The overnight bus from Manila to Bontoc Mountain Province takes ten hours. You sleep poorly. You wake up cold. You step off into a highland town where the butcher stand has a pig head set on the counter next to the change drawer, the machete salesman is already on the curb behind his yellow tarp of bolos, and the jeepney drivers know you’re heading to Buscalan before you do.
I’d been here before. May 2023. This trip started in Bangkok with my friend Steve. We flew into Manila, took the night bus up, and caught the morning jeepney to the trailhead.
Buscalan has Starlink now. Two hundred megabits. Grace and Teo’s house, where I stayed both visits, has a renovated tattoo studio. New construction is going up where there used to be just terrace.
Apo is still tattooing.
Thirty people in eight hours the day we showed up. She is somewhere north of a hundred. You sit, she works, the bamboo stick taps the thorn into your skin, you bleed a little, and she has another stranger in front of her before your forearm has stopped weeping.
Steve got tattooed by Apo and by her granddaughter Grace this trip. I sat that one out, having gotten mine on the first visit. Apo doesn’t perform. She just works. Bamboo, thorn, soot ink.
We stayed with Grace, Teo, their three-month-old son and daughter.
On the next morning Teo told us that the bad dogs get eaten. He said it the way you might mention which neighbor takes out the trash. Good dogs stay good dogs. Bad dogs become dinner. I didn’t ask follow-up questions.
We hiked out, took the jeepney, bused back to Manila, and flew to Hanoi the next day. The bus from Hanoi to Cao Bang is the kind of overnight where you sleep in a moving shoebox and wake up at 5 a.m. wherever the driver decides to stop.
Cao Bang is karst country. Limestone towers rising out of rice fields like somebody tipped the landscape on its side and forgot to set it back down. We rented two 150cc Airblades and rode for a couple days.
Day one took us through a forging village where every other shed had a guy hammering hot steel. We commissioned a chef’s knife. Leaf-spring steel, flat-ground, walnut handle. It cost less than dinner in Hanoi. It is now my best knife.
We slept that night in a homestay near the China border, a few hundred meters from Ban Gioc waterfall. Ban Gioc is a tiered cascade about three hundred meters wide that the border runs straight through. Vietnamese boats on the south side, Chinese boats on the north, and I’m fairly sure neither captain knows where the line technically falls.
Day two was God’s Eye. Mắt Thần Núi. A karst formation with a hole punched cleanly through it, perched above a flat valley you can ride a scooter across. We got there in the early evening. Nobody else. Not a person, not a guide, not a tour bus. We rode out into the field, killed the engines, and sat in the silence under the hole in the mountain.
There were a few wild cows. A calf and what I think was its mother. They didn’t care about us.
Bused back to Hanoi for two days. We ate banh mi at Banh Mi 25, which is the spot every guide and every local sends you to and which earns it. I read most of Train Dreamsby Denis Johnson on a plastic stool on the sidewalk in the Old Quarter. Barely a novella, about a railroad worker in early-twentieth-century Idaho, and it does in those pages what most novels don’t manage in five hundred. I sat there for a while after I finished it.
The Old Quarter has a cast of regulars on every block. A small poodle on a plastic chair, off-leash, ignoring tourists. A man asleep upright at a cafe table with two empty plastic cups in front of him. Total commitment to the nap.
