Tam-Awan:

Tam-awan Village is mentioned in Lonely Planet as well, and it has some of the same hallmarks of being a tourist trap like Sagada.  Just over the mountains, in the outskirts of Baguio, Tam-awan offers lodging in traditional Igorot-style huts with decidedly non-traditional hot showers and WiFi, and all for the low, low price of “more than anywhere we’d stayed outside of Manila.”  We were lucky to get a last-minute room, though we were told over the phone that we could only stay for one night.  Deciding we’d make the most of what we could get, Jenn and I packed up our things at our Couchsurfing host’s home and caught a cab to Tam-awan.  Though it was a bit pricey (especially compared to Couchsurfing), we would take a few art workshops and leave the next day with new skills and good memories.

Upon arrival, we were told that nearly all of the village’s artists were away opening an exhibition in Manila, and that there would be no workshops offered that day (except for Dream Catcher Making, but as Jenn is from Lawrence, Kansas, she already basically has a PhD in Dream Catcher Making).  Disheartened, we decided to spend the day making whatever art we could on our own and integrating ourselves into the community if possible.  The next few hours were spent happily drawing and taking photos.

Pictured: the inside
of Harry's head at 3 a.m.

Pleased at our artsiness, we cleaned up our supplies and headed back to our hut, which we were told was the fertility hut and was outfitted with bunk beds.  Passing by the village cafe, we were beckoned to come over and have a drink by a soft-spoken Filipino man with dark eyes and a long, wispy beard.  We took him up on it, opting to skip dinner in favor of drinks, snacks, and more drinks with the few artists still at the village: Alfonso, the bearded painter who had invited us, who possesses unfailing comedic timing; Arvin, a scriptwriter and actor who picks up money doing finances for the village; Louis, a French photographer-cum-crêpier who sounds for all the world like an American mocking a French person; and Ronnie, who works in the cafe and happily informed us that we could reserve our hut for the rest of the week.  Jenn and I downed a few bottles of Red Horse, the local extra-strong brew, in lieu of the sugarcane gin that the others were drinking, but as the sun went down and our courage went up, we began taking shots of GSM with the rest of them (but not, as it turns out, with the best of them).  The pride over being a beloved part of the community on our first day lasted right about until I passed out at 10 p.m..  Our rest was interrupted only by visitations by the vengeful spirit of Ginebra San Miguel, the patron saint of dry heaves, and by a cover band that played outside our window from 4:30 until 7 a.m. (whose skill and amazing song selection was only slightly undercut by my wishing for death with every note).  The next day, Louis and the rest informed us that mixing Red Horse with gin was always a terrible idea.  Sadly, I had independently found this little nugget of wisdom at the bottom of the fertility hut’s toilet.

We spent the next five days as a part of Tam-awan: Australian tourists, Japanese families, Korean university students came and left, sometimes staying for a drink, usually keeping to themselves and leaving after one night.  We took lessons in portraiture and monoprint, we played everyone some blues to much excitement, we revisited GSM after a brief separation.  We took in the fog that rolled in every afternoon, belying Tam-awan's selling point as a vista from which you can see the China Sea.  The traditional dance troupe came and went with the weekend, as did Louis' crêpe stand.  We met Jet, the (possible) owner of Tam-awan, with a penchant for high-fives and a laugh that shakes the bamboo awning and warms the soul.  We met James, a painter who loved to fake us out, i.e., “Your singing was not good.  It was...veeeeery good!  Hahaha!”  We met another bearded painter whom we were told was Alfonso’s twin removed by three years, a portraitist named Jenn, and a dozen other artists whose names I couldn’t begin to guess.  Alfonso taught us how to make a tornado in a bottle of gin, and we taught him to call it a “Kansas twister” instead.  Arvin got us some betel nuts, and Ronnie taught me how to chew it and spit the red goo out onto the ground (video forthcoming).  We felt more at home than we had in months, and began to daydream about moving to Tam-awan, teaching knitting or writing, collaborating with James or Alfonso, maybe taking the Jeepney down the mountain to take French lessons in Baguio and commuting back to drink and play music in the afternoon.

And yet...for all of the fun and the spirit of community, we were still paying customers.  During daylight hours, we were called “sir” and “ma’am” and offered room service by people who had been laughing and slapping us on the back just twelve hours before.  There was the unshakeable fact that, for all the fun and spirit of camaraderie, we were just tourists like all the others, sure to leave after a brief visit and rack up a sizable bill in the meantime.

