rope bridges

Check out the rope bridge in Tanay, Rizal, which will be celebrating its 400th anniversary next year 2006.

In Mindanao near Iligan, they have a bunch of rope bridges too, an adventure tourist thing there where you walk the rope in the tropical forest canopy. I ended up walking on a replica that was only 20 ft high compared to the 200 ft of the real one. But it's just as scary. Apparently, the replica was originally quite rugged until some college kids kept trying to jump up and down on it. After that, they "loosened" the bridge to make it more wobbly (ie unstable) to keep people from goofing off on it.

Kind of contradictory to American sensibilities that would post people to supervise the walk overs and maybe put a safety net underneath in reaction to the college kids jumping on the bridge, you know to protect you from yourself.

As "dangerous" as the Philippines can be: cars running you over, floods, dengue, etc, I enjoy the danger. It becomes very apparent that the responsibility for your life is on you and there's no one else to really blame if you screw it up. Plus it forces folks to watch out for the ones they care about because frankly no one else will.