I’ve been hearing about Baler for quite some time now; it’s quite a popular weekend getaway place but I’ve never been interested to go because it’s dubbed as a ‘surfing capital’ and I had no real interest to try out surfing — I didn’t know how to swim in the open sea, you see.

While researching about our Pagsanjan trip though, I chanced upon a couple of blog posts detailing the other stuff one can see in Baler, Aurora aside from the surfing. My interest was piqued so I quickly asked my high school buddies if they were interested to go. Since this was one of those spur-of-the-moment trips, only Fred, Chen and Ayzee said yes.

Schedules were moved around and a full weekend + Monday was cleared for the trip, since we wanted to maximize our time there and the bus ride takes five (5) to seven (7) hours. Since I was the one who wanted to go, I tried my best to arrange all the necessary arrangements for the trip.

At first the going got rough; I encountered a couple of problems booking hotel accommodations because none of the resorts could be bothered to answer inquiries via SMS or via email. I read somewhere that it’s best to call because reception tends to be spotty in Baler, but personally I don’t accept that as an excuse. This probably was the most painful experience I’ve ever had in trying to book rooms.

I also had problems in scoring bus tickets. I even bothered Fred to go to the bus station to try and get the tickets himself. Anyway. Bookings were finalized and everything was paid for. We were ready and we were just killing time, waiting until we had to go to the bus station when Ayzee informed us that she couldn’t go because of back problems.

Great. The first thought that literally crossed my mind was “Oh no, we’ll probably just get rained on again.” You see, Fred, Chen and I have gone onto a few trips with just the three of us before and it rained each and every time. Thank God our awful track record was broken by this Baler trip.

Anyways. It was fun. I got to try my hand at surfing, we lounged on the beach and just stared at the clouds and the following day we went onto the city tour where we not only got to explore the natural falls and islets and the ancestral houses in Aurora, we also got to climb a sixty (60) foot high 600 year old Balete tree.

Our working budget was around 4,000PHP for the whole weekend but since there were only three of us to split the fare (and the three of us together do have the tendency to give into splurge impulses), we went over the mark.

Here’s the itinerary and the breakdown of fares (rates are on a per person basis, unless otherwise indicated).

The total damage is 5305PHP, which already includes the cab fares in Manila. In retrospect, we could’ve done without the extremely expensive snack in Costa Pacifica but we wanted to experience lounging in their pretty chairs and just stare at the beach.

All in all it was a fun trip; we got to experience a lot of new things and even though the three of us have already known each other for over a decade, we still learned something new about each other.

Cheers to the first trip of 2014! Not too shabby, if I do say so myself.

*photo credits: Chenyl and Fred. I haven’t gotten around to uploading mine yet.