Sagada tripping: !st morning in sagada

Finally back in the city after a few days of going up the mountainous city of Sagada!

Can't say my body is happy to be back in the city, but I have no choice but to join civilization again for work XD And I do need to recover everything I spent up there in the mountain city. I feel like just an article wouldn't be enough too go over all the activities we had up there so I'll go at it per activity.

Day 0

This was basically the waiting and traveling game. at 10 pm of Thursday night, we met up with our tour coordinator and our van driver in Mall of asia (a usual pick up point for a lot of travel tours). We got acquainted with the other people who would be joining us for this little sagada trip. It's always so refreshing to travel with strangers and this group of strangers were so nice to us UwU


there was 9 of us as guests, the coordinator and the driver so 11 of us in total. Once we left Mall of asia, we were on our way to the mountains!

Day 1

Honestly, from 11 pm to... maybe 6 am, I was actually knocked out because I was dead tired from work that morning since I had to run a few mercury samples (about 117 of them and cross check the content with the other instrument reading) So imagine my tiredness. What greeted me when I woke up was a pretty nice view though.


At 6:30 am, we were at the arch of Banaue

We spent a little over 40 minutes there because everyone needed a good stretch and we all looked through the shops for some trinkets. From there, you could already feel the mountain breeze. Such cold and crisp air, but honestly it only gets colder, the further up you go.

These were only among the rows and rows of shops that were lined up along the arc. You could really see how popular the stop was.


Nobody really brought anything from there but the time to breath fresh air was much appreciated because we had another 2 hours ahead of us before we reached our destination.


But there was another stopover, and that was for breakfast! More like breakfast with a view, really!

From that stopover we went to, you could get a glimpse of the rice terraces that banaue is so famous for. And that was just the start of it, from that stop onwards, there were more and more of the terraces that followed the higher up we went.

It took us another 2 hours to really really get to reach the city of sagada and to finally arrive at the hotel we were to stay at for the next 3 days.

It was sooo homely and cozy over there! And even without fans or anything, the cool mountain breeze just passed through the windows and corridors plus the view from the window is just beautiful. It was so nice to be surrounded by so much greenery. An extremely refreshing way to purge out the cityscape, really.

12 pm of Day 1

We weren't really given much time to catch up on sleep. At maybe 12 pm, the staff knocked on our room to summon us for the lunch they prepared for us (part of the package we paid for was 1 meal a day and the count apparently started from day 1 up until the last day)

We had this weird local hand pulled noodles called batong pitil, it was strange because the sauce was separate unlike with most noodles you find in the city, yet it was sooooo good! tastes similar to chow mien but a little more herby.


After eating we explored the hotel a bit and found a few dogs around. Being what was formerly a hunting and head hunting tribe, the people were close to their dogs and have a special place for them in their hearts. Like they dogs were extremely friendly that they don't even bark of growl at a stranger unless they can sense that the person is really bad.

So these are the dogs I met in the hotel XD you have goldy, shadow and sugar the chowchow. I think their names can describe their appearances well enough. Apparently, no bad dogs exists in sagada because if the dogs turn bad, they get executed and served as food.


I also dug up a bit of this and apparently, sagada is one of the few cities/communities left where it's legal to eat dog meat. This is done as one way for them to stay warm, and also because there are rituals there that require dog sacrifices like in hunting and for protection. It's a bit unsettling but no dogs have beeen sacrificed in such a long time because the locals have trained their dog to be as friendly to people as possible and that part is quite a huge relief because I don't want to see a dog getting dragged away to be executed ;;-;; that's so cruel!

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I'm going to have to cut this blog a little short for now because we had a lot more activities later on in that day and to fit it all in one article would be a little too long XD
Thank you for reading my article though! I really appreciate it UwU until my next blog about my sagada activities