La Union Trip

We went to La Union, Philippines for a quick tour, sightseeing and vacation. The beach there have waves awesome enough for surfing so I was excited to go there, I always wanted to try surfing. It's kinda rare for us to travel north.

This trip happened in November 2022. Sorry to post this really late.

The weather is cold and gloomy because there's a storm heading to the north. The storm hit south and we just evaded it unknowingly.

This is our first stop. The lighthouse (or guard tower) ruins. Silly me, I forgot to take a photo of the structure. I just took this rocky beach and some few pics.

This is the gate of the structure.

Both parts of the gate are filled with locks. Reminds me of those "promise locks" in some tourist spots in some countries.

This is the interior of the structure. It doesn't have a roof and it's pretty much empty but you can take really nice photos in here.

Our second stop is this church. It's located near our first stop.

We took a look inside and prayed. After that we continued our trip.

Our next stop is the "Bahay na Bato" (Stone House). Why is it called like that? Well, we'll see...

The place is huge. Before you reach the rock-filled house. You'll see some pathway that lead to different places within the area and one of this places is this little museum.

You'll see a lot of artwork here in different styles and formats. 

Oh look! They have some mosaic portraits of the Marvel Superheroes. They look nice.

They displayed old things here that can be considered as relics or antiques these days.

There are lots of ancient stuff that are displayed here, like old plates, utensils and other items that dates from before and after the Spanish occupation of the Philippines.

I found this wood sculpture cool but a little creepy.

So this is what a century-old sewing machine looks like.

We're finished looking at the cool stuff in the museum so we went up to see the view of the beach.

After taking some of our photos and selfies we went down to go look for the rock house. I forgot to mention, some pathways leads to dead ends probably closed for maintenance or it's just private property.

Along the way you see some sculptures displayed around the area. Some of these sculptures are creative, cute, funny and creepy (the Halloween spirit still lingers).

We finally found the Bahay na Bato (Stone/rock house).

It's called "Bahay na Bato" because this house made of concrete and rocks and is literally filled with rocks, pebbles and some hardened corals that came from the beach (probably during the high tides).

We went up to see the view from up there.

This photo is wallpaper friendly or it's the type that you can see in the postcards.

This is the front view of the house. See? So many rocks!

The beach is also filled with rocks. It feels good when you walk bare feet because they massage your feet.

I can't believe there's a beach filled with rocks, this is the first time I saw one.

Look at those clouds. I bet this place is much prettier when it's not rainy or cloudy outside.

After our short stay at Bahay na Bato, we went and stopped at the man-made forest to take some photos and selfies.

We finally reached our last stop for the day, the beach.

The sky is cloudy, winds are strong and it's raining a bit. Because of the incoming storm, the waves are huge and strong which is awesome for the experienced surfers.

Like this guy, surfing through the stormy waves. May, I really want to do that too.

Too bad the coast guard banned surfing for that day because the place is currently in storm signal #3. Meaning that it's dangerous to swim or ride a boat on the beach because of the strong winds and stronger, higher waves.

It bummed me out because I want to go surfing and see if I can easily ride the waves on a surfboard because of my years of skateboarding experience.

So we just stayed on the cottage and chilled for a while while petting some local animals. What a cute dog.

We stayed here for the night. And oh, we had a drinking game session and we got drunk so bad. So I'm afraid to say that we skipped the night tour and there are no bar hopping and night photos taken. The hangover was so bad that I remembered why I stopped drinking hard drinks.

The next day, I still have a bit of a hangover. We have to leave our cottage and beach by lunchtime so we had our breakfast, had a little bit of strolling at the beach and took some more photos. 12PM, we checked out and left the beach and we're on our way home.

We're still on tour so while on the way home we stopped by at this temple.

It's huge so we checked it out and took some pictures and selfies

The temple have a nice view of the town and the sea.

This is what's inside the temple. It looks nice and really clean inside so we went in and made a wish.

While on the road, we saw this shop so we stopped and we bought some dried fish. They taste good especially when dipped in spicy vinegar. They taste even better when partnered with cold or fried rice.

While waiting for the others to return to our ride. I saw this cute little black goat with a white cross on its forehead.

It's getting dark and the weather is getting bad while we're on the highway. Looks like we greeted the storm head-on. It's a little scary to drive on a highway while raining heavily and having poor visibility on the road. So I stayed awake during the storm.

Thankfully the heavy rain stopped (or we cleared the storm) and we're back in Manila. But we had a little accident. The driver of our ride hit a sharp pothole on the road resulting to a flat tire. We had to stop at a nearby gas station to change the tire.

It's almost midnight and we're finally home. It was a fun quick tour of La Union. We plan to go back there, hopefully during summer or anytime that's not rainy, because I really wanted to try surfing and see more places and stuff. Also we didn't visit enough places because of the bad weather and our hangover during the night.

Cheers!