«» Travel Notes 024: The Pacific Coast Trail
My first thru-hike and a glance into the uncharted world between the Sierra Madre mountains and the Pacific Ocean
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hi nirelle I will have to back out of PCT :(
I messaged Nirelle as I was about to leave for Japan because I was feeling overwhelmed with my schedule and my finances. It dawned on me that I had only four months left in the country and 30+ provinces still to visit, so not only would this trip take a precious weekend I could otherwise use to visit a new province, but it would also take up a fraction of my dwindling budget.
And yet, this is me taking a picture of our very first river crossing.
What happened?
After returning from Japan, I did everything I could to plan a trip to a new province, partly because I wanted to visit a new province and partly because if I told Nirelle I was backing out, then I had to be doing something else.
I considered visiting Sockscargen, Dinagat Islands, and Misamis Occidental, but ultimately, I could tell I was trying too hard to force a trip into reality. None of these places called to me, and coming from a year of travel, I learned that you never want to chase a trip too badly. You want to be intentional when planning and embarking on a trip, but you also want to go through it with some looseness, some spontaneity. Rigidity in travel is a recipe for disappointment and stress.
Ultimately, I let my trip go and asked Nirelle if she still had a free slot.
The Pacific Coast Trail (not to be mistaken for the Pacific Crest Trail of the United States) began as a project in 2009 by YABAG Mountaineering to connect a trail from the southern end of Quezon province all the way to the northern tip of the Cagayan Valley. All in all, the trail stretches 700 km long across mountain jungles, rivers, and beaches.
The trail is broken down into four phases, with our group opting to join for the second phase (red line in the picture above), which covers the coast between Dingalan, Aurora and Infanta, Quezon.
Besides its length, the Pacific Coast Trail isn’t like any other hike I’ve been on just because there is very minimal elevation, with 80% of the trail spent walking by the beach. This doesn’t make the trail any easier, though. Walking on dead corals, pebbles, rocks, and sand is a lot more difficult than you would imagine because the terrain is either soft and collapsing under your feet or sharp and poking into the soles of your shoes.
And it’s loooong.
We trekked from 10 AM to 4 PM on the first day, covering 14 km.
We trekked from 8 AM to 6 PM on the second day, covering 27 km.
The third day was the shortest at 6 km. We trekked for only three hours, from 10 AM to 1 PM.
Three days before our trip, PAGASA detected a low-pressure area to the east of Mindanao that they feared would turn into a typhoon.
In the end, it only rained on our first night. The picture above was taken a few minutes before heavy rain droplets ravaged our campsite. Otherwise, the weekend’s weather was scorching hot; umbrellas were out the whole day to shade us from the sun. Thankfully, our trail was lined with multiple river crossings and mountain springs (I don’t think I’ve ever had so many baths in one day before!).
Come the 2nd day, I was very grateful I had decided to go on this trip. It wasn’t like any other hike I’d been on. At first, I didn’t even consider what we were doing to be a hike because we weren’t ascending anything. It felt more like a trek or a walk.
In doing some background research for this post, I discovered a term existed for this specific form of hiking.
According to Wikipedia, “Thru-hiking, or through-hiking, is the act of continuously hiking an established long-distance trail.” In other words, if your goal as a hiker is to climb ever higher summits with evermore magnificent views, then your goal as a thru-hiker would be to traverse ever longer distances. The most famous thru-hikes are the Pacific Crest Trail (4,635 km) and the Appalachian Trail (3,525 km). At the same time, the Nakasendo Trail in Japan is another thru-hike that I’ve been eyeing long before I knew thru-hiking was a thing.
Next to thru-hikers are section hikers, who would complete a trail by traversing the trail in segments. This is where the activity my group and I were pursuing would lie. We completed Phase 2 of the Pacific Coast Trail, meaning we have three more phases to pass if we want to complete the entire thru-hike.
I had another reason for backing out, which I didn’t mention: I had already been to Quezon. I visited Baler five years ago with my family, so I decided Aurora was a province I didn’t need to visit again.
Yet the villages and communities we passed couldn’t have been more different from the live bands, hollering surfers, and floral-clad tourists of Baler.
Walking along the dark sand beaches of the Pacific Coast Trail, I observed the Dumagat Tribe cooking and washing their clothes under makeshift bamboo roofs. I saw clothes sprawled on the sand in a neat, grid-like fashion, their version of a “sampay.” I saw dozens of empty coconut husks laid out under the sun to extract coconut oil. I noticed how abundant water was wherever we went; there was no such thing as turning off the faucet. In fact, there were no faucets as water sprung from the ground through endless lines of hoses.
Instead of locals offering P500 surf lessons, we encountered fishermen selling kilos of lobsters at a fraction of what they would go for in a fancy Chinese restaurant. Instead of acai-bowl-serving-cafes, we were entertained by sari-sari stores with endless bottles of Coke. Instead of scrolling through Instagram and Facebook, the girls of one village gathered by their community center for what seemed like a game of BINGO.
All of which was a gentle reminder that there is so much of the country I have yet to see, experience, and appreciate. Simply visiting a province once isn’t enough. It’s the least I can do, but surely not the most I can do.
Atom
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Love this, Atom!! 🤍 Glad PCT gave a different perspective!!