Ahjummas hike Mt. Daraitan
Hiking Mt. Daraitan with a bunch of titas who had never gone hiking before is a bad idea. I could easily bail out, but I went anyway. Two reasons–one, I really want to go hiking again, and two, I would feel guilty to not accompany my senior colleagues knowing that none of them had gone hiking before.
At some point when they were still organizing this trip, I surfaced the idea of going to Gulugog Baboy instead because it would be so much easier. But I also did not want to organize the trip so I just supported the idea of going to Daraitan since we already have contacts there who could help us.
Why do they suddenly want to go hiking? We had a guest from IFAD, one of MTCP2's funder who expressed interest to go hiking. Usually, we only take our guests to Intramuros for a meal, so this one is few levels up. My senior colleagues were so into the idea of hiking, so I thought so be it. Let's do this. It would also be fun to see who will be able to make it and who won't.
We left the meeting place, our office in Katipunan before 1am. We were quite early. We arrived at the jump-off early, but there were already lots of groups before us.
I am not sure if I'd become stronger or it was because I was in the tail, but I did not feel tired during the 4-5 hours hike up. As much as I wanted to overtake everyone, I can't just brush off what our guide in Sagada once said while we were going down Sumaguing cave, "the weakest link should go first (after the guide), and the strongest link should go last.." I've already been to Daraitan so I self-appointed myself as the strongest link, which meant, aside from the guide, I had to assist my companions. Thus, I had to go with their pace. We were awfully slow. We let the first half of our group leave us behind since it was easy to follow the trail and there were a lot of people hiking that day.
But no matter how slow we went, nobody got left behind. We all made it the peak.
This photo was taken after waiting for a couple of hours at the peak. Arip, our guest, remarked, "All these for a couple of photos at the peak". It was a weekend so there were a lot of people. There were too many actually that the peak seemed like Divisoria. Our group patiently waited, even we saw face to face that we got bumped several times, by groups that had more assertive guides. Some of us were even able to nap (while seated at the rocks), myself included. What, it was the breeze! And because I wasn't able to sleep while in transit to Rizal. When it was our turn to take photos at the peak, we almost got bumped again but we were already irate and sleepy we couldn't help but say loudly to let us go first since we'll only take a couple of photos and we'll take 2 minutes. Staying true to our words, we were probably the fastest group to have our photos taken in those rocks.
From the peak, we hiked down to Tinipak River, it was quite far and two of my colleagues were obviously already beat we weren't sure if they can even make it down. Our guide asked me if I can take the other people in our group to the river (guide them) so we can already go ahead and he'll just accompany the other two because they were walking slow. I hesitated, but then again, there were already obvious paths along the way, so we went for it.
Once we reached the river, we bought lunch. A colleague was so amused at how fast I devoured my meal. I was hungry! We just stayed at the hut, too lazy to go swimming, while waiting for our colleague.
We took our time at the hut, but even if some of us we're already too tired, we gotta get going. Good thing the way out of the mountains is easier because we no longer have to climb up or down.
While traversing to the river, I told my colleagues that once we hear the sound of motorcycles, that means we're already near the river, our destination. A colleague said, "Weh, pa'no magkakaron ng sasakyan dun?", thinking it was impossible that vehicles can get to these mountains. Thank you to this group of motorcyclists that suddenly appeared while we were resting at a kubo by the river, I didn't came out a liar. 😂
As you see we were all amazed because these motorcycles were able to go through huge rocks along the way that seemed impossible.
Pink sunset in the background as we go back to the smoke-filled city.
On the trip back to Manila, my colleagues were discussing where to go next, as if they weren't beat up. We made a bet that no one will show up at work the next day due to body pains. As for our guest who was the reason we made the trip anyway, he was also tired and did not expect that we'd really go on a serious hiking. Well, at least my colleagues were able to have that experience.
