Griddable » Down to Tagaytay

Down to Tagaytay

Saturday, February 26th, 2011 in: News, Travel

Despite going to bed late I rose with Troy at 8 for some morning yoga. He led our first session the previous day, so now it was my turn. I took him through the intense extended sun salutations. “This must be Revenge for the other day.” he laughed. Later on Janet confirmed we were headed to Tagaytay, where we’d stay with Fred and Christie, friends of Joemar who live on the inside edge of an active volcano.

The bus broke through the smog of Manila and snaked it’s way through the countryside. The landscape felt like something between Mexican villages and rural China. Endless rows of shops, home restaurants and parking lots for Jeepneys lined the way, punctuated by flashes of brilliant green. Churches and Christian schools stood out by their cleanliness and luxuriousness, in stark contrast to the junk shops surrounding them. The air was heavy with the smell of exhaust wafting in through the open bus windows.

“This is our driveway, but we let the locals use it,” Fred winked as he picked us up from the roundabout and drove us down to their place. “it’s the last house on the street to have public utilities, beyond that it’s just primitive jungle living.” we pulled up to a gate framed by some beautiful bougainvillea, and as we stepped down the 99 steps to the house, I felt like I was being transported back to Berkeley, where my cousin has turned the community property behind their house into a garden paradise. But this wasn’t just an oasis in Berkeley, this was the real deal.

Christie welcomed us with hugs and her permanent smile, her infectious laughter filling the open house as she introduced us to their son, Dillon. The house is more like a compound, with a collection of structures open to each other, rather than rooms joined to one another and sealed off from the outside world. The architecture in a tropical environment is so much more exposed than I am used to. It’s not unpleasant, but the feeling is new. Stepping out onto the veranda gave us a view that justified everything. Before us lay a sprawling jungle reaching out for a remarkably large lake with an island in the center. “that’s Mt. Taal,” Christy indicated the island, “the lake itself is a volcano crater, and Mt. Taal is a volcanic within the crater. At the center of the island is another crater lake.” there’s nothing quite like this anywhere else, this is like a meta volcano.

We toured the property with our mouths agape the whole time. “I hope you don’t mind having the guest hut to yourself,” Christie mused, as if any arrangement could disappoint me in a place like this. “I’d be happy sleeping in your broom closet,” I assured her. I had my own sleeping pad to prove it.

We climbed some trees for coconuts to split open and blended into smoothies. Dillon is a smart kid in the endearing, slightly socially awkward way that makes home-schooled kids easy to spot. In addition to teaching himself how to play the piano from synthesis recordings on YouTube, he can easily bring both of his feet up behind his head, which he likes to do often to measure guests reactions. “I learned it from this book,” he said, pulling out a copy of the Ashtanga Practice Manual by David Swenson. I couldn’t help but laugh. “not only do I have this book, but I know the author’s brother!” I’ve taken a couple of Doug Swenson’s workshops with my yoga teacher Robert, which have been fantastic experiences. The Swenson brothers are my yoga heroes, I didn’t expect to see their faces here but somehow I wasn’t too surprised.

Dinner was vegan and delightful, served with some awesome pineapple and some young papaya which tasted almost like a carrot. The Gunns are more or less vegetarians, and my diet is adaptive to whatever is available, so I became veggie for the weekend. When we finally retired for the evening, I stood out on the veranda with Fred, gazing up at the beautiful full moon. “We manifested all this. We were paying the same rent back in the States for a bedroom in a guy’s house, and my wife told me that she’d rather be rich in a poor country than poor in a rich country, and convinced me to move our lives back to the Philippines. It took three failures before we hit on this place, you know.” Fred gazed out over the lake, into the past. “One day we were sitting in a restaurant trying to figure out why no one could be happy where we lived. And it occurred to me to say ‘why not just agree on what we all want, and let everything fall into place.’ and it did.”

Fred bid me goodnight, leaving me on the veranda, staring at the moon and wondering what dreams may come.