Wednesday 16th September
Early start and excited to be heading to Sagada! After bidding Tito Randy goodbye, we were driven up the road to the jeepney terminal, literally a 5 minute walk, and deposited on the Sagada Jeep, where we waited... And waited... And waited...
We waited for at least an hour before one man told us that we needed to wait for more passengers, as there were only two of us, before the jeep could leave. He did kindly offer to let us hire the keep out for P2,500. Of course we said no, and patiently waited. Half an hour later we were told they were expecting the arrival of five tourists from Batad who were going to Sagada... They never showed up. So after a full two hours of waiting and generally getting annoyed and hot in a slowly heating up metal jeep, we were graced with the man from before holding a map. He repeated that they couldn't leave without more passengers, offered again the opportunity to hire the jeep, and then offered us another option when we declined private hire, which was to take us to the main road, by the Banaue lookout point, in his tricycle where we could catch a mini van to Sagada coming from another town. It would only cost us P300.
We immediately smelt a scam. Like Simon had said before, anyone that approaches you with a map is definitely trying something. We also questioned the need to go to the viewpoint to catch the mini van, which we had walked to and knew wasn't that expensive to get to (around P100), which also had no other connecting roads, meaning every vehicle had to pass through the bottom of town to get to. Shaking our heads, annoyed at the waste of our time, we declined his offer and went back to Tito Randy.
He wasn't entirely surprised when we came back, as this had happened the day before with an Italian couple. He recommended catching the mini van from the top of the stairs, where we had to walk to get to the viewpoint and to our favourite restaurant, only a short 5-7 minutes away. It was already 11am by this point, with no guarantee of a mini van until around 1pm, with a long journey before we even got to Sagada. With the intention of only staying one night and realising we would be wasting a lot of time travelling, and then having to come back on ourselves early tomorrow morning, we decided to cut our losses and skip Sagada and head down to Manila in he evening. After buying our tickets and having yet another awesome meal at 7th Heaven, we ended up chilling out for the rest of the day, and I finally managed to get my hands on fresh banana bread!
When it was time, we headed to the Ohayami ticket booth where a jeep would pick us up to shuttle us to the bus further down the road. When we got there, the jeep was already packed full of people, no space to sit inside and the top loaded in bags... The driver was insistent that everyone could fit, which meant 5 of us had to sit up top, with all the bags, one guy clinging onto the back. Definitely a pretty cool experience, full of fresh wind in our faces and fear in our hearts at every sharp turn at full speed!
By the time we finally got to the bus, we were exhausted, falling asleep quickly and completely missing the food stop much to Simon's dismay,