Baler on the Ocean

We spent 2 nights in Baler, a popular local tourist town on the ocean. Baler is the coconut capital of the Philippines and the coconut orchards stretch on and on. Combined with the tropical weather, afternoon rain and it's a beautiful area. You do have to pass over a mountain range on good but windy roads which takes about 2 hours (another 1.5 hours from Cabanatuan to the mountains.) Highway engineers don't worry about maximum grades or snow so the roads follow the hills, up and down. The little corolla was often in 1st gear climbing the steeper hills. It's also a perfect place to gear down and save brakes.

The Costa Pacifica is the only major hotel in town. The others hotels go downhill fast and range from hostel rooms to local sleeping gazebos on the edge of the water. Baler is famous for surfing but while we were there, the waves with only breaking a couple feet and too close to shore to get a good ride.

The Costa Pacifica room faced the ocean with black volcanic sand. We were looking forward to the wood fired pizza at their restaurant but discovered that their fish tacos were perhaps the best on earth so we had tacos twice and pizza only once!

Part of our visit was working with the Elders and doing apartment checks. The four apartments are spread across 4 Barangy (villages) about 20 minutes apart. This is rice harvest season and after the rice is harvested, it's spread on any flat concrete around to dry. When we went to the Church for Zone training, the Church's driveway was being used to dry rice. We just drive over it slowly and do our thing.

Roads in the Philippines are typically concrete and pretty much just lay on the ground without any cuts or grading. They seldom back fill the edges and so the shoulder could drop of 10" or even into a deep drainage ditch. Below is a truck who missed the turn and will probably be there for years to come. There is no highway department to cleanup slides or fill pot holes.

Typically when a side road comes in, the two lanes don't line up height wise so they just leave out 20-50 feet of concrete and you drive through the potholes and dirt to reach the concrete again. Or you may be going down a great highway at 100 KPH and suddenly 50 feet of concrete is missing. Oh!

This picture is called planning ahead. A new 15 ton bridge was built over a creek but it's blocked off with a pile of dirt. Cars have to drop over the edge of the new road, down a dirt hill to the old bridge. The reason? This end of the new bridge is 15 feet higher than the road and no plans to build up the road to meet the bridge.

One of the missionary apartments is in Marie Aurora. After a quick check, we drove down the highway heading to zone training meeting. There was a sign that said "Oldest Balette Tree is Asia. So we made a quick U turn and drove down a beautiful road to the tree. Of course there was concessions, souvenirs and a P 10 entrance fee ($.22 per person)

The #2 tourist attraction in Baler is the hanging bridge. It's a pedestrian bridge over a river. We parked at the end and paid the P 10 parking fee ($0.22) collected by a young couple who lived at the end of the bridge. Parking fees and souvenirs sales is probably their primary income for them and their family. Filipino families tend to be large even though the government is suggesting a family size of 3.