the unplanned trip: just get on a bus.

every once in a while, discussions come up in the office about going out of town on a weekend, be it just a day trip or an over-overnight at a beach resort somewhere (typically down south).

naturally, multi-person pre-arranged trips will take the successful confluence of various conditions to happen, and more often than not the trip simply evaporates into the ether as one or more proponents see to other, more pressing, matters.

on my end, self-inflicted pressure to be out of the metro for a weekend had been building ever since before my rather odd birth day.

harkening to something louie said about just jumping on a bus to somewhere, me and my roommate decided last friday night to just go to baguio. no firm plans, no nothing. off he went to the bus station to see about securing seats on the last express bus, and i did little other than stuff some clothes into a duffel bag; enough for a three-day trip, just in case.

express bus: i was also considering a trip down south to my comet-viewing haunt of white beach in mindoro's puerto galera area. but that would have entailed a bus/boat/tricycle trip one way and the reverse order of that the other way (naturally) -- and i was looking for the least hassle on this particular occasion, so the north-bound bus to baguio seemed like a good idea indeed. the "express bus" part is another inducement -- otherwise, aircon or no, the bus would have paused at every conceivable stop along the way. that would stretch the nominally six-hour journey to god knows how long.

i wasn't in the mood to be that patient.

the last express bus of the day was scheduled to depart at 11:00 pm. more time to consider what to bring or not: we decided not to lug along his megapixel digicam -- bad idea, as it turns out, but that's the way of a spur of the moment trip.

to the bus station, then. good thing i insisted on being early. i'd forgotten to consider the effect of "office time" versus "philippine time." turns out that office time was ten minutes late, oddly. if we'd been on time according to my watch, we'd have missed the bus entirely.

at any rate, bus left on time (their time) and being a late hour, we cleared the metropolis in under thirty minutes: pasay to balintawak via edsa, and thence to the privately operated north tollway. i suppose the massive increase in toll fees are worth the "world-classness" of the construction employed on the tollway. the trip was smooth and uneventful (short of the rain, but that's a given for this period of the philippine seasonal dichotomy), highway traversed in an hour.

i tried my best not to sleep (not that there was anything to see out there, really), but the sandman did his work and consciousness fled not long after the bus had departed the tollway and began negotiating the national road network heading for the mountain fastnesses of the "summer capital" of the philippines.

every once in a while, i'd wake up as the the bus did some sharp sideways transitions during overtaking maneuvers. on this matter: victory liner (the operator of the bus we were on) has a motto to the effect that they bring you to places "faster and safer."

the "faster" part was not in doubt, given the super-sharp overtaking maneuvers. we'd come up to a clot of slow movers, and the bus would shift left, then shift right after overtaking up to three vehicles in a line. immediately after that, something would flash by on the left. fun! not.

back to sleep. hard.

woke up as the bus did it's one scheduled stop somewhere in tarlac or la union, i don't remember for sure. probably the latter. it's a stop that's owned by the bus line itself, so i'm told. i'll take more notes next time.

soon enough it's the ride into the mountains. slept for a few bits, except where the g-forces of the bus negotiating switchbacks would wake me up by either pressing me against the windows or against the seat bolsters such as they were.

back to sleep.

then i wake, and i notice stars in the sky as we come up and there's a carpet of sodium pinpricks in the distant dark. we're almost there.

bus station. glenn (roommate) notes that the victory liner facility is new to him, situated where the old pnr office was. odd, i thought. a philippine national railroad (presently semi-defunct) office in baguio? i could hardly imagine their ancient hardware making that climb.

time was 4:00 am. a five-hour trip. a full hour shorter than expected. "faster" indeed.

i am glad, though, that i didn't get a ringside seat next to the driver. i figure that the climb into the mountains would have been hair-raising indeed (had i a head of hair to raise, at any rate).

so there we are. baguio. now what?

to be continued.