Sketches of My Life, Hand Drawn by Me on WordPress.com

It always amuses me whenever I see pictures of the old houses at Ilocos. I associate Ilocos as very clean place; I don’t know where I got this idea. But since the first time I heard about this place, I longed about going to this place. Not until around two months ago, I just went to Ilocos together with a friend. I was very excited about that trip. Partly, I was eager to get this trip, not only because it was my dream to go to Ilocos, but also to release any stress or tension I feel during the past few days before the trip. Ah… to get away from the very busy city. Aside from excitement, unfortunately, I was not able to prepare well for the trip. I have not bought any special thing to bring or researched about the places that we are going to visit in reference to our itinerary.

The meeting place, to gather all the participants for the trip, is somewhere at Ortigas Center. At the first time I saw the participants, I thought, this trip is indeed for photography enthusiasts, while looking at their luggage and DSLRs. Haha, because mine is a point and shoot. Anyway, after almost an hour and a half of waiting, we started to board the bus and we were now heading to Ilocos! Overnight commute, I think, is appropriate when travelling for more than six hours because you can sleep the very long trip right away. Of course this is not good when you’re the one who is driving. I was sleepy then because I got a few hours of sleep that day in order to make it to work earlier. It was an almost eight hours of commuting from Ortigas to Ilocos Norte. We left Ortigas around ten in the evening and arrive at Burgos, Ilocos Norte at around 5:30 in the morning.

Let me show you a series of images to the rest of our trip.

Our first meal for the day was the Ilocos empanada, yum (no image of the food). It was empanda in form but its wrapper is thin (like the one in lumpia) and fried. The filling includes Vigan longanisa and eggs. It also comes with suka as its sawsawan.  :D

This sets day 1 of the trip. Almost half of the day, I was bothered by my hair but I could not do something about it. The wind blows all the time while my hair was dry… bad hair day, haha.

Day 2.  We woke up around 5am to take our breakfast then go start the trip again.

Then time calls for us to board our bus off to Manila. Again it is going to be a long trip to the busy city… our home. It was less comfortable this time because we carried more things (e.g. pasalubong) but with much fulfillment that we were able to experience, at least a few if not all, of Ilocos.

The rest of the album can be viewed here.