When it came time to leave, everyone expressed their regret to see us go and extended us many invitations to come and visit again for the festival in May, the annual bike trip in December.  Jenn and I have every intention of coming back again, and keep rewriting our future plans to involve an extended stay at Tam-awan.  For now, we have to get back to full-time touring, but Tam-awan remains a dream that we hope to revisit someday.

Pictured: one extremely kick-ass T-shirt (made by Harry, modelled by Harry)
 and some equally kick-ass people.

"Guy Sitting Next to Me," by Jenn

You Ate WHAT?: Fear Factor Edition

From Sagada it was six hours to Baguio, all downhill.  We fought steep mountain roads and motion sickness, stopping at a roadside store to use the comfort room and try balut (perhaps not as comfortable, but decidedly tasty nonetheless).  The rest stop offered few options for food, and after we’d tried the Mr. Donut shu mai, we were ready for a challenge.

Side note about Filipino food: we are so bored of Filipino food.  Two weeks into our Korean vacation last year and we couldn’t get enough of the barbecue, the garlic and the chili; two weeks in the Philippines and we’re dying for a nice salad or something.  We’d never tried or even heard of Filipino food of any kind before coming here, and, if you haven’t been to the Philippines, I’ll bet you haven’t, either.  Our friends and Lonely Planet (which is kind of like a portable, frequently unreliable friend) warned us that Filipino cuisine isn’t really anything special, which is why it hasn’t made it overseas.  It’s been hard coming to a different conclusion, try though we might.  Every meal involves an extremely fatty cut of meat and a scoop of gummy white rice that makes us pine for the Japanese rice we’d complain about.  Filipino food is fine, generally speaking, but extremely heavy, the kind of place where “snack” means “cheeseburger” and “dessert” means “all the desserts mixed together” (and this is coming from an American, mind you).

Halo-Halo, no relation to a certain BBC comedy.

As mentioned, one point that’s stood in the way of our enjoyment of the food here has been a constant, paralyzing fear of contracting constant, paralyzing diarrhea (closely linked to our fear of Filipino toilets).  The rule that we’ve been advised to adhere to while traveling in the Third World is “Cook It, Peel It, or Forget It.”  There are many, many more such rules, of course: don’t drink the tap water, don’t order anything with ice in it (because it’s probably made with tap water), don’t eat anything that’s been sitting out all day, don’t eat raw vegetables (because they’ve been washed in tap water).  However, these rules have really cramped our style; following them strictly would rule out a good 70% of the food in this country.  It got to the point where we decided to throw caution to the wind and just eat some balut already, diarrhea be damned.

A typical balut vendor.

Balut is hands-down the most notorious Filipino dish: it’s defined as a “pregnant egg,” meaning a hard-boiled egg with a fetal chicken inside.  In America, it is most famous for being featured on the culinary showcase “Fear Factor,” a point about which one of our acquaintances had much dispute (“Man, no wonder you think that’s nasty, man, you gotta put some salt on that shit!”).  It is prepared in the traditional Filipino fashion of sitting by the side of the road in the sun all day.  Balut is eaten by cracking open a small hole in the shell, sucking out the salty, soupy liquid at the top, then peeling away bits of shell to reveal the mushy gray insides.  Needless to say, we had to try this shit; we have a reputation as eaters of the exotic and the cray-cray.

Balut is...pretty good, actually.  Like a soft, almost yogurty hard-boiled egg with a definite livery taste to it.  As we ate, we drew praise from the old ladies next to us.  “You eat balut?” one asked approvingly, dripping some of her egg-juice on the concrete.  “Oh yeah!” I replied, even as Jenn said, “First time.”  The blackish chicken-fetus wasn’t anything near as noxious as I’d expected; frankly, I’d been expecting feathers, a beak, visible eyes.  In its gooey vagueness, it resembled the innards of a frog or goldfish in the dissection pan, the ones that looked nothing like the clearly labelled organs in the biology textbook.  But, and I cannot stress this enough, however it looked, it was tasty.  Surprisingly, balut isn’t really anything to write home about (mudda, fadda, kindly disregard dis lettah).

Dig in!  Source: http://caryle.blogspot.com/

The bottom quarter of the egg was mysteriously hard, inedibly so, even, so we threw it away when nobody was looking and boarded our bus.  When our stomachs started to turn as the bus jostled down the road, we were 90% certain that it was the greasy shu mai.  Damn Mr. Donut.