Once again it has been awhile since I have posted... Brian and I have been back at my family homestead in Tennessee for almost 2 weeks now, and unfortunately things are not going well. The cancer has spread to my mom's brain, so we would really appreciate if everyone could keep her in their thoughts and prayers, as the prognosis is not good. It's been quite a shock for us to one day be strolling through Asia planning our next destination and then the next day to be catching a last minute flight back to the US to stay with my parents indefinitely, but we are really glad that we have the luxury of this flexibility so we can be with my family at this time. I have a few minutes free while my mom is sleeping, so I thought I'd continue with the blog where I left off a couple weeks ago...
From Boracay we took the tiny propeller plane back to Manila and jumped on the local Victory Liner bus for the 8-hour ride to Baguio, in the northern Philippines. Getting to the Cordilleras requires long, grueling bus and jeepney rides no matter which way you go, due to unpaved bumpy mountain roads and a lack of any other transportation method. Luckily, most of the road up to Baguio was paved, so that ride was fairly smooth, but we did have to deal with people jumping on the bus to hawk goods at us repeatedly (see pic). We arrived in Baguio around midnight, and decided to check into a room at the Microtel above the bus station to get a few hours of sleep before our 6am bus the next morning for the 5.5-hour ride to Sagada. Morning came way too soon, and we boarded the rickety bus with schoolbus-like seating and off we went up the jarring mountain roads. About every 100 feet we could look down and see sections of the road that had collapsed down the mountain; luckily we never spotted any buses down there!
Once we arrived in Sagada we found a clean private double room with a bathroom to rent for $8.50/night (little did we know it also included a strong stench of sewage and a rooster outside the window that thought the sun came up at 2am!), and set off on the hiking trail through Echo Valley to visit some of the hanging coffins, caves, and an underground river. Even today they still hang some of the coffins - here's a pic of some more recent ones.
That evening we went to a local restaurant expecting once again to be sorely disappointed by the selection of vegetarian food (usually only mayonnaise sandwiches - I'm not kidding!), but the chef offered to make us the traditional Filipino "pork" adobo dish, using seitan instead of meat. Where they got seitan in this tiny remote town I have no idea, but it was fantastic! (see pic) And even stranger, we had traveled 14 hours by bus over remote dirt roads into the northern Philippines mountains to find the T.V. in the restaurant showing the most recent episode of American Idol! :) After dinner we had to hurry back to our inn to make the mandatory 9pm curfew in town (left over from a conflict during the Marcos era).
The following day we hired a local guide and made our way to Lumiang Burial Cave, where ancient coffins are stacked from the floor to the ceiling (see pic). Apparently, sometimes the guides will even open the lids and shake the bones around, but we passed on that. Afterwards we hiked by some nice rice terraces (see pic) on our way to the Sumaging Cave, where we descended down steep, slippery, guano-covered rocks for what seemed like hours until we finally reached the pools of water (see pics). We were feeling pretty gross with the humidity and bat poo, so we didn't stay long at the bottom!
 Lumiang Burial Cave |  Sagada Rice Terraces |
 Sumaging Cave |  Sumaging Cave |
The next day we got up early to catch the 8am jeepney for the one-hour ride to Bontoc. Jeepneys are the most popular method of public transportation in the Philippines, and were originally made from leftover WWII US military jeeps. They are essentially lavishly decorated extended jeeps with benches in the back for passengers - although many passengers also ride on top. The destination is written on the side, and rather than having a time schedule, the jeepney driver just leaves when he feels he has sufficiently crammed enough passengers into (and onto) the vehicle. So needless to say, it's not the most comfortable ride! Once we arrived in Bontoc we searched for a jeepney that was making the 3.5-hour trek to Banaue. We found a rickety blue one that was making the journey, but we had to wait another 2 hours for enough passengers to show up - at least by getting there early we didn't have to ride on top! We were crammed in pretty tight on the benches, though, and the jeepney was carrying fruit wine jugs that were leaking all over our bags and shoes... and then we had to stop for another hour for "road construction" (see pic). It was on this jeepney that we met one of the only two Americans during our time in the Philippines - a 74-year-old backpacking granny from Minnesota. You go girl!
After the long, bumpy, uncomfortable ride, we finally arrived in Banaue, which is home to the UNESCO World Heritage Site rice terraces. We spent the night, and then chartered a jeepney and a guide to take us out to the tiny villages of Batad, which has amphitheater-shaped stone-walled terraces (the Banaue terraces have mud walls). We drove on the bumpy roads for an hour and a half, passing many terraces and a house perilously hanging over the side of the mountain (see pic) before we reached the end of the road and set out on the long hike down to Batad (many of these Ifugao villages don't have road access yet). We finally reached the terraces (see pic) and continued hiking down them all the way to the Tappia Waterfall at the very bottom (see pic). And then we had the grueling hike back up, where our huffing and puffing selves were humbly passed by old grannies carrying tree trunks and giant baskets of food. :) We didn't finish the hike until late afternoon, and boy were we sore... I can see why they are all so thin here!
 Beautiful Banaue |  Downtown Banaue |
 Hanging House |  Batad Rice Terraces |
 Batad Rice Terraces |  Tappia Falls |
The following day we had a few hours to kill before our bus left in the evening, so we listened to some of the bad 24-7 karaoke coming from the bar down the street from our inn ("I'm a beeeech, I'm a lover..."), then walked about an hour up the hill to the Banaue viewpoint (the scene on the 1000 peso bill, see pic). Unfortunately, it's been so dry this year that the terraces aren't in their full bright green glory, but they were still fascinating to see. We then toured the Banaue Museum of Ifugao Culture, had one more nasty mayonnaise sandwich, and boarded the bullet-hole riddled Autobus (see pic) at 6pm for the frigid (A/C on full blast) 10-hour trip back to Manila, where we were treated to obscure Japanese movies such as "My Wife is a Gangster 4". We arrived back in Manila around 4am, and promptly got ripped off by the taxi driver on the way to the hotel - ah, southeast Asia! :)
 Banaue Viewpoint |  Bus to Manila |
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