The Hell of the North
The Hell of the North
No this is not about the Paris-Roubaix race, the most painful cycling classic on earth. Imagine spending one full day being battered by cobblestones to a point where by the very end upon entering the velodrome your hands are almost as raw as the tires you use to cover those 250 kilometers of road and cobbles. Pain and Suffering, but what the hell we still do it anyway.
I am referring to another classic, a Philippine mountain bike classic. The Baguio to Sagada route. I’ve gone pretty much around some of the hardest off road areas in the Cordillera but it seems this is the classic ride that everyone remembers. I would probably consider a whole lot of other routes much harder than this but this was a classic and as such I needed to give it a try. So when Andrei texted me the sudden change of route the night before, I answered back with a big YES.
5am, Tublay –Big smiles followed by howling laughter breaks out as we sprint our way past the howling chasing dogs of Halsema highway, chasing these two lone bikers away from their territories. By this time we had only been riding for 30 minutes but myself and Andrei had already done a dozen of these sprints to get away from chasing dogs and were now watching the sun rise to the east. Bathing the freezing cold morning in warm sunlight and showing us the mountain’s beauty as the light turned everything from black and white into color.
7:30am, Sayangan 40kms from Baguio, my pack starts to feel like a lead weight as we climb the hill up to 2400mASL, and my tummy starts howling for a big breakfast as I feel a bonk starting to form in my head turning my brain into mush. The site of a good friend waving from the bus to Sagada, gives me some new hope and some fresh legs trying to catch the bus at the stop a few kilometers ahead to send my backpack ahead with them. Unfortunately though, upon reaching the bus stop, the bus that would have taken my heavy bag away was long gone.
8:30am I was hungry, in fact I was very hungry that I entered the bus stop and pretty much ran for the counter and ordered my meal without even taking off my pack, helmet, or gloves! Andrei of course having had his breakfast was more composed, fixing his bike and gear outside before coming in to order a more modest meal than the giant serving I now had on my plate.
9:30am, Salvation came after breakfast when a bus bound for Sagada parked at the bus stop and my bag was handed off to the conductor to be sent ahead of us. Whew! another 100 kilometers to go.
11:00am the long smooth downhill to Abatan was such a welcome ride down the ridge that myself and Andrei pretty much coasted our way down just chatting on the smooth road and watching the sky for eagles.
Upon reaching Abatan we decide that we can probably reach the boundary before lunch and decide to push on after buying some quick snacks just in case we don’t make the next town before our stomachs start complaining again.
The Kilometer post to nowhere –on long rides like this there comes a point in the ride when you start counting down kilometer posts, and for the past few hours we had been doing just that coming into each new town. Right before the boundary between Benguet and Mountain Province we noticed a kilometer post marked “SO”. It started at SO5, SO4, SO3, SO2… by that point we thought to ourselves, were close –malapit na yung boundary! But then SO1 came around and we were still in the middle of nowhere and just when we thought that SO0 would be the boundary we found ourselves in the middle of a pine forest! SO????? Maybe it is one of those ghost roads that corrupt officials build to use our hard taxpayer’s money.
The boundary came about 3 kilometers later.
From the boundary it was 30 kilometers of blisteringly fast downhill. Andrei and I were counting the number of motorized vehicles we would be able to pass on the way down…1…2…3… then the rain started. And our speed went from 40kmh down to 15kmh and we struggled to keep our bikes upright as the road turned into slippery slush and our brakes rendered almost useless in this weather. Mud and grit constantly being thrown at your face, you wished you had built in wipers. A few times we passed a slide right as it was literally coming down the mountain!
30 kilometers later I am sitting by the roadside in Sabangan wondering what the hell just happened to the sky??!! It was sunny one minute, and then buckets of rain were just falling from the clouds! I scarfed down on some cassava cake I had bought in Abatan and waited a few minutes for Andrei to come down the mountain. By the time he reached me, his suspension fork had stopped working; we presumed it was now filled with water and grit rendering it almost rigid. Both of us were now soaking wet and our bodies covered in road grit and mud from the long downhill.
30 minutes later we reach Dantay, the junction to Sagada and due to the weather we had to change our plans slightly since Andrei now did not have any dry clothes and had to go to his house in Bontoc for the night and as I had sent my bag on the bus had little choice but to climb the last 10 kilometers up the mountain to Sagada. So we parted ways for now. He would come up the mountain the next day.
The last 10 kilometers up to Sagada were pretty much laboriously exercising my own threshold for pain and mental fatigue. I was now alone and had nothing but the wet road and the rain for company. I took to counting down the kilometer posts from S10 in Dantay and slowly progressed my way up the wet mountain. The last few kilometers I was almost zombie like simply letting my legs pump up and down the pedals on their own volition. I felt like I was in a haze of endorphin induced stupor, watching the rain and the landscape form all sorts of funny objects, animals, and people my vivid imagination was able to conjure. I was truly alone with my thoughts and the rain.
I was looking at a funny elephant dancing on top of the limestone rocks and prancing around the pine trees when I suddenly noticed that the pressure on my legs was disappearing, I looked down and the road just started to pick up speed, I wondered how fast it was moving… the rain seemed to be moving pretty fast too… hmmm. Ok by now I was pretty out of it, then a little past the dancing elephant I saw some tourists huddled under a tiny roof curiously looking at this solitary wet man riding up the mountain, and realized that I had finally arrived. 5:30pm April 5, 2009 -Hour 13.
