Honeymoon Recap 4: Bumpin’ Baguio
From the low altitude of the sleepy lake district we took to the high ground towards North Luzon’s mountain region. On our journey spanning 15 hours of bus time our first stop, following the first 8 hours, was Baguio.
Baguio is a cool college town with an altitude nearly on par with the mile-high city. But it’s not clear if we made the most of it. There were a few highlights, like while running an errand along the crowded city streets an older toothless fellow with a hoarse voice who eagerly asked how tall I was, and gave me enthusiastic respect knuckles when I energetically replied ‘dat I was reeeally talllll. “I knew it, man!!” replied he, and we carried on like this with several more exchanges of the respect knuckles. (As you might imagine, I liked him immediately.) But the fact remains that we whiled away some of the hours with frivolities, like holing up in a cafe to wait out the rain and thereat ordering scotch at 3pm simply for the novelty of it (ah, what fun it is to be an adult!).
Perhaps our most creative adventure in Baguio was our effort to make up for poor planning (time-wise) to catch a 7pm screening of the new Harry Potter movie. We were still hungry at 6:30 with the theater a 15 minute walk away. We invented and played the “Street-Side Buffet Ballet”, a quest to fill our tummies and make it to the show on time whilst sampling the best of the hoards of street-side food vendors that set up shop all over town around dusk. It was a flurry of making snap decisions of what looked tasty as we navigated the crowded streets to our destination. Roasted corn on a stick, 25P, fantastic! A gyro-like wrap, sure I’ll take that random sauce you offered, 80P, delicious! 5P for some bits of meat on a stick… ugh, gross, moving on! 5P for a baked bar of something wrapped in orange cling wrap, sure, I’ll take 2, thanks! A tasty carrot to cleanse the pallet after that weird stick meat… don’t need the whole pile, how about 2P for one? Ok! Fried banana chunks on a stick…. 10P, what a treat! And to wrap up after all that, a so-called pimkin that suspiciously resembles a clementine, nice and sweet at 5P! And voila, we’d arrived at the theater, with 4 minutes to spare! (As best I could tell from our balcony position, we were the only ones present for that screening, perhaps not too surprising given the abundance of bootleg DVDs of the movie I saw laid out around town earlier.)
And that’s about all I can think to write about Baguio. Maybe we were big lame-o’s for this leg of the trip, but in our defense at least we got our laundry done and–yeah, ok, we were big lame-o’s. So the next day, we left town for what was next.