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).

Bontoc to Sagada: Terror at 5000 Feet

We woke up early.  No, seriously.  This was the day, now was the time.  We had spent two days in Bontoc already, the first enjoying the museum and the comforts of not-being-on-a-bus, and the second exploring the market and struggling with Filipino toilets.  But now, this, our last day in Bontoc, we would see the famed Rice Terraces of Maligcong, the Eighth Wonder of the World!  This was not our first time seeing the Eighth Wonder of the World, but it was our first time seeing this particular Eighth Wonder.  For your illumination, here are the Seven Eighth Wonders of the World:

1. Stonehenge
2. The Moai of Easter Island
3. The Rice Terraces of Maligcong
4. King Kong
5. Angkor Wat
6. Andre the Giant
7. That Pizza with the Cheese Baked in the Crust

I had been told by an extremely helpful employee of the Bontoc Tourist Information Office (a man whose praises are sung in our guidebook, and who may in fact be the only employee of the Bontoc Tourist Information Office) that we could take a Jeepney up to the Rice Terraces, but that this was far less fun than walking up the mountain to see them ourselves; it was only a two-hour walk, and stopping to ask the locals for directions was a much better experience than another Jeepney ride.  Indeed, the thought of jostling up a mountain, our only view from the postage stamp-sized windows of a Jeepney sounded less than thrilling.  The man’s advice was corroborated by the friendly German we had met the night before, who told us that it was only an hour and a half from the top of the mountain back down to the town.  Our brains groggy from days of sitting in the sun and eating pork fat, we struggled with the math necessary to check the estimates we had been given (45 minutes divided by 1 Jeepney, times 1.5 hours return trip, carry the two, minus pi = good times!), but trusted what we had been told and started hiking up the Something Mountain, confident that we would be back in time to catch a Jeepney to Sagada, our next stop.

From the foot of the mountain on the outskirts of town, the view was fantastic.  We followed the tour guide’s advice and his map, which was as charmingly hand-drawn as it was hard to follow.  The valley below us was shrouded in haze, something we had hoped would burn off as the sun grew hotter (we later realized that much of this haze was smoke that had settled over the river -- what we had learned at the Bontoc Museum about the native tribes’ slash-and-burn farming practices seemed suddenly relevant).  Puzzlingly, the view shrank as we hiked up the mountain, scrambling up dirt roads and making friends on the way.

Before long, we had drank our two liters of water.  Yet no matter how high we climbed and how many disbelieving smiles we got from the Jeepneys that zoomed by us, the top of the mountain stubbornly refused to arrive.  Two hours passed, then three.  Our hips and knees started complaining even louder (mine took on the voice of Gilbert Gottfried for maximum irritation).

“Do you think we missed the summit?” I asked.  Yeah, it was even less funny then.

It was now almost 11:00.  The last Jeepney was shockingly few hours away, and here we were, exhausted, sunburnt, and out of water, and we hadn’t even seen the rice terraces except for the steadily-shrinking view that we had passed on the way up.  We tramped back down, passing vansful of happy, air-conditioned tourists on their way up.  Clearly the travel gods were not smiling on us this day.

When we arrived back in town and drank most of its water supply, we made our way to the Jeepney stand.  The line of increasingly crowded Jeepneys stretched around the block.  We approached the one at the front, which was already packed full of tourists and had almost as many bags perched on the roof as there were people clinging to it.  “Going to Sagada?” Jenn asked.

“Yeah, get in!” the driver replied.  We squinted into the darkened cabin, which was already shoulder-to-shoulder.  “In the front!” he clarified.  Jenn squeezed in between the driver and another woman in the front seat.  Sensing an important cultural experience, I took some deep breaths, silently apologized to my mother, and scrambled onto the roof.  I just had enough time to get cross-legged when the Jeepney took off up the mountain road.

For the first 300 meters, all I could think of was the time I wouldn’t climb a wooden watch tower for fear of falling, the time I ran out of Independence Day because I got scared, the time I got in trouble with the police for riding in the back seat of a pickup truck (the fact that my cousins and I were throwing water balloons at passersby may have had something to do with it).  Surely I wasn’t doing this, right?

