Occurred: October
- 2011
It was a beautiful sunny day that welcomes me and my buddy
Maria reached the bottom of Mount Cristobal that locates between Quezon
Province & Laguna. Waking at 4:30 am that morning was really hard. We left
the city around 5am, dark and silent. I was doing my little research about
Mount Cristobal about how to get there and how long. What I did not researched was,
it was also called “Devil’s Mountain”.
There were many ghosts’ stories about Mount Cristobal
and both of us were dumb enough not knowing about it but it doesn’t matter, we
never experienced any ghostly that time. Also we never checked the weather as
when we went back to Manila, there was typhoon.
Me and my fun & crazy friend thought we were lost.
It even rained that morning and of course we were like little ducks under
various leaves and branches we found. I was carrying a baguette behind me, it
was a little wet of course until we found the camp sight. Fresh, smoky and you can
even smell all the greens. We started pitching our tent. We cut some branches
and plants as our ground carpet. We did some spiritual limber and enjoyed our
victory of finding the perfect spot. Before darkness arises, we started eating
our cheese and poor wet French bread.
Darkness arrived; we were inside our tent doing
different kinds of card games. Talked things and slept. It rained, so hard,
non-stop. We were taking turns of bringing out little water inside our tent. It
was never easy for sleeping, candles were lit and our tent was soaked. We
looked outside and we were surrounded with water. Our tent is having a little Jacuzzi
with the rain.
We joined the other mountaineers in their tents. Five of
us, sitting super next to each other, wet and shaking, one of them has bong and
so we were like in a little heaven inside our tent. I fell asleep for like 10
minutes but the rain and the cold mountain kept us awake and shaking.
5AM – Maria & I, decided to go down before we get
totally sick and frozen as all our clothes were wet but I was lucky to save one
dry pair of socks. Four other mountaineers stayed.
Around 8AM – took a bus back to Manila, took a taxi.
Driver was not nice enough to open air-con even we asked him to turn it off
several times. The next day and few more days after, both of us can’t walk
straight.
Read this article
to find out more about how it was called Devil’s mountain.
