Out of Chronological Order...

I didn't sleep much on the bus ride to Baguio.  Grace has motion sickness problems and took a couple of pills as the bus was leaving.  Except for the two comfort stops, she spent the trip sleeping with her head on my shoulder.    She looked so sweet, I didn't mind a bit.  It took over an hour to get out of Manila.  Much of that time we were on toll road that looks like an American Freeway.  Once we hit two lane, we were not able to go as fast.  One of the biggest traffic problems here comes from the huge difference in speed between different kinds of vehicles. The big highway buses, with powerful Nissan diesel engines, can go really fast, but farm trucks and the heavy haulers can't match that speed.  Also, the Victory Liner buses are well maintained, while everything else on the road is slowly disintegrating without any maintenance until something breaks, and then it is patched up with wire and duct tape.  The bus would accelerate to 100kph then have to brake hard to keep from hitting the farm truck with no lights.  As we got into the mountains, there were places where the road was washed out, and the bus had to slow to a crawl.  The air conditioning worked very well, and I was glad I listened to Grace and brought a jacket.  In the mountains, I observed that there are some universals for living in the mountains.  People will put old tires on the roof.  I don't know why they do it in the US, but they do it here too.  People will think up funky crafts to use whatever natural resource is abundant and call it "ART" and try to sell it to tourists.  People will make things out of the local wood that look like chainsaw carved statues, even when carved with hand tools, twice life size.  Who buys that stuff?  Who has a place to put it?  They will make furniture with 6 times the wood needed, and so heavy, a team of Olympic weight lifting champions is required to move it.  They will find unique ways to stick river rocks together to stabilize dirt and stop erosion.  People will name their house and put up a clever sign announcing the name.  When I was in High School, our next door neighbors at Rock Creek Lake had a sign with club, diamond, heart and spade with the name of their house, "Suits Us."  People will sculpt tree trunks into the corners of a house built of concrete and paint the trunk brown. People will build log cabins for tourists to stay in.  Government agencies will built bridge rails to look like logs and paint them brown.