tagaytay

When I saw my uncle on Tuesday, he offered that we stay at his house and take advantage of his car/driver as he and his family weren’t going to be there for a few days anyway. We weren’t sure about staying at his house, but we sure weren’t going to say no to the car/driver. We immediately began to think of places to which we could go. So, on Thursday (March 20), we had the driver pick us up at our apartment at 7am.

We were going to Tagaytay, a tourist destination in the mountains, just an hour away from Manila. But that’s an hour away if there’s no traffic. In the Philippines, people are off from work on Holy Thursday and Good Friday, and most people go home to their provinces during that time. We had hoped that most people had gone home on Wednesday night and that we wouldn’t have much traffic on Thursday morning, but that was not the case. It took us 2 ½ hours to get to Tagaytay.

It was crowded there. What I hadn’t counted on is that Tagaytay is the province so, if people were going home to the provinces, then some of them were going home to Tagaytay. We went to People’s Park, and at 9:30am, it was already full of families having picnics. (This concept of people having fun/vacation during Holy Week is foreign to me, though apparently this is common. I always remembered Holy Week as being such a solemn and religious time for us.) From that vantage point, we saw Taal Lake and Volcano. This is pretty much the view for which people come to Tagaytay.

Taal Volcano is a dormant volcano that is in the middle of Taal Lake. At People’s Park, and everywhere else in Tagaytay, many people offered their boat ride services to the volcano. But, even though, it was already early, it was quite hot already. And, when you get to the volcano, you can only get to the crater either by horse or on foot. Neither my companion nor I were keen on the horses, and I didn’t think I could do the steep walk in my flipflops and in the heat. So, we decided to go have lunch instead and then go to the spa.

We went to Nurture Spa, still in Tagaytay. There were many treatment choices, but as it’s so cheap here, we decided to make the most of it. We got the Kagandahan (Beauty) Treatment, which consists of a one hour massage and a one-hour facial, and added on the one-hour foot spa. We were first led to an open air nipa hut (hut with a roof made of palm leaves), where we had our foot spa. Our feet were soaked for 20 minutes, then scrubbed the rest of the time. As we were hungry (our lunch left a lot to be desired), we had tea and snack while this was going on. Then, we were taken to the massage room, where we got our massage and facials. Afterwards, we were served tea. Mmmm… it felt good. I should really get more while I’m here. Those 3 hours only cost us about $75 per person.



The spa treatments got us hungry again (and plus we had a long drive ahead of us), so we decided to eat again. We ate at Gourmet’s Café, which is an organic restaurant that serves produce from its own farm. You could tour the farm, but we got there too late. The driver ordered some kind of tuna paninni; it looked good. We shared a fruit and nut salad and a pesto calzone. The salad, which had mixed greens, watermelon, mangoes, dried cranberries, and caramelized walnuts with a lychee dressing, was good, but the calzone was just so-so.


Then, we were off to the city. It was a long drive. We didn’t get home til about 8 or so. Another long day.