So now, about the trip. We left home on the evening of June 12 and arrived in Cagayan the next morning. That was a Friday. We had lunch at our hosts’ farm. Beautiful.

Anyway, after that, we went to Piat, Cagayan and visited the Piat Basilica. One of the most beautiful cathedrals I’ve yet seen in the Philippines.

We went to Penablanca, Cagayan after that and visited the Callao Caves National Park. At the riverbank of the Pinakanawan River, we boarded a boat to the other side, where a 200+ stairway leads us up the limestone cliff into the mouth of the caves. It was a huge cave. Dark. It is said that it has about a hundred chambers, only 8 of which have been explored. We, however, only walked to the third one till we decided to return.

After visiting the caves, we boarded the boat again and moved upstream along the river. We docked at some place then my brother and I swam at the lukewarm and shallow river for a couple of minutes while we waited for the thousands of bats which come out of a hole on the limestone cliffs at exactly 6 PM to fly off. Andaming paniki! They all came out of the cave hole like some dark swarm cloud.

The next day, we started off for the half-day drive back to Manila. The landscape of vast, vast green meadows and plains along the highway from Piat, Cagayan to Quezon, Isabela is one of the most unique and scenic views I’ve yet seen in the Philippines. It was like a giant Microsoft Windows XP wallpaper!

Along the way, we stopped by Dalton Pass on the Caraballo Mountains at the border between Nueva Ecija and Nueva Vizcaya to have lunch.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 15th, 2003 at 10:06 am and is filed under Travel . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.