Road Trip

A couple of friends and I decided to go to Vigan for the weekend (June 10 and 11). This is my first road trip in quite a while.

We left Manila at dawn (530 AM) and had breakfast in the car when we reached our first “pit stop” at Hacienda Luisita. Breakfast consists of Spam pandesal sandwiches, and juice that we brought along. After a 10 or 15 minute stop, we hit the road again, aiming to be in Vigan by 2 or 3 PM.

As soon as we passed through the arch welcoming motorists to La Union, we saw a line of people on the roadside, sticking out their fists and waving them in the air, each fist clenching prawns and/or shrimps of different sizes. No, this is not a peculiar local way of welcoming people to La Union, but rather these people are advertising the size of the prawns/shrimps they are selling. We picked one lady and proceeded to negotiate with her and her cronies. We choose to buy the 4- to 6-inch shrimps rather than the bigger 8- to 9-inch prawns.

After haggling (which we got not a single cent off, such hagglers we are!), we decided to purchase a kilo. When the ladies took out their weighing scale, I was eyeing it skeptically. Also, I noticed that they had a plastic bag ready, which has a couple of inches of water in it. A kilo worth of shrimps was weighed and I had my doubts; it looks like half a kilo only to me. When I asked one of my friends to check the weight (since he goes to the market every week), the ladies slipped the shrimps into the plastic (with two inches of water). My friend took the shrimps and pronounced the weigh to be quite fair. So, off we went again, pushing on.

Shortly after, we decided to pull over and have an impromptu picnic. Roadside cooking (also called tailgating, I was told) was fun, complete with the smiles from people inside passing vehicles. We discovered then that the shrimps we bought were indeed less than a kilo. Our market expert did not know that there was water in the plastic bag before the shrimp was placed in it. Well, we did get a kilo of shrimps, including the water. No matter. We were indeed “tourists” and got “duped” by the locals. However, if we had an honest to goodness kilo of shrimps, we might not have finished it. At least, we had no leftovers (yeah, yeah, and yeah; right). Lunch was done in 30 minutes, from setting up to cleaning up our “mess.” And then we forged on.

We finally got to Vigan around 300 PM. Not bad, we hit our target time. We immediately headed to the town plaza and had the local specialties, the empanada and the okoy. After filling our stomach yet again, we did the tourist thing - walked around the plaza, the main road, looked for a cheap (but clean) hotel, visited the zoo, bought local handicrafts (I got some hand towels and blankets, woven from a loom). We stayed overnight, and headed back to Manila after brunch the following day.

The drive back home was longer; we were more relaxed and had more stops for lunch, for roadside corn, for coffee. We had dinner when we got to Manila.

People who found out that we were in Vigan for a night asked why we stayed for so short a time. After traveling all 400 + kilometers from Manila to Vigan, why not stay longer? Truth is I don’t know. For us, overnight was enough for us to see, feel, and appreciate the charm of the place. Another night might leave us with nothing to do. This way, at least we did not have time to be bored.

Till the next road trip!