Sagada: The House that Lonely Planet Built

"Off the beaten path" in the sense of "there's some chickens wandering around."

Sagada was clearly a very different animal from Bontoc.  Lonely Planet sings its praises at great length -- great enough that every tourist who wanders down the main street seems to be leafing through an identical copy of it.  It’s described as hippy-oriented, laid-back, unspoiled by tourism, chill, off the beaten path.  Most of all, it is supposed to be very un-touristy.  In retrospect, I find that I have to applaud the devastating sarcasm of the good people at Lonely Planet.

Pictured: not at all Filipino food.

Indeed, after a week in Manila and Bontoc, Sagada feels like a traveler’s paradise, and it is very much built to be so.  Gone are the Filipino toilets and the cold showers taken with buckets, and with them the prices we had so gotten used to.  Here the hotels are extremely comfortable and cheap...just not as cheap as Bontoc.  Here every restaurant has vegetarian options, a full bar, and excellent coffee.

Our first night, when we were too exhausted to rouse ourselves from our luxurious cottage, we pampered ourselves and ordered take-out pizza from a local place run out of a tin shack on the main drag.  Its proprietor, a presumably Italian man who made some decidedly non-Italian pizzas, had much to say about life in Sagada.

“How long have you been here?” I asked.

“Forty days.”

“Oh, wow.  How’s business?”

“Pfew!” he exclaimed, pantomiming something extremely vague that I took to be a rocket taking off.  “But I think I will leave soon, I don’t like it here.”

“Oh, that’s too bad.  Why not?”

“Envious people.”  He excused himself to shoo away a Filipino mother and child who had come to order pizza.  “I hate envious people,” he continued.  “Envious and stupid.”

The next day we had our first bout of traveler’s diarrhea.

We glutted ourselves on free WiFi and homemade yogurt for two days, finally tearing ourselves away from the groovy (if decidedly touristic) scene long enough to visit Echo Valley and see some of Sagada’s famous Hanging Coffins.  “Mysterious!” we thought, though the term “hanging coffins” is deceptively non-descriptive.

We trekked all the way across town, literally hundreds of meters (which, my fellow Americans, is actually not too far), past the native basketball court and around the corner from the traditional cell phone tower, and were greeted with a breathtaking afternoon view of a valley that seemed shockingly bereft of coffins.  We eventually sighted a few coffins that were, in fact, hanging horizontally from the limestone cliffs, though their stubborn refusal to show up on film leads me to conclude that they contained vampires.

UGH, WHAT IS THIS COFFINLESS GARBAGE?

We rewarded ourselves for our efforts with one of the world’s rarest and most expensive beverages: Kopi Luwak, also known as kape alamid or civet coffee.  Basically, most coffee beans are fermented, washed, dried, roasted, ground, and drank by human beings or particularly civilized apes.  Civet coffee goes through exactly the same process, with the added steps of being eaten and pooped out by the Asian civet cat.

This cute little guy!

Jenn and I found civet coffee to be strong, smooth, and tasting not at all like cat poop (which is, incidentally, how I prefer my women).