Day 21

We arrived this morning in Legaspi, a 10 hour bus ride south of Manila, which was itself 15 hours in two buses south of Sagada, where we started yesterday morning at 5am. It's so much hotter here in the lowlands so we splurged for an air con hotel which is relatively luxurious at $19/day! We also want to get some snapshots of the hotel, volcano's cindercone, and other local sites.

We initially arrived in Daraga at 7:30 am and took a 10-minute jeepney ride to Legaspi. We stopped at the town plaza and ate some oranges and took our bearing. We checked 3 inns and hotels and finally found the Legaspi Tourist Inn. It is on the third floor, very nice lobby and an accessible roof top, but Mt Mayon is not visible as there is a tall building blocking its view. We checked in to the only available room and it is the deluxe one for PHP950 (less than $20) with tv, air con, and its own bathroom. After that exhausting 27-hour bus ride, we felt richly deserving of this luxurious lodging.

We took much needed showers and did some laundry and went out to find food as we only had snack type of food during the trip. We went to the public market and found several carenderias (eateries). After much search and explaining what vegetarian food is, we found RJ’s Carenderia which had “pinangat” made with “gabi” leaves with coconut and chili—very delicious. We went back to the hotel and had a good nap for a couple hours.

We bought the usual fruits. Guayabano was not widely available, only two stalls were selling them and were not really ripe yet. Ole was desperate for them and bought the only one that was ripe, but it was really overripe and for the most part did not taste good anymore.

We have been unable to find a public Wifi connection here so we will probably just go to an internet café and see if we could connect the laptop there. We took some photos of the volcano, looming large over the city. Back to the hotel, we had our fruits for dinner and just watched our first Filipino tv. It has 70 channels, including the usual US ones, a few Taiwanese, and half a dozen local news and programming.