28/03/18

Ejay picked us up and took us to the Cebu city south bus terminal so we could catch our bus to Poog for our climbing day. It was easy to find the bus which was heading in the direction of Toledo.

We told the bus driver we wanted to get off at Poog, which I found out is pronounced Po-og. The journey itself was quite pleasant, although it was supposed to be an hours drive but was 30mins longer. It was busy until Naga, and then the traffic cleared up once we started heading up the mountainous area. The bus driver dropped us exactly where we needed to meet Enie Yonson our guide. However, we didn’t know that at first because Enie had sent me a picture of a sign saying Upper Poog but since he’s taken that picture the sign has been knocked down. So it took us some time to figure out that we were actually in the right place, and we had to ask a few people who had no clue what we were saying. When Enie arrived we jumped on the back of two motorbikes who took us to the base.

I found Enie through a blog post, he told us that he’s the last Filipino who climbs in the Catabaco area so he doesn’t get to climb much. I contacted him via fb to arrange a days climbing, and his rate is 500p! which includes all gear and guidance. He helped set up the routes and then I’d lead up. Jeni decided to lead climb for her first climb but struggled and fell pretty much on top of me. She bruised her elbow pretty bad and kicked my back, luckily not my head. After than she only top roped, but I’m glad it didn’t deter her completely from climbing and she gave it a good few more goes. I surprised myself that I was leading fine outside but the Poog rock has super nice handholds once you find them and so it was easy to hold onto the wall. My favourite achievement was lead climbing the 6a up 27m, which is the highest I’ve ever lead. It was knackering but I felt great on the way down knowing that I didn’t give up despite struggling right at the top. We loved our day on the crag so much that we decided to try Cantabaco with Enie the next day. Just doing a few easy climbs should be enough to fulfill our climbing holiday dreams.

We called it quits on Poog around 4pm after I had set my first ever climb! I’m so slow at clipping in quick draws I make my life so much worse, but it was fun to try. We started to walk back until a bike also called a Habel-habel picked both Jeni and I up and took us to Cantabaco. It was a fun 30min journey on the back of the bike which took us through the busy street of Lutopan, and then finally to a guest house it cost us 50pisos each. There’s not many cheap places to stay and this is the most popular one because it’s the cheapest but they only have 5 rooms, luckily they had a room for us for 100pisos each. It’s a private room with a small bunk bed. I don’t know the name of the house but every local knows of it when they see a foreigner.

We decided to head back to Lutopan for dinner and hailed another habel-habel and it cost 20pisos for the journey. We got our driver to stop where all the food stalls were which had rice and bbq. We got some chicken and pork on skewers and small packets of rice which was wrapped in banana leaves. It was so delicious and they handed us a plastic bag to put our hand in and eat with so we didn’t get sticky fingers. It was so insane in this area with all the locals from surrounding villages coming here to buy goods and food. Motorbikes squeezing through all the tight spaces, cars beeping and people walking. We headed back to the hostel once we had checked the bakery nearby and had bought some sweet snacks to try.