So last weekend I had the last minute opportunity to jump on a tour to Banaue and Sagada for 4 days. These towns are located in the northern part of Luzon Island (the island Manila is on). This area is known for the beautiful rice terraces and being the more mountainous area of the Philippines. We left at 3:30am and started our 12hr drive. If you look on a map, it's really not that far, but after driving there you realized why it takes so long....the roads are CRAZY!
Our first pit stop of the day was at a pay toilet on the side of the road. Although I am learning some Tagalog, the sign on the bathroom was in a different dialect so I had no idea what it meant. It said "ihi - P3, bawas P6". I jokingly said to the other ladies "must be 3 pesos for a pee and 6 pesos for a poo" We were all laughing our asses off until I asked the toilet attendant what ihi and bawas meant and he confirmed my interpretation. Maybe I am smarter than I think!
At this same rest stop they had some monkeys tied up on chains sitting outside the washroom area. Now, this was obviously a tourist trap and the monkeys looked a little crazy so I stayed clear. One of the ladies turned her back to get a picture taken and the monkey jumped with his mouth open and landed on her arm. I think she had to change her underwear after that! Thank god she had a long sleeve shirt on and he didn't puncture her skin. Stay away from the monkeys!
Eight hours later we arrived in Banaue. It was raining but we decided to go for a hike to Tam-an Village anyway. It was really interesting to walk through the rice terraces and the local villages. It's so crazy to imagine that all of these rices terraces were built by hand and carved out of the mountains over the past 500 years. The hike took about 3 hours and once we finished the group decided to take trikes back to the hotel vs walk. Thank goodness as I was beat.
The next day we woke up early and drove to Sagada. Now, I have lived in the mountains most of my life, consider myself pretty adventurous and have driven on some crazy roads, but this road took the cake for me. Huge buses and cars driving like freakin race car drivers down a one lane dirt road with no guard rails it a bit too much for me. It was also raining and you could see previous mudslides everywhere. Thank goodness we made it in one piece!
Once we arrived in Sagada, we started our tour of Sumaging Cave. As you can see by the video it's pretty amazing. As you enter the cave you can hear the thousands of bats who call this cave home. I gotta say it was kind of creepy. As you descend to below where they are hanging, there is bat poop all over the place and it's so slippery that you can't help but get it on your hands. Agghh...gross. And the smell is something nasty! Once we got past that part it was super cool. You take your shoes off and it it all limestone formations with water gushing through it. There is no way you could do this in the US. They would make you sign so many waivers and require all sorts of training so it wouldn't be worth it. Besides the fact that they wouldn't leave it in original condition - they would have a huge paved path through it. We were squeezing through these tight cracks, dropping off of cliffs with ropes attached, and swimming through pools. It was definitely the coolest and most fun cave I have ever been in.
For dinner I split up from the group as I had heard through a friend of a friend that I needed to go to this place called the Log Cabin for dinner and they had made me a reservation. There is a french chef who lives in Sagada and on Saturday nights he does a buffet with all local ingredients from Sagada. You never know what it will be but it always include homemade bread, soup, meat, salad, dessert. I didn't really know what to expect but it blew away my expectations! You basically walk into this huge kitchen where all of the food he has made it waiting. It looked amazing (and it was)! Some of the things he makes are not things you would every think to put together. For example, the dessert was a pudding with squash and blueberries. It was fabulous! The best part was that the whole feast only cost P350 (about $6). After dinner they start a fire outside the restaurant and have a nice round stone patio set-up for everyone to sit around and chat.
The next day we drove back to Sagada and hiked through some different rice terraces and villages. It was so beautiful! The pictures can't capture the amount and beauty of the rice terraces. After that it was the 8 hr trip back to Manila. I can't wait to go back!
Some of the interesting things I saw/learned on this trip were:
- After the rice is harvested, they need to dry it and they do this on the sides of the road. So there are miles and miles of rice just sitting on the side of the road drying.
- Road construction here is done by hand and take years to finish so the workers live in road side labor camps on the sides of the roads.
- Although the Philippines is 80% Catholic, almost every handicraft shop I went into had a huge statue of some sort of penis. Sometimes it was a man holding his giant penis, sometimes it was a woman riding the penis. I didn't quite get it but it was pretty funny!
No comments:
Post a Comment