Hot Air Balloons, I think are pretty damn awesome. It’s actually the first ever successful flight technology humans have ever created and plus they look adorable.
It was our first time going to the Hot Air Balloon Festival in Clark, Pampanga. My friends and I are from Baguio City and they get out from work 9:30 in the morning. What we did is we rented a van and off we went to our journey to Clark.
So the event starts from February 9-12 2017 and we went down from Baguio on Feb 11. Our goal would be to watch the Hot Air Balloons to be lightning up the night sky to a glow! Kinda like the Japanese Lanterns in the movie “Tangled” though these are much more enormous flying objects hahaha. On the way we stopped over “Isdaan” in Gerona, Tarlac.
This place had real efforts put into it which is really nice considering the growing interest of everybody to travel, unwind and take pictures! I mean come on, look at this. Is this in the Philippines? or Thailand??
Besides the awesome statues, figure and sculptures; Isdaan is where they have the oh so famous “Taksyapo”.
From research they say this is a Kapampangan word for “bwisit”. In english its kinda like cursing and distressing yourself. So, what you do is you buy a ceramic cup, plate or whichever thing you prefer and throw it as hard as you can on a wall which they have painted different things like “Ex-girlfriend” or “Manyakis” (which translates to Pervert). In the past i saw that the pricing of the ceramic plates and cups were like 10 Php, when we went there, a cup costs 20 Php and others would have a different price, like the TV is 2000 Php. I don’t know about you but I’d rather keep my 2000Php and splurge on something else rather than an old television set to throw to a wall. Moving on, we were definitely wanting to try out the food in Isdaan despite the reviews on how pricey it is, possibly its worth it? Turns out they were under staffed and we needed to wait more time for our turn to actually get a table and get our food prepared. Its literally jam packed and aloooot of tourists are there. They gave us feeds for the fish so we could do something else while waiting or picture taking, though it took too long and we were already starving from our trip. So we decided to skip it and we ate at Matutina’s which is a damn good restaurant as well.
One thing that ticked me off from Isdaan was the Mickey Mouse mascot, we had no idea we actually needed to pay them for just taking a picture! crazy, he was literally following us around just to find out he was waving 50 to 100 peso bills that it was asking for a payment, so I gave a 20 cause okay, life’s hard.. i get he/she is just trying to make a living.
So anyways, after our lunch at Matutina’s we headed to Clark, I slept on the way and when I woke, I woke up to a heavy traffic. We weren’t stuck though it was moving seriously slow. People were parking along side the road and walking towards the area where they would have the Hot Air Balloons to fly instead. Crunched up faces of people looking irritated and shit. You know, overpopulation problems. Anyways. So we got to the parking area, which the parking area is HUGE by the way. I think everything was smooth, we found a parking spot which was actually far from the event site, but was fine, walking is good for you. The place was like a windy desert! Sand flying everywhere like its wanting to make me a mummy wanting to make my snot and lungs the color mocha. It’s like we were doing the cinnamon challenge only with sand.
So at the entrance, the fee is 350Php. One of my friends said they were able to buy tickets for 300Php since there were some people who bought tickets for friends that didn’t come. (mga indyanero). Lucky them. So there, we were in, since it was sandy like powder like sand they were actually selling face masks there which was 15Php each.
So we got that. While waiting for the Hot Air Balloons and stuff they also sold kites. I bought the small eagle. The manang technically gave me full disclosure that it takes more effort to fly the 100 peso kite compared to the 150 peso kites. So being the cheap ass that I am, we still bought the 100 peso one and it WAS damn hard to keep afloat ? or flying in the sky. It always wanted to crash down, may day! may day! hahaha sad but it was fun
So after all the wait. It was already 7:30 pm. Everybody was getting excited, they were inflating the Hot Air Balloons and music was blasting out the speakers. There was some sort of gag show on the stage but we weren’t very amused. Lights were going on and stuff but then suddenly one by one they were deflating the balloons without them taking off the ground! How come?? huhuhu we were devastated. Unfortunately the conditions were not right for them to float up the balloons. (I’m not even sure if I said that right). But it was too windy for them to make the Hot Air Balloons float up. I guess some of my friends were upset with what happened but I really enjoyed the adventure though. After that we went home. We were back in Baguio at about 12 in the morning? Exhausting drive but I had fun.
I appreciate the people I traveled with more over to my friend Hazel. She loves planning these kinds of trips and bringing everyone together. cray cray
