Joe Philippines: Lowlands

I have skipped several prior posts in this series due to them being repetitive or not holding up to the test of time well. So some of my writing references posts you haven't seen.

After our beach overnight vacation within a vacation, we spent the next day going around Baguio, mostly stuck in traffic jams, visiting people and buying a few souvenirs to bring back home. The following day, we began our journey into the lowlands and eventually start our journey home. However since we didn't have far to go for the first day, we left at a reasonable hour and I was able to see the view on the descent down the mountain, my first time in probably well over a decade. It was as beautiful as I remember it. Unfortunately, Filipinos have gotten crazy with their window tinting since my previous visits. Almost every single vehicle has the darkest tinting on all sides and rear windows and even strips of tinting on the top and bottom of the front window. It isn't conducive to taking shots through the window and due to traffic and narrow roads, we can rarely pull over to get the shot so you will have to use your imagination of looking out from the mountain and seeing the China Sea off in the distance.

At one point in the road, we were traveling pretty slow and my window was down when we came across the above seen where a truck had missed the curve coming down the mountain sometime since we came by this way a day and a half ago. It isn't the first time I've seen something like this on winding mountain roads in the Philippines and I'm sure it won't be the last.

The tricycles you see above rule the lowland but don't have enough horsepower to work well in the mountains. Thus, I always know we've made it out of the mountains when I start to see them. Outside of a town, they thin out like above but when you get into any little town along the way, they multiply by multiple factors of ten and clog up the road since they only travel about 20 mph. Just about everywhere you go, the official speed limit is about 100 kph which works out to 62 mph so you can see the huge speed disparity depending on your ride. Many times we would get to our destination and my right leg would be sore from pressing down on the floorboard as tricycles pulled right out in front of us time and time again without even a sideways glance. I'm not sure how one can explain the sheer numbers of them when so many must get crushed in accidents other than the abundant birth rate in the county.

Eventually we made it to our destination of Tarlac where we would spend the next several days but along the way, we stopped at one of my wife's paternal uncle's house for lunch and ice cream. Here in the Philippines, you don't just drop in at the local grocery store and pick up a half gallon of your favorite ice cream. Many of these smaller towns don't even have grocery stores that would carry it. Instead you order it delivered to your door on a motorized tricycle, ice cream, container, cooler and all as you see above. I reckon there was about five gallons of ice cream in that thing. Because it was probably made last night, you don't get to choose flavors like cookies n' cream or rocky road because they don't exist. In fact, we had just two choices, mango and ube, and since mango was still out of season, we really didn't have a choice. Ube it was. For those not familiar with ube, it is a purple sweet tuber much like a yam.