Today is the 109th anniversary of the Philippine Declaration of Independence and I’m celebrating it by launching the beta version of Lakbayan! See how much of the Philippines you have visited! To whet your appetite and give you a preview of what to expect, my personal result is shown below.

As you can see, I have almost never been outside Luzon when traveling in the Philippines, thus the really low ‘C-’ grade. I’ve only been to Puerto Galera and Bacolod outside our country’s largest island.

I got the idea to do Lakbayan from the Visited Countries website. But it’s not just a localized rip-off. I have added some additional features. For one, instead of a simple “yes/no” answer to the question of whether you have visited a territory or not, there are five possible answers ranging from never-visited, and just-passing-through, up to I-have-lived-here. Also, you also get a Traveler’s Grade from the failing ‘F’ up to the god-like traveler ‘A+’. (It’s probably only senators and up who can claim an A+ grade. Hehehe.)

I’ve separated most popular tourist spots and cities from their provinces—just because you’ve been to Boracay doesn’t really mean that you’ve “seen” Aklan, right?

Oh yeah, I’d really appreciate reactions, bug reports, and suggestions. (This blog post’s comment form also doubles as a contact form.) As I’ve said, Lakbayan is currently in beta stage and I’ve enlisted all you vaes9 readers as my beta-testers. Hopefully this project won’t crash my server due to its viral nature (sorry to the 30+ other websites I share the machine with, in case that happens). If you enjoyed Lakbayan, some link love to it and this blog post is appreciated.

For the technically inclined, I’ll do a follow-up post detailing the development details and the design considerations I made when constructing this website. But for now, enjoy!