Bakla Conquers Mt Daguldol (Part 4)

Posted by AJ on 04.16.2008 at 9:01 am

This post is the last entry in a series of entries about my hiking trip to Mt Daguldol. (Part 1 here Part 2 here part 3 here)

Just like Nina, I am blogging about this whole experience not just because of the free stuff that we got from Columbia. The better part of this hiking trip was the adventure itself and the people I went with! Great company, even without great equipment, always makes an experience so memorable and fun!

The morning on top of the mountain was pretty cold, but that didn’t stop me from wearing my linen pants, which I normally just wear on beach trips. And since I felt like I have achieved so much, I decided to claim the world:

Others went for “me” time:

When the morning fog finally cleared out, we headed to the summit (which was like 10 meters or so from our campsite:

After some much-deserved photos at the summit, we headed back to the campsite to pack-up. Before leaving the place, I wanted to have a jump shot of my self so I made several attempts:

Until I finally achieved what I wanted:

Jump AJ! photo by Nina Fuentes
Jump shot photo by Nina.

Photo courtesy of Dino De Leon

Then we had a photo of all five bloggers: Ferdz, Nina, AJ, Phoebe, Jayvee

Photo courtesy of Dino De Leon

At around 9:00 AM, Saturday, we started our descent. I knew that the hike down was going to be a lot easier. Then again, there were some areas along the trail that gave me and my Columbia Sportswear Beartooth S8 hiking shoes a hard time. So what did I do? I performed songs from Broadway! San ka pa!

Along the way, I was left trekking by myself since the people who went ahead of me walked too fast, while the people behind me were enjoying their nature walk. It came to a point where I did an Amazing Race inside my head. I pretended that I had a teammate and a cameraperson filming us. So I ran through the ups and downs of the trail until I got to the next stop. How’s that for crazy?

The next stop was…

And that’s where the inside jokes about being high-maintenance started:

After filling our tummies with high-maintenance halo-halo, we continued the descent. 15 minutes close to our jump-off point, it started raining! Great, right?

Oh, it only got even “better” when all of us have already reached the jump-off point — it stopped raining! The rain only meant one thing: it was going to be a lot difficult for the van to climb up back to the “town” since the dirt road was already wet, and possibly muddy.

And muddy it was. The van got stuck at one area and started about twenty minutes of trying to head up. Some of us had to get off of the van so it would have just enough weight to be able to climb up. But that was not enough. There were only three options left for us: (1) let Mang Jimmy, the driver, try again with the boys (ehem, including myself) pushing it up, stay there and wait for the road to dry up, or fall off the cliff.

Since I have gathered enough strength (thanks to the numerous amounts of cigarettes that I have smoked while descending the mountain, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I went a few meters ahead of the van and took out my invisible rope, hooked it up onto the van’s front end and starting pulling it up.

That magic worked!

When we finally got to our trip’s “home base,” we had lunch and what did we have for lunch?

After lunch, some of us decided to take a dip in the beach for some much needed tan. We walked a few meters from where we were and ended up at Laiya Playa’s La Luz Beach Resort.

At the end of the day, this is all we can say:

The ride from Batangas back to Manila took longer than we expected, thanks to heavy Saturday night traffic. We stopped by one of the tollway plazas for dinner and took some final fasyon shots!

Travel Queen and Horny Guy, photo by Jayvee
(AJ’s Cap, I’m So Horny Shirt and Green Beach Shorts by Columbia Sportswear)

This trip is truly one of my most memorable trips for this decade. I was the only smoker in the group. I was the only gay in the village. I was the thinnest. I was smoking along the trail. I ate the most. And I was the only one in the group who didn’t slip! But amidst all these, I realized that I if I can conquer a mountain, I can conquer anything!

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