CONQUER SAGADA

I combined Tina's blog with mine to give her a credit for her beautifully written Sagada adventure article. I am just so overwhelmed by her innocence and her sense of kid-humor. (I'm so sorry Aquaman!)
(Italized articles are written by Tina.)

I say “wonderful”, “beautiful”, “nice” and “wow” almost always. That is so because of two things: One, I am generally easy to please and I get touched over the simplest gestures. Two, I think I need to brush up on my English vocabulary. Business memos, the kind of writing people in the corporate usually do, are allergic to adjectives. I love adjectives, so I am allergic to business memos.

I personally (literally) would like to add the word “Holy Mary Mother”, “Shit, this is a nice place” and “fuck, I don’t wanna go back to Manila!” during our bat-shit-touch game inside the cave. Not like Tina, I am not easy to please, nor get touched over the simplest gestures. In contradiction to this statement, I can easily appreciate the things life has to offer. Mountain climbing is way sooooo out of my league. But seeing the magnificent wonder of God’s creation, I can’t help but to thank Him because I was able to walk around the cliffy and edgy rice terraces. Thank you Lord! Hallelujah! (Even if I am the sweeper, I don’t care. I managed to get down and climb back up anyway.)

Thus, my current state of unemployment.Thus, the urgent need to get out of the city which has set too high a standard for university graduates.Thus, my gratitude to that youthful stubbornness two months ago when two of my friends and former colleagues said “Amen” to my invitation, “Tara! Sagada tayo?”

This, I have to thank Tina. I have been searching for a perfect travel buddy all this time. I’ve known her for three years now, and yet I didn’t even know she’s into this kind of thing. (Until one summer of 2010 when she asked me for a Binondo food trip with Mark, a food blogger and a good friend of ours). My long search for a travel out of the bustling and polluted city is finally over! Thank God!

Thus, amidst news reports about a typhoon in the Northern Luzon in the last (and long) weekend of August, we hopped on the bus together with six other willing and adventurous souls and braced ourselves for an experience of a lifetime which I hope to share not through the sites I have feasted my eyes with, not through the food I ate, not through the places I have set my foot in, but through the people and lives I have been given the privilege to become a part of. Kahit ilang araw lang.

I don’t really care even if we battle our way up the North with typhoon and all. I am so daring that I feel the adrenalin all over my body. Maarte lang. Really, even if my niece died a day before the Conquer Sagada, loneliness didn’t pull my excitement down. I fear death, I love adventure and yet, God mysteriously brought events simultaneously. Ewan ko, to balance my feelings or to balance the world. No one can tell. I lost one precious little girl in my family and yet again, I gained six friends from different walks of life sharing the same hunger for adventure.