Mar 16, 2025
Well, sooner or later I had to stuff something up. We carted our bags along the broken footpaths down to the bus terminal early this morning with Mandy bravely trailing in my wake. Arrived at the right place at the right time to find, well, actually it wasn’t the right place. Certainly it was the Victory Liner bus terminal but it turns out that the tickets I bought online would depart from another Victory Liner bus terminal on the other side of the city. And, of course, given the nature of traffic in this city, there isn’t time to get a taxi all the way across to the other side in time to redeem our tickets. Ironically, it turned out, the bus station we were meant to be at was next to the airport, but then we wouldn’t have had all that fun with our driver yesterday if I’d known the suburbs of Manila.
After a bit of pantomiming the girl gave us tickets for one of the buses leaving the terminal that we were at, but as what they call a ‘chance passenger.’ That means basically standby, and you can get on if there are any seats unclaimed. Not sure where that leaves us, but looking at the number of people around I think we’ve got a good shot of getting a seat at least.
Eventually a fully suited guy walked past calling for first class passengers, helpfully allocated us seats on the bus, and then ushered us into the air-conditioned first class lounge. Our day is getting better, although we had to sit there listening to an impersonator sing songs from Jesus Christ Superstar. Then it was the greatest hits of Peter, Paul and Mary. Oh well.
Mandy got her long held wish to be a backseat driver, and safely ensconced in our leather layback armchairs with free wifi, snacks and a toilet somewhere downstairs, we headed off.
We are going to be spending most of our time wandering around some of the many islands in the south of the country, so before we started on that, we decided to head north into the mountains for a couple of days. Baguio City is about 250 km north of Manila by a decent tolled expressway, and after about 2 1/2 hours down the valley we hit the base of the climb. Lots of zigzags as we headed for the clouds, arriving after about an hour and a half. It certainly got its head in the clouds. It has its own climate, own clouds and even its own rain pattern. But it’s a full 5° cooler. Think of the summer residences of the British Raj in India and you’ll get the idea.
Each country has its own unique culture, and I’m getting the idea that the tagline for Philippines is ‘pointless bureaucracy’. The most pointless question you can ask is ‘why’. We’ve checked into our hotel in Baguio which is pretty bare bones, not even a fridge or kettle, but before they would give us the key they wanted a $10 deposit. When I asked why, all they could tell me was ‘security’. Not sure what damage we could inflict to an empty room that could be fixed with $10 but that’s not the point. They have a full set of power points in the room but the international ones don’t work, and if you ask why they just shrug their shoulders. They made us fill out a registration card with all of the details that she had in her hand from the booking. I didn’t bother asking why. You have to reconnect to the internet every two hours. Nope, not asking.
After recovering from our hike to the hotel, we wandered out to see what was about for tea. Everything American was the answer, and we ended up in McDonalds for the first time in a long time. Big Mac index here is $7, so food is cheap.
Victory Liner 1st class coach to Baguio
The very average Travelite Hotel Baguio