Prayer mountain

The Philippines and Indonesia are twin countries- from our languages, to our traffic jams, to our food, to our disaster-prone location. But being geologically older, blocks of stone can be hewn from its mountains, allowing monumental buildings and structures to be erected which have stood nature's fickleness and humanities' ineptitude. The example of which is BOROBUDUR, pictured above. This is in comparison with the Philippines lack of such "indigenous" materials, the awful substitute of which is adobe- compacted volcanic soil- which is so much less sturdy thereby making it less likely to survive the heavy stresses of living in the Pacific Ring of Fire and being the Asian Doormat of Typhoons.

But lest I be misinterpreted, the Philippines has a very rich cultural heritage, albeit different and relatively young vis-a-vis Indonesia's standing existing samples. Who know what can be unearthed by Philippine archaeologists in the days to come...

Borobudur, June 2006, using my Canon A430 digicam.