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.

Sagada 2: 600 Feet Under

Jenn and I had been spelunking before.  One of the precious few things to do in Missouri (if you don’t like baseball and meth is too rich for your blood) is to explore one of the Show-Me State’s many caves, caverns, or assorted holes.  I’ve been to Onondaga Cave a number of times and had a generally very pleasant experience appreciating the stark beauty of limestone rock formations and naturally-occurring gift shops.  “Onondaga,” of course, is an Iroquois word for “well-lit, with professionally maintained footpaths.”  In short, we considered ourselves old hands at caving and fully prepared for the two hour tour of Sagada’s Sumaguing Cave (you think we’d have learned by now not to trust any time estimate that we’re given, especially ones that end in “two hours”).

We entrusted ourselves to a guide named Patrick.  Patrick, as will soon be revealed, is an intensely trustworthy guy.  He’s been taking hapless tourists into the caves for nearly fifteen years, and presumably, all of them made it back out alive (though given the preponderance of coffins hidden within, a cave-related death would probably approach The Perfect Crime).  We were well-equipped for a spelunking expedition: the man in the tour guide guild office advised us to wear flip-flops and cautioned us that, while long pants were acceptable, shorts would make us look better in pictures.  I carried the nice camera, trusting that the combination of a zipper and good intentions would add up to something close to “watertight.”

Thus readied for a pleasant jaunt into the hellish bowels of the earth, we sallied forth down the hill towards the cave.  We had a brief break when Patrick went to exchange his kerosene lantern for one that he thought would have a chance of working better -- as far as I’m concerned, this decision qualifies Patrick for instant canonization.  While we waited, we took pictures of some far less camera-shy hanging coffins.

The first stop was the Lumiang Burial Cave, which involved only a brief stop to gawk at an collection of non-hanging coffins.  Up to this point, caving seemed to be little different than hiking, in that I seem to be ill-suited for both and also I forgot to bring water.

Take note of the gear worn by Action Hero Harry.

Pictured: Jenn's last known photo.

Patrick talked us through the caving agenda: as we preferred the two-hour tour (hahaha) to the longer six-hour Cave Connection, we would be encountering three distinct stages.  The first, he told us, we would be scooting down steps on our butts.  The second we would be getting wet up to our knees, and the last would be our choice of the Hard Way or the Easy Way.  Clearly he didn’t know who he was dealing with, this Patrick, and has no idea for our predilection for never, ever doing anything nice and easy.  As we walked to Sumaguing Cave, we passed some rice terraces that were as spectacular as they were downhill.

Down hundreds of steps, really rocks placed in a vaguely step-like pattern, we walked in the officially-recommended flip-flops, one of which Jenn promptly broke.  We passed under several hundred bats congregating on the ceiling of the cave -- I don’t know the proper term for a group of bats, but I’m going to go with an “eew” -- and Patrick helpfully advised us to stop using our hands to steady ourselves on nearby stones lest we coat our hands in guano.

In front of one of the famous limestone formations.  No, I won't tell you what it's called.  All SFW guesses welcome in the comments section!

There’s no easy way to convey the kind of fear that begins to settle into your chest when you’ve descended into an unlit cave in shorts and flip-flops, hundreds of feet below where the bats deign to live, the ceiling gets lower and lower, and your guide tells you to leave your shoes behind from this point.  It is a good way to reacquaint yourself with all of your childhood fears, this Sumaguing Cave: fear of the dark, fear of falling, fear of drowning, and fear of guano.  When it came time to squeeze ourselves through a narrow mouth, a river rushing down our backs, camera bag held desperately overhead, Patrick shouted back to us, “Oh, I forgot!  We started the third stage a ways back.”

In his description of the cave experience, Patrick had neglected to mention the Pitfall Level, in which we were instructed to hang on to a rope that was suspended from the cave wall and to walk ourselves over a deep, possibly bottomless pit filled with stanky cave water (and possibly man-eating salamanders).  “Ha ha!” I suggested.  “Seriously?”  Patrick demonstrated by scrambling to the other side with the casual ease of a Batman.  Jenn and I exchanged a look.  Shit, we thought, shit.  We're in way over our heads here.

