And so, I took the 6 hour-long bus trip to Cagayan alone.
I've always wanted to go to a place alone, with no one there to meet. Just a few days of self-reflection, shopping and alone time with the most important person in my life - me. Yes, I'm that self-absorbed. Hehehe...
No, seriously. It was kinda cool to find myself in Cagayan, hailing taxicabs, haggling with the cab drivers, shopping, shopping and doing more shopping, eating at places I would usually be too kuripot to eat in, taking my time fitting clothes I wanted to buy because no one was there to hurry me up anyway, finding a motel to sleep the night in, laughing my heart out inside the room when I saw the condition of the motel room (Trust me, it sucked a whole lot more than Country Living. Only bigger... Not that I've been inside Country Living. Kwento lang nila sa akin. Wahahahaha...).
One thing I learned in Cagayan though was to never ever trust cabdrivers. One, if you give them a P100 bill for your P77 fare, they will shower you wth compliments, sweetly say thank you and do not give you your change anymore. I was duped three times by that scheme. Two, if you were already in town and you ask them which one is the nearest for them: Limketkai or SM, they will instead tell you that "Mas maganda sa SM". Which of course, you ask him to bring you there. Only to find out that Limketkai was already somewhere in the downtown area, that you were actually closer to Limketkai and you could have saved yourself the P89 cabfare you spent when he brought you to SM, which was a mountain's trip away from the downtown area. Three, because of my pagiging kuripot, I was stupid enough to listen to a cabdriver's suggestion rather than to a highschool classmate's recommendation. Thus, I ended up in William's Inn, a rundown motel that stood infront of a hubu-hubu. Yes, a hubu-hubu. I even took a picture of the sign that stood right infront of my room.
Sure, I only paid P350 for 5 hours of stay in a really cheap airconditioned room but considering that I came in at 2 AM, tapos walang cable yung TV, what's the point of having a TV in there? Yung airconditioner, parang de-barko sa ingay. May sala set nga doon pero I can just imagine the pokpoks coming from the hubu-hubu across the street doing their naked gymnastics in that thing that I was too afraid of sitting in the couch for fear that I might catch something. May hot water nga, and the bed had new sheets naman pero still. If I stood in the middle of the room, i can just imagine the DOMs, pokpoks, adventurous highschool teenagers and weirdoes doing an orgy in every nook and cranny of that room. That room reeked of sex. Not the passionate make love kind of sex but the illicit, oh-yes, damn you, who's your daddy, moaning and grunting, paid for, red light zone kind of sex. I wanted to change to another motel, a cleaner one, hopefully, but considering that it was alreaady 2 AM and I was not in the mood to haggle with the receptionist in Bisaya, a language I was still unable to master, over refunding my P350, I just took a deep breath and stuck with it.
But over all, I had fun in Cagayan. Medyo malungkot lang ang walang magtake ng picture mo but that's what timers are for anyway, di ba? Hehehe... All in all, I felt so independent. Like I could pretend I was in a different country and this was how it was going to be, how I was going to handle myself if I started living alone, on my own.
It was great. I felt giddy and heady at the same time. Feeling ko, para akong lumayas. Lumayas sa mga problema ng buhay, family, school, love, health.
I wasn't a doctor. I wasn't anybody's daughter. I wasn't anybody's doormat.
I was just one of the many beautiful faces gracing the streets of Cagayan - a tourist, soon to be forgotten, before I will even be remembered.
Here's a few pics from our trip:
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