Saturday, March 1, 2014
We had a nice leisurely walk with Kona to Pup Culture where
he was going to stay the day at daycare.
Wagging his tail he walked up to his favorite worker and was greeted
warmly. Kona bid us goodbye, and we
headed to the F1 Hotel to meet Andrea, a coworker of Edi’s. We three would be touring Pagsanjan Falls
together. The Gray Line Van pulled up
with J.R. driving and Neil in the passenger seat. They were our guides for the Tagaytay Tour,
so we were happy to see them.
Our first stop was in Victoria. This little town is known for its balut a
fifteen day old duck embryo boiled in the shell. We saw a hatchery with lots of cute little
ducklings, and a few grown ducks. We
went into a little open air café, and Neil ordered one balut. As we sat at one of the tables, he cracked
the shell and showed us each part of the egg and how to eat it. Edi had actually eaten balut at work the
previous week, but it was a sight for me.
Neil ate the duckling; I would only taste the yolk. It tasted like a boiled egg, but I’m not
crazy about boiled eggs, so I won’t be ordering this delicacy soon. Edi, on the other hand was told that if he
ate three, it would increase his manhood J
Our next stop was at a little store that makes distilled
coconut wine. It is very high in alcohol
content and more like liquor than wine.
We each got a free taste – whew!
We all had regular, but they had all kinds of flavors. Of course we had to buy a bottle at only forty
pesos.
Arriving at Pagsanjan Falls Summer Lodge, we got changed and
stored our belongings in a locker and headed down to our banca (a native dug-out
canoe). We were fitted with life jackets
and hardhats and climbed in. There were
two banca men – one in the front and one in the back. A motorized banca pulled us upriver a ways
and then we were on our own. The banca
men navigated upstream through the rapids and paddled through the lagoons. Let me just say that these guys worked hard –
their feet take a real beating on those rocks!
After a beautiful ride up through the canyon we arrived at
the falls. We disembarked and got on a
bamboo raft where another guy actually pulled the raft to and through the falls
by a rope that was attached to where we were to behind the falls. After going directly under the falls, I
understood why we had the hard hats.
Back in our banca, we drifted downstream being navigated
once again by our banca men. We made it
back to the original lagoon where the motorized banca was waiting and were
towed in – I’m sure to the relief of the guys that had been working so hard all
day.
At the lodge, we changed and had a delicious lunch waiting
for us including chicken (white meat!), rice, lumpia, kimchi, a green leafy
vegetable, little crunchy sardines, and sliced apple. We were starving, and the food was yummy!
Back to the van we went for the ride back only stopping once
for a bathroom / coffee break. We were
dropped off at the F1 Hotel, bade farewell to Andrea, and headed to Pup Culture
where we were greeted excitedly by a clean, bathed Kona. A walk back to our apartment brought us to
another end of a great adventure.
