We were woken at about 4am but a clucking cacophony of roosters, and the sounds of them tap dancing on tin roofs. I shoved a pillow over my face and tried so hard to sleep in but it sounded like there was one hundred cawing birds in my room, and I tossed and turned until my alarm finally went off. We went back to the woman’s house and she invited us in for coffee, rice, and eggs, all locally grown in the area. I asked if she had any chili peppers and she went and plucked some fresh from her yard, and we were delighted. Other women from around the area came to gather for coffee, and the woman apologized for how simple her house was, which was honestly the reason we were ever there in the first place, simplicity, and to experience how happy the people are with almost nothing to their names, while also still trying to share what they had to people who paid a lot of money to even be in their country to begin with. One woman asked us if we went to Buscalan and showed me her tattoo from Whang-Od’s granddaughter, and we said not this time, we wanted simple, not busy. We went back to the Inn and she asked us to sign the book of visitors, and I only had to turn back 4 pages to find my name from 2019. She said the owner of the Inn died but she and her sister had been holding down the fort ever since. Such nice people but we were on our way to explore this side of the river a little bit, and declining more invitations from strangers to come have coffee with them. A boy carrying a dead chicken stopped in awe of Mark as he crossed the bridge, and we made it back to the side with the road, and went to Francis’ house again. His other nephew was outside and informed us that Francis had gone to Buscalan again, so we took a video saying hello so he would know what stranger was trying to look for him the previous day, got into our car, and headed back down the mountain.
We stopped in Bontoc to hit up the local market, for some fruits and rice. We grabbed a papaya, a fruit Mark had somehow never tried, two yellow Mangos, some black rice, and some weird purple pudding full of various textures and ingredients. Mark scored some elephant pants for Jess and I found a Kalingan textile top for Rami. Though Bontoc is a proper town, it stil didn’t feel overly chaotic, and was nice before we got back into the car again. There were so many breathtaking terraced hills and views that we missed on that night drive that we got to soak up that day. We had a 13 hour drive back to Manila, and so much of it was previously unseen. The Kiangan terraces were jaw droppingly beautiful, and were new to both of us, and we stopped as frequently as we could find pull offs to appreciate and photograph. The trickiest part about getting back was passing the large trucks jammed full of cabbage, driving very slowly down the mountain. There were so many trucks full of cabbage, which made the ride back to Manila extra tedious. Down we went, pushed through Baguio’s traffic, onto the toll road, and then we cruised back into Manila. It was a long beautiful day of driving but again we got to Greg’s to get some much needed sleep.
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