There was some dispute over whether the properly gentlemanly thing for me to do would be to allow Jenn to go first, or for me to go first and test the water, as it were.  Jenn decided to attempt it first, summoning all of her courage, and as I fiddled with my flashlight, I suddenly heard a mighty splash!  I looked up into the dimly-lit corridor and Jenn was utterly gone, disappeared into the pit below.

My mind flew to all of the things that would never happen now.  There would be no cycle tour in Japan, no traveling through Cambodia and Thailand.  No children.  She hit her head on the rocks, I thought, she hurt her spine.  Best case scenario, we're going to spend the next ten years getting her walking again.  I was too terrified to say anything, even to call out to her.  All I could do was kneel on the rocks and pray for her to rise again.

Patrick shot his hand into the water and pulled Jenn up by the shirt, clutching her glasses in her hand.  “Can you swim?” he asked coolly.  She nodded, and before I knew it she was back up on the ledge, sopping wet but miraculously unharmed.  Somehow she hadn't hit her head on the stone wall, she had turned herself right-side-up and taken a breath before falling in.  I breathed again.

At last we reached the bottom of the cave.  Patrick invited us to enjoy the pleasures of the cave’s “Swimming Pool,” an offer that we wryly turned down.  We had done it, we had accomplished what we were sure was impossible, it had nearly killed us, but we had successfully made it to the end of the cave!  The smell of kerosene filled the room, and Patrick let us have a break while he smoked a cigarette.  “Are you OK?” I asked Jenn for the thousandth time.  She still was in high spirits, though the prospect of scrambling back over the sheer, slick cliffs quickly filled us with a gnawing sense of dread.  The feeling of success was immediately gone.  There was no way we could make it back up all those sheer rock cliffs, not with how shot our nerves were already.  We didn't have anywhere near the strength of arm to get ourselves back up to the top.  Panic set in.

Really, what carried us out of that cave (besides Patrick) was the knowledge that the alternative was dying alone in the dark.  Each time Patrick had to leave us to grab his bag or to scout out the way ahead, visions danced in my head of whether we would asphyxiate, freeze to death, or be eaten by bats first.  Gone was the confidence that led us down the California coast; all I wanted was to be back at home in bed with a grilled cheese sandwich.

I’m making jokes about this experience here, but that’s by virtue of being dozens of miles away from Sumaguing Cave.  To get some feeling of just how terrified we were at the bottom of the cave, just take a look at this photo.  There were no handholds except invisible crannies in the slick rock walls (which, remember, we were climbing up in bare feet and shorts).  There were many, many occasions when Jenn’s or my hand slipped and we were just a Patrick’s Awesomeness away from death or disfigurement.  If our hand missed its mark, if our toes couldn’t hang onto the rock, there would be no easy transportation out of the cave to a local hospital: we were hundreds of feet down impassable rock, half an hour’s walk from the local (hospitalless) town, six hours from the closest big city.  An error, be it due to nerves, lack of fitness, or simple bad judgement, would be fatal.  Like, no-backsies-fatal.  And we were scared that we wouldn't make it back out of this cave alive.

I mean, look at that.  That's 9 feet of rock and the only way out of Sumaguing Cave.  In rough patches, Patrick advised us to take turns boosting each other's butts up the cliffs or stepping onto his knee.  Not to brag, but we've eaten breakfasts bigger than Patrick -- I was 100% convinced that putting my weight onto his delicate limbs would result in a hospitalization.  More than once our fingers clawed at the top of the rock, struggling to haul our bodies up the ledge or else fall back to our deaths.  We were blindly, pants-wettingly afraid.

Bruised, sore, sopping wet, we trudged back up the rocks, past other tour groups going the other way.  Until that moment, I never knew how happy I could be to see a broken flip-flop and piles of guano.

Once again, we rose through our plight and arrived back at the surface world, thus rising from Mighty up to Mighty Mighty.  I recalled all of the Dungeons & Dragons games I ran that took place in caves and chuckled at the thought of an armored, 300-pound dwarf dodging traps and doing battle with goblins in anything like what we had just gotten through -- 10 minutes in Sumaguing Cave would be enough to off any adventuring party.  Having accomplished the impossible, or at least very difficult, we proceeded to celebrate by not leaving our hotel room for 36 hours.

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