Mt. Pulag climbed!

It's been a couple of days since I came back home from the Mt. Pulag climb early Monday morning, and still I am unsure about my feelings about the trip. It definitely was an experience though.

It started early evening Friday when I headed off to meet Verchie and Benny in Gateway, Cubao for some heavy carbo-loading in Italiannis. Benny and I also prepared our peanut butter sandwiches (more on this later) while we where there. We headed off to Victory Liner Station, which has a hefty walk from Gateway, which was quite ok as I checked the weight distribution of my bag which seemed fined. We met up with the rest of the group there, and to my surprise included Narod, an officemate of mine! What nice a coincidence.

From there it was a 2 hour wait for our 6 hour bus ride to Baguio. We arrived to a very cold Baguio morning and loaded onto our jeep that would take us to the jump off point. We had a two hour jeepney ride to our first stop over, the Ambuklao dam. Thank God for that stop over as I was ready to puke anytime. The smell of the clutch was pretty bad inside the jeep, not to mention the Initial D-esque driving style of our driver. I later found out that nearly everyone had the same sentiments.

not our jeep

After a few minutes getting our heads together, getting a few snapshots we headed off to the jump-off point. This time a group of us decided to "topload" or sit up top the jeepneey and our bags. Unfortunately I took no pictures as I had my camera in my pocket and I was holding on for dear life (just kidding). Too bad since the view from the top of the jeepney was really nice.

the only "topload" picture

We stopped over for breakfast in one of the towns along the way and proceeded to the DENR place for a lecture and registration. After that it was off to the Ranger Station, our jump off point. Some last minute preparation and a quick lunch (say hello to to peanut butter sandwiches) and we were off to take on the second highest peak in the Philippines.