Philippines

Yes we went to the Philippines...

Here is the view from our room in Batad, a small town/village we visited. These are rice terraces built between 2-3 thousand years ago. We only spent one night there because we were on the run the whole trip.

We started in Manilla, the capital. It is another big dirty city which we really didn’t care to see the sights of, so we focused our trip on places we could go from there and still make it back for our return flight. The first day there we walked around a little ate dinner and we saw a tricycle that had my name stitched on it. We didn’t get any good pictures of the tricycles because we forgot. They are either a bicycle or a motorcycle with a covered side car. These are the worst transportation Dora and I have taken so far, very small and bumpy. I tried to take a picture of the tricycle with my name on it but my camera was dead. We took an over night bus the first night so we were carrying our stuff with us everywhere. Believe it or not we each only had our school bags since we knew we would be carrying it all most of the time, so we packed extra light. The night bus was not a good time, we might have gotten about 1.5 hours of sleep the whole night, and that isn’t even all at one time. The bus stopped every 2 hours and they turned the lights on and people would rush in the bus to try and sell us different things to eat, most of which we couldn’t recognize. Finally morning came and we made it to Banaue. The town is north of Manila and in the mountains. The weather was very mild, some people from Manila head north to get out of the hot muggy weather in the summer. So it is 7 am and we get off the bus in a daze and all kinds of people are waiting for us and trying to take us here and there, and stay at their place or eat somewhere. So we go with a guy in his teens who has a tricycle and takes us to a restaurant for breakfast. We set off for a long tricycle ride to the trail to Batad and make the hike around 9 am. It was about 2.5 hours up and down the mountain hiking with our backpacks, but it was the only way to get there. Banauae and Batad both have rice terraces and we wanted to see both of them. Here is another view of the terraces in Batad, they used stones and stacked them like a retaining wall.

We took a break when we got to Batad, took off our backpacks, settled into our room, and ate some lunch. We didn’t rest too long because we were afraid we wouldn’t get going again. We took off to explore the village the terraces and find a waterfall that we had heard about. The waterfall was only supposed to be a 45 min hike but we took our time and we just made it back in time before the sun went down. Here is the waterfall, below, the water was cold but refreshing after hiking all day.


It cooled off nicely that night so it was great for sleeping that was one of our few good nights of sleep. The next day we woke up early for breakfast, and we paid our bill for the three meals a few beers and the room it was only $13 total for me and Dora. I would probably stay there for a week if I had time. Back over the mountain and through the jungle to Banauae. We got to a V in the path and there was a guy running/jumping down giant stairs with a 90 lb bag of cement and he told us to go up the stairs because it is a shortcut. We thought we would try it since on the way down we took the long way. That was the hardest part of all the hiking we did. The sun was really hot and the steps were probably between 1.5 and 2.5 feet tall because they were going straight up. After our hike we took another tricycle ride to eat and to go to the viewing point for the Banauae rice terraces. These ones are supposedly the eighth wonder of the world.




Another night bus took us back to Manila and another to the ferry. We spent the next day on the beach to recover from all of the hiking. Here is a shot of the beach, it is White Beach in Puerto Galeria.


We went a little further north to see a the Taal Volcano. It is a volcano in the middle of a lake which is in a prehistoric crater.

It is the smallest volcano in the Philippines but one of the most active in the world. We hiked to the top and got to look in the middle. Not really what I expected, there was another lake.


The water was bubbling near the shore.

If you look closley at this picture you can see steam coming from the ground. It was a little scary to walk past, the rocks were hot too.

We had to put a picture of these, Jeepney's is what they called them. We spent about 2 hours in one of these to get back to Manila.