Up, up the mountain we went, and gradually I got up the courage to take some pictures with one hand as I clung to all of our possessions with the other and held on tight with my toes.  This would be something to tell the grandkids one day, I thought, assuming I live long enough to procreate.  Also, probably shouldn’t tell them that in their parents’ earshot.

Strange omens along the road

"Godspeed"

At last, we arrived in Sagada, which promised to be a(nother) delightful little mountain town.  Hiking to check a few of the local guest houses, we discovered one of the perils of letting whimsy take care of your travel itinerary: we had arrived on Friday evening, and most of the cheap rooms were already booked.  We ended up having to spend a whole 20 bucks on a cottage with two bedrooms, a kitchen, and a view #humblebrag

Bontoc: Taking the High Road

Over our years of traveling, we’ve gotten around by a number of different vehicles: planes, bikes, Rosie the Honda, ships, ropeways, pogo sticks, etc..  The most odious of these for long-distance travel is, arguably, the night bus.  We took a number of night buses in Japan between Osaka and Tokyo or Hiroshima, and typically it combines all the fun of taking an airplane with all the suckiness of a long driving trip.  At least the Japanese highway buses were as safe as everything else in Japan -- though I may have gotten some bad nights of sleep (and subsequently squandered the following days napping or sitting in coffee shops, staring into space), at least I never had any fear for my possessions or, you know, my life.

The bus from Quezon City to Bontoc was different, at least at first.  When the taxi driver had had a difficult time finding the bus terminal, we pulled over in front of a Starbucks to squint at a map for ten minutes.  While we idled there by the side of the road (which turned out to be just around the corner from our destination), a shoeless street boy began tapping on Jenn’s window.  She did her best to wave him away, but he stood there, crying something we couldn’t understand, and his tapping started to grow more insistent.  Eventually we puzzled out our location and zoomed away from the boy.  Our taxi driver, a charming older man, had warned us that the roads to Bontoc could be “steep.”  We thanked him, confused, wondering what our duties were as passengers to ensure our safe arrival, and got out at the bus terminal.

The terminal was, basically, a couple of buses under an electric light.  Feral dogs prowled around the buses, chasing each other and scratching themselves more than I was comfortable with.  Occasionally they would stalk the feral cats, who themselves were occupied with chasing the mice.  The bus was kept in place with chunks of concrete in front of its wheels.  Nobody else was around except for the ticket booth attendant; somehow we had gotten there an hour early.  With nothing to do except look at the bus and watch the circle of life play out around us, I began to imagine the various things that could go wrong on this trip (not recommended).

Jenn posed while I worried.

Eventually we did make it onto the bus, which was much more comfortable than the outside suggested, especially when we found we could stash our big backpack in the aisle rather than at our feet.  I was even able to sleep a little, though the first time I was awakened it was by our neighbor across the aisle lurching to his feet, opening the window, and sticking his head out of it.  Groggy, the only thing I could think at first was that he was trying to commit suicide by traffic-related decapitation (also not recommended), but when I saw streaks of something splash on the window, I realized that the motion had gotten to be too much for him.  Before he had finished, another passenger stood to do the same, then another.  Maybe it was the motion, maybe they had eaten some bad balut, but whatever the reason, it got all Stand By Me in there in a hurry.

I awoke again to realize that we were the only ones on the bus.  Looking out the window, I saw the other passengers eating breakfast at a roadside canteen.  “Oh well,” I thought, and tried unsuccessfully to shut out the dawn light and go back to sleep.  When that proved unsuccessful, I checked out our surroundings.  Ten hours on the bus, and we may have been on a different planet.  The mountains rose above us, green and sharp, and the valleys below were filled with mist.  Of course, with the improved view of our scenery that daylight allowed, I also got to see just how terrifyingly narrow and poorly-maintained our road was.  Time for some retroactive worrying!

