only to realized we're still strolling around the nearby Station Balanacan in Mogpog (just down there's the port connecting from Lucena to this island) and will have to travel for like three to four hours on our destination?

Okay, 'nuff said. Off to Torrijos!

Author: slickmaster | © 2014 september twenty-eight productions