I’ll be honest. After one week of being in the Philippines I was wishing we could fly out. I joked with Andrew that the government make you buy a return ticket out of here prior to arriving in order to make you stay longer. Rather than to prevent illegal immigration. If we didn’t have a flight already booked we’d have left. Manila was not a pleasant place. It was dirty and extremely polluted. There isn’t really any green space and it is not a tourist destination. Our next stop over was worse; Angeles is at the heart of the sex-tourism industry. The city is once again polluted and rubbish dumped on the streets. At night the cockroaches came out. We couldn’t wait to leave. The next stop was Baguio, known as the gateway to the mountains. Although greener it is still very polluted – it made my eyes sore and I felt nauseous. The hotels were overpriced and there was little to do. After a rollercoaster ride to Sagada on the bus. Six hours of being thrown around we arrived. I think the pictures sum up this place. It has a well organised tour office that has reasonably priced tours (most of the tours don’t really need a guide but you are helping the economy). It has some really good restaurants that serve local coffee and tea plus delicious yogurt. There are no touts. You don’t need a taxi to get around. From the worst place we have visited it may surprise you all but I think Sagada is my favourite place of the trip. It’s a shame we are moving on. I will miss the cookies and yogurt and the views! Posted from Sagada, Cordillera Administrative Region,...
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The trip to Sagada was a distance of 130km and was scheduled to take 6 hours. It would take us along the Halsema Highway. This is ranked in the top 10 deadliest roads in the world. Our bus looked like it had seen better days but I wasn’t aware of the danger the road posed so I was happy enough, although I did wonder why Annemarie didn’t look too happy. As we made our way out of Baguio the bus would stop for anyone who waved their arm. I don’t know whether the people waved at the last second or the bus driver didn’t see them, but he would slam the brakes on and come to a sudden dead stop every time, throwing us around on our seats. At these stops the bus was loaded with all manner of goods, from metal pipes, metal sheeting, huge boxes of unknown items and even a huge bowl filled with water which I think held mussels. Finally we got out of the city and the road started to climb and wind around the side of the hills. Every time we went round a corner we would slide on our seats. At first this was acceptable, but soon it became obvious that the whole journey would be like this. The road literally followed every curve and contour of the hillside, meaning there was a corner about every 2-3 seconds. The driver also preferred to drive like a racing driver, accelerate hard wherever possible and brake hard into every corner. So we slid forward just before every corner, slid side-to-side around the corner before being thrown around again with the acceleration. Just in case this wasn’t annoying or uncomfortable enough the road was not smooth and the suspension had long since given up, meaning we felt every hole and uneven section of road. That might have been OK if the road had also been closer to the bottom of the mountain than it was to the top. For most of the journey there was a huge drop off the side of the road, many hundreds of meters down to the valley floor. The driver didn’t care, he kept slamming the brakes on and throwing the bus into each corner as fast as he could. Other drivers might use the gears to control the speed but not our driver, on downhill sections he changed UP gears and went faster only to whack the brakes before the next bend. Worryingly, he sped past the signs asking drivers to test their brakes and went just as fast past the signs warning of accidents on that section of...
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