We left Banue. And so we kept on driving up there, on the mountains, among the clouds. Not fogs—clouds. Fogs are low-lying clouds. We were on the mountaintops, among the clouds. Understandably,  Lee got weary again.  

When he saw a shed, he slowed down and parked. We got down for a while to flex our muscles and move, move move—so that we can gain some heat. It started to drizzle and we ran to the shed. Amid the clouds, we saw some more rice terraces. We took some more pictures.

In the waiting shed, there was a man with his little son. I wanted to take pictures with them as my souvenir but the child was reluctant. He was both scared and shy, I guess.

On our journey, Lee was unusually silent.

“Are you okay?”

“I think the man we saw is bad and dangerous.”

“What makes you think so?”

“Did you not notice his mouth? His teeth were red. That was blood.”

I spent the next few minutes explaining to Lee everything I knew about betel nuts.

The way to Baguio was much hazier than when we went to Sagada from Baguio. Finally, the mountains were no longer that high but anyway they were still high. We were still engulfed in clouds. I had to crane my neck to help Lee see the road ahead. I didn’t think I was giving him much help but anyway, I wanted him to feel that I was doing anything I could do to help him. Really, our eyes were tired of the haze and we started getting drowsy. I could see only as far as 10 feet and we had to drive slowly. And as if that was not bad enough, some parts of the road were under construction—and abandoned.

There were cliffs and waterfalls everywhere. Yes, cliffs and waterfalls on the mountain peaks, engulfed in clouds. I took some pictures of waterfalls while we were driving. Again, my then fifteen-year-old digital camera was never good enough to capture the captivating beauty of the surroundings. What I visually present here is a very small fraction of the panoramic beauty that we saw.

As I mentioned earlier, we were weary and drowsy. To wake ourselves up, I had to turn up the volume of the stereo and the poetic Jason Mraz was once again spewing out his meaningful songs. We were up there, where the mountain peaks seem to meet the sky. We were literally driving through the clouds—again— up there on the mountain ranges.

We had been driving for hours on the cold mountain slopes when we realized that no other people, no other cars, were driving with us. We were the only travellers on that isolated part of the Earth. Nobody was behind us, nobody was in front of us, nobody was driving counterflow. We wondered if the road we were traversing was a deserted road. Waze can’t detect deserted roads. The only signs of human existence in the area were the numerous, abandoned construction works being done.