December 28, 2008: Head for the Mountains

Baguio City is only about 150 miles from Manila, but it took us six hours to get there after leaving around 10 am (the original plan was to leave at something like 4 am so that we could have two full days to explore Baguio, but given our late arrival back from Subic I think this was deemed unrealistic).  That only includes maybe 45 minutes of stops, too.  The problem is you can only take the SCT Expressway so far, and after that the final 75 to 100 miles (I have no idea how many for sure, but it was certainly at least half the total distance and quite likely more) is a grueling drag on "local streets," by which I mean two-lane blacktop with at least half the traffic composed of tricycles, motorized rickshaw-like vehicles that appear to have a top speed of 15 mph.  To avoid having the trip take 12 hours, people (including us) were constantly passing slower-moving vehicles.  This is a two-lane road, remember.  One in each direction.  To say this was a little scary does not do it justice.  And you're hanging on like that for four hours, and when the trip gets into the mountains it becomes all the more white-knuckle (though there is certainly less passing at that point, for obvious reasons).  We took Marcos Highway into Baguio; it's not the fastest route but it's supposedly safer, although frankly I didn't see it.

We didn't do much after getting there around 4 pm.  We did make a trip into the city center, which was incredibly hectic and packed with people.  (This, as I may have mentioned, was a running theme.)  Baguio's population is somewhere between 250,000 (at the time of the 2000 census) and 300,000 (the current estimate), which would rank it between 60th and 70th, depending on which figure is right, if it were in the United States.  In the Philippines it's easily in the top ten, though in the bottom half, and it felt like it.  The fact that it was a holiday didn't help, I'm sure, but Baguio was crammed with people, and going to the center of the city at night certainly forced that point home.

With my cold not improving and in fact morphing into mostly a very nasty cough (for which we obtained some Robitussin in town), I was a bit worried at first about the accommodations.  We were staying in a small house that Alma's uncle owns in Baguio (when he's not there, which I assume is pretty much always, it's cared for by an older couple).  I was in a room on the lower story, and like most Filipino houses, the windows were just thick plastic shutters which could be closed pretty much to a sealed point, but really not quite.  I guess when you live in a country that lies entirely within tropical regions, you don't really need to keep the cold out.  Except in Baguio, in the winter, you do a little bit.  Baguio is known as the "Summer Capital of the Philippines" for its mild climate, which it owes to an elevation only slightly less than that of Denver.  While it was quite pleasant during the day, at night it did indeed drop into the 60s and perhaps even the 50s.  (In Manila a few days later, I saw a headline on the front page of the newspaper - the front page - describing how Baguio's temperature had dipped all the way to 9.8º, a temperature that is about as low as it ever gets there except in truly extreme cases.  That's 50 degrees Fahrenheit, by the way.  Yeah, people freaked out and it was on the front page of the national newspaper that temperatures had dipped to 50 in the mountains in late December.  Welcome to the Philippines.)  I was worried that that might be a bit cool to sleep exposed to even if it's not that cold overall, and the sheets in the room were a bit damp from exposure.  But I slept under a blanket and really it turned out fine, although I had something of a backache on the 29th because the mattress was a little saggy.  The accommodations were certainly rougher than in Manila, what with running water existing pretty much in name only, but hey, it was only going to be a couple of nights.  I hoped that on the 29th the city would justify the trouble we'd taken to see it.

A substantial portion of the drive to Baguio - and for that matter a substantial portion of any drive outside of Metro Manila - is spent looking out at rice fields.  The neat thing about rice fields is that a number of them are plowed by carabao.  I like carabao for two reasons - one, I like saying the word carabao, and two, while animals are everywhere in the Philippines, there's something singularly exotic about seeing a water buffalo.  Cows are everywhere, but I can see cows in the US (if not the same breeds as I'd see in the Philippines).  You can't see water buffalo in the US.  It's a nice counterbalance to every rest stop having a McDonald's or a KFC.

Much rarer than rice fields as a sight out the window were sugarcane fields.  But here's one.

Ang ilog, or a river as we'd say in English.

Ang mga manok (chickens), hanging out behind the house of a family friend where we briefly stopped.  I probably only make myself more conspicuous when I do things like take pictures of chickens for two solid minutes, though really that probably marks me as a city/suburban dweller more so than a white person specifically - it's not like you can't find chickens in the US, you just have to go into the country.  Of course in the Philippines you don't necessarily have to go into the country per se - outside of metro Manila there's livestock pretty much everywhere.

At one point the traffic narrowed to one lane to accommodate some local parade.  This was the beginning of it.  I took some video, but my camera takes videos in 720p HD, so posting them isn't terribly realistic size-wise (plus they don't play nice with Vista, and if I can't see them without pixellation I have no idea what they'd look like on the other end of an Internet connection).  Not like you wanted to see some random town parade anyway, right?

A sizable river bed that was mostly dry.  We also saw some of these in Zambales, near Mount Pinatubo, and saw several more on the way back out of Baguio.  My intuitive explanation was that only a trickle was flowing in the middle of the large bed because it was the dry season, whereas in the rainy season, water coming down from the mountains expands to fill the bed (or at least most of it).  I'm not sure if that was right but it makes sense to me.

A snap backwards from the van.  Alma chastised me for sticking my hand out the window, but I made sure no one was coming first.  You can see here how the road was just two lanes, with a marking in the center to indicate that passing was allowed (although Filipinos are not a people who pay much attention to traffic signs or markings, I noticed).  This is how it was for the vast majority of the drive.

This shot was taken from right outside the Baguio house soon after our arrival.  You might be able to ascertain a bit of an incline on the street there, but this picture doesn't reveal the scope of it; the road slopes up at a pretty steep angle directly behind me.

Another look at some of the surrounding neighborhood.

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