As Seen by TV

This was the highlight of my trip to the Philippines.
Sagada is only a couple hundred kilometers from Baguio City but the trip still takes several hours. In part because the roads aren’t straight for lengths exceeding 4 meters, and because it isn’t always paved. In the hours on the trip, we must have passed at least 12 landslides that had partially or completely blocked the road (but had since been reopened, or were still in the process of being cleared of debris). However, the typhoon that hit 2 weeks later, made Sagada inaccessible from Baguio, thankfully we were lucky.

Don’t let the images fool you, it is completely DARK, that water is FREEZING, and there were two people ahead of us throughout the… uhm, spelunking? So you can use them as a size reference in regards to the size of the cave (and thankfully their lantern lit up more of the cave).

The first cave is a burial site (see all the coffins piled up?!), whereas the second is the infamous Sumaging Cave. We descended for over an hour, though spaces smaller than a manhole, waded through areas where the water was 1.5m high (freezing, mind you), to absolutely massive spaces. All the way at the end we came to “the swimming pool.” I can tell you that my hair and skin have never felt so strangely smooth and clean as when I came out of that superbly fresh water. Despite the temperature of the water, and the fact that you can’t see your own hand, I would do it everyday if I could.