Bahala na

A recent family conversation centred on various transportation methods we’ve used in the Philippines. Leisel’s hands-down favourite is the trike, in all its forms. Not surprisingly, that’s how we got to the airport in Coron :-).

The airport is 30-40 minutes out of town, apparently further than most tourists want to travel by trike…

The airport in Coron was small, not air conditioned, and crowded! With true Filipino hospitality, they brought some plastic chairs out for our family since all but a scattered few of the permanent chairs were taken. Soon after, I was proud of Daniel for cheerfully giving up his seat for an elderly couple. We were grateful when boarding time came and it was fun to see we were getting on a Canadian plane.

From Coron, we flew to Angeles. Even before landing, we could tell something was different here. We could see neighbourhoods and subdivisions from the plane. Houses were surrounded by lawns. It looked like we were flying into a North American city. The airport was huge, brand new, and immaculate. (A plug for the staff at the Angeles airport here because we quickly recovered a carry-on bag we forgot on the plane). From the airport, a driver took us down wide-open, four-lane highways at 100km/h to Baguio city. This was all so unlike anything we had experienced in the Philippines so far that we were starting to wonder where we were! We spent one night in Baguio. The next morning, everyone noticed pine trees all around us, a freshness to the air, and a wonderful coolness that didn’t have us sweating before breakfast! Then we got our RENTAL VAN and started driving ourselves toward the Batad Rice Terraces. This was the most remote, difficult-to-reach part of our adventure in the Philippines, which made it super fun!

That feeling we had of being in North America didn’t last long!Our destination was 220km away. Google maps said it would take 6 hours. “No way,” we thought… It took us 8! That included two stops, but still!! Switchback after switchback, I’m sure the steering wheel didn’t stay in one spot more than 3 seconds the whole drive. We saw more vistas than we could count, but only a handful of guardrails :-). In several places, landslides had reduced the road to a single lane. In those situations, we could usually see far enough to know the coast was clear. When we couldn’t see all the way, open windows helped because we could hear a jeepney coming before we could see one. Leisel did a great job navigating, and no one threw up. We arrived at the parking lot just after dark. Our inn had a guide waiting to take us from the last turn to the parking lot, then to lead us along the 10min hike through the forrest to get to the inn. (There is no road access to Batad, the village where we stayed.)