We pulled into Bontoc, capital of the Mountain Province in the Cordillera Mountains, at about 7:30, a whole hour before our scheduled arrival.  The town was considerably bigger than we had imagined: the main street at which we had stopped was lined with general stores, tailors, hotels, restaurants, hotel-restaurants, restaurant-bars, general store-restaurants, and hotel-restaurant-bar-general stores.  It’s a nice, quiet place, a welcome respite from the smog and crowds of Manila.  We noticed immediately that the Jeepneys were rather subdued compared to Manila’s, though the tricycles are much more tricked out, some to the point where they look like popcorn stands/pinball machines.

Of course, our first order of business was to get some food, find somewhere to put our bags, and begin to explore the town.  We wandered into the “Drop By Cafe,” which fulfilled all of our requirements for eateries (that is, it was within sight).  The food at this cafe was good enough that we went again for breakfast the next day; they make a mean longsinog.  Also, we were privileged to meet The Most Awesome Kid in the World, who is already far more badass than I will ever be, and at the time was playing with a giant-ass knife (pictured).

May I draw your attention to the giant-ass knife?

He then went on to try to steal a motorcycle.  I fucking love this kid.

After a cup of coffee and a heavy breakfast, we were now recharged and fully ready to go back to bed for awhile.  Fortunately, one of the local hotel-restaurant-etc.s was willing to let us check in at 9 a.m.  A little nap did us a world of good, giving us the energy to take a photo out of the hotel window, then go out to lunch.

Bontoc, our guidebook told us, is notable for its location high in the Cordillera Mountains, and has traditionally been a trading point for local mountain tribespeople (Alex had described it as “like that bar in that movie ‘Star Wars,’ what was it called again?” and that’s how Harry rolled his eyes so hard they fell out of his head).  It’s also a destination for hiking, trekking, and other adventurous activities that really shouldn’t be attempted after a heavy lunch.  It is worth noting at this point that we have not had any meal in the Philippines that hasn’t been heavy.  We decided to puzzle this one out while exploring the Bontoc Museum.

On the way, we passed by the school, which, in my expert opinion, found the best “X” for its alphabet that I have ever seen.

The Museum, as promised by the guide, was excellent, and contained a great deal of interesting artifacts from traditional daily life of the indigenous tribes.  Though few of the artifacts or photographs had dates on them, we were able to deduce that it was probably from the ‘60s or ‘70s due to three major clues: first, the map of the Philippines mentioned that the indigenous peoples were about four million strong, accounting for 12% of the nation’s population (the current population of the Philippines is around 86 million); second, it kept using words like “Mohammedan” and “tribals”; and third, one of the photos featured two young people in traditional garb with a guy wearing bell bottoms behind them.

Indeed, as we wandered around the museum, appreciating the rattan baskets and photos of elderly tribespeople smoking pipes, we started to get our Critical Thinking danders up.  One group of photos of Kalinga people working on their farms was captioned “The Tribals Rely Upon Mother Earth.”  Also, the insistence on referring to some of the indigenous residents as “headhunters” was ignorant and insulting.  That is, until we came to the “headhunting” section of the museum, which featured actual human skulls, gongs with jawbone handles, and a photo of a guy holding up a head he had just cut off.  That was...ah...some persuasive support of the term “headhunter.”  Also there was a picture of a headless corpse being carried on one of those sticks, y’know, the ones that are used to carry human beings as prisoners or...um...would it be insensitive to say that it made me think of "Return of the Jedi"?  You know, more than I already do?

We ended our evening the way all evenings everywhere should conclude: eating a delicious plate of sizzling sisig (that’s fried pork jowl and brain), downing some Red Horses, and talking international politics with a couple of Europeans.  My only quibble with the Cable Car Bar was its choice of entertainment, which was a couple of Filipino women (with great singing voices!) singing karaoke for our pleasure for two hours -- they were immediately followed by a cool younger dude with a guitar and a nice, mellow voice, who sadly chose to follow up his groovy introductory chords by saying “This is a song by Coldplay.”  =/ to the maximum.