It just occurred to me that it’s Valentines’ Day and maybe I should post something about the occasion…? Unfortunately I don’t have any of those type of stories so for now we’re sticking with a recount of our Anawangin-Nagsasa-Capones adventure last July. Budget and Itinerary included.

I’ve always had great respect for the so-called ‘Weekend Warriors’ – people who manage to fit in a lot of things over a couple of days’ worth of travelling. Most of these people are employed so they could really only afford to travel during Saturdays and Sundays. Considering the transit time to any place outside of Manila can range from two to five or seven hours, the ground they can cover in a short span of time truly is impressive. As I’ve mentioned before, I’m the finicky sort of traveler so I’ve never entertained the thought of trying out the Weekend Warrior way. That is, until last July, when my friend C arranged this trip for us.

She basically did all of the research – places to go, tour guides and boatmen, and even prepared the itinerary below. All we really had to do was show up after work at the bus station and we were off.

I believe that the itinerary she prepared was fairly standard for a weekend get away. However, it was still a bit too ambitious for us (lol) because we ended up skipping the trekking bits as well as the early wake up call to catch the sunrise.

Here’s what we actually ended up doing:

Here’s what we ended up spending:

We were in Cubao as early as one o’clock in the morning but for some unexplained reason our bus left really late so that was kind of annoying because we could have used that time to catch up on sleep, you know?

A funny/annoying thing thing happened in the evening though. We’ve already been asleep for a couple of hours when two girls from another group drunkenly made a scene. They were part of the big group that occupied the camp site next to ours and I assume that it’s one of thos organized tours that offered joiners. It didn’t seem like anybody else from the group knew them at all. At least, nobody from their group tried to stop them when they drunkenly staggered into the campsite from their bonfire at the beach. I kid you not, these two girls laughed, cried, sang and even tried to coax one of the guys from their group into an “adventure” until three in the morning. Somehow I managed to sleep through the racket but my tent mates weren’t so lucky so they had to suffer through the noise. Our group did have a bit of fun in the morning though trying to figure out the location of the two girls and making up conjectures about their “history” (because they did reveal a LOT).

I’d like to attribute the hours of downtime that we spent just bumming either on the beach or in the cottage to work related stress but I think we were all just lazy, LOL. We ended up hanging out on the beach a lot and catching up.

We even met Rodell, the grandson of the woman who cooked for us, who made the trip a whole lot more fun because he was so energetic.

I had a couple of guys from work make snooty comments about how this whole experience wasn’t “legitimate” camping because we had somebody cook and prepare the tents for us but hey, this was a whole lot more convenient for not that much money. The package we availed included all three meals, boat transfers and even the use of a private house in Pundaquit so we could wash up properly before we headed off to Manila.

While I’m not keen on experiencing this kind of travelling style anytime soon, I am glad that I found that I was able to manage it. If only those two girls didn’t keep the whole campsite up the whole night, I might have appreciated it better.