Ilocos Norte & Sur: July 26-28

Sorry for not blogging in a while. Here’s a re-cap of my trip to Ilocos.

7/25—10pm

Bus departs, Cubao PARTAS Bus Terminal. Partas in Ilocano means fast I think. The fare cost P826 for the deluxe bus, pretty expensive for a bus ride, but then again it was a nine and a half hour long trip. The deluxe bus was super nice, the seats reclined, you could compare it to sitting in first or business class on an airplane. Actually, we even had assigned seats too like on a plane. Oh man… the assigned seats. So, Tess and I didn’t reserve tickets so by the time we bought ours we had the last two seats on the bus. So it was similar to sitting in first class, but on an airplane in constant turbulence, if you know what I mean.

7/26—7:30am

Bus arrives in Laoag [lawag] City, Ilocos Norte. Tess didn’t expect to arrive this early, she didn’t want to wake-up our contact who was supposed to pick us up so, we take a tricycle to the nearest Jollibee. Jollibee wasn’t opened yet when we arrived, but they let us in anyways with all our luggage. I should have taken a picture because before the Jollibee workers served breakfast, they all gathered together for morning prayer and then they raised their right hands and recited the Jollibee Code of Service (?) Someone should look for it online. Has anyone worked at Burger King or McDonalds? Do workers there have a similar ritual?

Laoag is interesting, there are no taxis, you basically get around on foot or by riding tricycles, I’d never seen so many tricycles in one city before. When we traveled around doing interviews in the different provinces of Ilocos Norte I saw so many caribous and rice fields. People were out in the mud planting rice…hard work and time consuming. After dinner and conducting interviews Tess and I decided to take a bus to Vigan, Ilocos Sur.

Vigan is about an hour and a half bus ride from Laoag. So, we head over to the Partas terminal, ask for two tickets to Vigan, the man behind the counter points at the bus that just left the terminal, “there goes your bus to Vigan”. The tricycle man (what do you call the tricycle guy, a tricyclist?) said something in Ilocano, Tess and I don’t understand him, but get in the tricycle anyways. Tess, “I think he might’ve said that he can catch up to the bus”. The tricycle doesn’t follow the bus, instead it takes a different route, goes around all the speed bumps, barely misses a pedestrian, and he abruptly stops in front of this bridge. Tess and I get out, we looked behind us, and there it was.... the Partas bus to Vigan, talk about a high speed chase, it was definitely an adventure.

Bus arrives in Vigan, Ilocos Sur at around 6:30pm. Vigan is a heritage city, “for more than 3 centuries it was the center of political, religious, commercial, social and cultural activities in the north” ---tourist brochure. The well-preserved Spanish colonial town is part of the UNESCO World Heritage site and is home to Gov. Luis ‘Chavit’ Singson, a whistleblower to then President Joseph Estrada, who was later on impeached. But, by the time we got to Vigan it was already late, we walked through the empty cobblestone streets. The stores were already closed, no one really around, sometimes a calesa would pass by…it was eerie. Tess and I checked out two of the old mansions that were converted into hotels. We pretended to be interested on spending the night, but really, we just wanted to look at the buildings from the inside.

That was that, after touring for about an hour it started to rain so we ate halo-halo at Chowking and waited for the bus back to Laoag. Vigan, an old heritage Spanish colonial town, complete with its modern day fast food amenities.

Wednesday was a long day, we didn’t get back to the hotel until 11pm, and the night before, we didn’t get much sleep on the bus ride. Not to mention that we spent the whole entire day going from town to town, but still managed to do some site seeing at the end of the day.

7/27

7:20am—woke up. We ate breakfast and left to do more interviews for the day. We went to Bangui part of Ilocos Norte to do an interview. Bangui I believe is about an hour away from Laoag. We stopped to take pictures of the windmills in Bangui, wish we could have gone closer though, it was an interesting site, these huge white structures right on the beach. Before reaching Bangui we sped through the town of Burgos, we didn’t stop but, I did see the Cape Bojeador Lighthouse from the road. After the interview in Bangui, we went to Pagudpud because it was the next town over, took pictures of the beach and stuck my feet in the South China Sea, then we left after 15 minutes.

7/28

Did some more interviews. We toook the 9:30pm bus back to the Cubao bus terminal. They were showing the movie SPEED on the ride back. I was watching a movie on this bus, about a bus getting blown up. It was strange passing through the towns late at night because everytime we passed the town centers there would be security check points, we'd have to slow down and outside were these guys with guns, the PNP (Philippine National Police).