Rice Terraces in Banaue, Philippines 1-22-10

The busses here work in funny ways. Options are to book a no AC bus or an AC bus. AC sounds like the wiser choice, but they don’t tell you that you’ll need to wear long-underwear, wool socks, a winter coat, sweatpants, gloves, and a hat (really!). The air-con gets so cold on the bus that everyone had plugged their air vents with their window curtains! I was wearing 3 pairs of socks, jeans, a t-shirt, a sweatshirt with a hood, and a pant and jacket tracksuit on top of all of that… I was curled up into a little ball inside my sleeping bag / blanket and was still shivering!

And just so you know, the bus ride experiences in Asian countries are very interesting. You try to sleep, but are awoken constantly by the driver slamming on his breaks, other drivers honking, bumps in the road, and sharp turns that almost tip the bus over. Also, a constant feeling of “are we there yet?” is always in your mind… because if you miss your stop and don’t get off, the bus just keeps on driving, they don’t let you know when you get to wherever it is that you are going.

At 7:30am we made it to this little mountain town of Banaue and took a jeepney 100 meters away to the ‘center of town’. Which really meant, the spot where there were a few min-stores, two small hotels, a couple empty restaurants, and an area with a small market.

Sporting our sweatshirts to counter the cold air, we checked into a place called Sanafe which had a terrace view of the rice paddies on the mountain behind us. Our dorm room was downstairs in a tiny closet with two small beds that had mattresses slightly more comfortable than sleeping on wood (but we could still feel the solid bench beneath us). Our basement room was freezing cold all the time and even after asking for extra blankets, Cam and I still froze each night. The fact that the showers were cold as well only added to the discomfort. Well, that’s what you get for 300 pisos (pronounced pesos), about $6.50 US, in Banaue.

When we arrived here we needed to take out some cash from an ATM and realized our stupidity when we heard the closest ATM was an hour and a half away by motorbike. Of course they wouldn’t have ATM’s in this small town, how could we have forgotten to take money out in advance?

It was my first day out of the hospital and I was still feeling tired all the time, so I took an hour nap before planning to take the trip with Cam into ATM town. Cam woke me up and asked if I was ready to go... I told him I wanted to take another little nap and he laughed and said he’d take the trip alone and let me rest up. I slept for hours and felt pretty good when I awoke.

We ate a snack of sticky rice desert from the market outside our hotel and then rode on a motorbike up the mountain we were staying on. We stopped several times at different look-out points to take pictures of the rice terraces. It was fascinating to see these old terraces, they look like large stairs travelling from the bottom of the valley to the top of the mountain peak and each level wraps around the inside of the mountain slope. I wondered how they ever could have carved out these steps.

We stopped a couple other times to speak with some locals who surprisingly spoke perfect English. Most people in the Philippines speak English, they learn in school as they’re growing up. We met two older Philippino women who used to work in the rice fields years ago, but now just sit on a bench at a look-out point, get all dressed up, and collect donations from tourists like us. I helped them with their new jobs… they were too sweet not for me not to. We also met some little kids in town and took pictures with them. One thing I’ve learned while traveling in Asia, is that kids LOVE to have their pictures taken and to look at themselves in the photo afterward.

Cam and I had dinner and made plans to leave the following night on the same bus we had just come in on. Our next day in Banaue we took it easy and walked around town. We played pool at a billards hall in town (a room with three pool tables), Asians love to play pool, and we bought a deck of cards from a little shop and spent a few hours playing Gin Rummy and Up-and-down the River.

We met a nice older man from Germany and he invited us to tour the rice terraces later by car with his wife and their driver. It was nice to have a second look at the terraces, especially when we discovered that the view we had was the same exact one as the picture on the back of a 1000 piso bill.

Driving home towards our hotel we passed two boys carrying a live pig, tied up and hanging by its legs on a pole. This 200 pound pig was squealing and thrashing around to get off this pole. The two boys continued to walk up this hill resting the bamboo stick on their shoulders, both seemed unfazed by their difficult pig.

We later discovered that someone in the town had died earlier today and the pig was going to be used in a ceremony. Cam, the German, and I jumped out of the car and literally RAN after these boys to catch up and take pictures of what was going on. When I got back in our van I realized I had just exerted some effort for the first time in the past 10 days, it felt great.

Back at the hotel, Cam and I packed up and took out as many layers as we could for the artic bus ride back. The ride was slightly more enjoyable the second time around, although we made it back to Manila three hours earlier than expected, 5:00am. Our flight wasn’t until 10:30am, but we went straight to the airport anyway and slept on the chairs outside our gate until it was time to board.

We would be flying into Legaspi, the closest airport to Donsol (whale sharks), and from there would have to take a bus or van or taxi or tricycle to Donsol. “We’ll figure it out when we get there”.