Sagada, Mountain Province: Coffee Heritage House

We went to Sagada last 18-20 February. The place is beyond words -breathtaking!

We searched every homestay, hostel and hotel before our trip because we initially want to go over the holiday (Chinese New Year). There are no vacancies, thus we have to move our travel period to Sunday.

We checked Coffee Heritage House (CHH) and besides the good reviews, we’re also drawn by the nice pictures of the place.

Here’s an honest review, please note that these are just facts that could aid fellow travellers.

1. Reservation/Booking

We searched online but since I don’t want to book using our credit card, we called the mobile number posted in their website. We were able to avail the 25% discount posted for private room. That includes 3 persons (including our 9yo son), while our 7yo stays for free (bed sharing). Booking includes free continental breakfast. We settled 50% downpayment through online bank transfer. Upon our arrival, we were asked to settle the full amount since they were not informed about our downpayment. That’s the time I learned that all their online transactions are handled by Booking.com, so best to keep a copy of your deposit slip or in this case, screenshot of your online transfer. The issue was settled after a while, so no big deal. Price range is around P2000/night for private rooms. P1000/BED for dorm type rooms.

2. Hostel/Room

The hostel/building is cozy. You will find the pantry & lobby in the 2nd floor. There’s a fireplace, which they light up every night. Everything is generally clean. You have to take off your shoes before entering, there are slippers available though. Bonfire area available and can be used at night.

The private room is cement finished, paint on one side of the wall only. Not sure if it’s still in the works. Dont expect too much, there are no room amenities (eg. TV, WIFI, radio, AC, etc.). Just beds and lights, some makeshift (cement finished) table corners where you can place your bags. Toiletries not available, not even hooks for towels inside the room.

Note, this hostel only have shared toilet & baths, regardless if you booked a private room or dorm type rooms. I checked with their reservations officer and she said they have around 10 T&B. We didn’t experience queues since there were few guests that time and we take showers late at night. Hot shower is available, but you have to control and set water volume to low (heater unable to heat high volume of water). No hot water in the tap. T&Bs are generally clean, can be messy at times so be respectful to your fellow guests and clean as you go.

Bed can pass hotel quality, comfortable matress and pillows, sheets are clean. However, we woke up the 3rd day with bedbug bites. My hand’s still swollen and itchy while typing this blog (picture added under customer service).

Room can be hot in the morning, unable to check fan availability, you can opt for open windows but it can be dusty when the wind blows hard since the private room windows are ground level. Hard to open windows at night (no screens) cause there are lots of insects, considering this place is surrounded by trees.

3. Location

Far away from the town proper and far means around 20mins away. If you don’t have a car, you’d need to walk from the main road as there are no means of transportation going to the hostel. If you have a car, note that there are rough patches so if you’re driving the “lowered” one, that might be a problem. Main road to hostel is dark, you have to rely to your headlights or lights from the houses at the side of the road. Note: one way, so slow down when passing curved roads. We learned from our tour guide that this is part of the farm-to-market road of the Gloria administration.

This place is perfect if you want to stray away from the city buzz and explore the mountainous side of Sagada. I also observed that it’s way cooler here compared to the town proper. Really quiet and peaceful at night.

Open parking is available around several meters away from the building. If you arrive late at night, flashlights will help since the surroundings are not well-lit or no lights at all.

4. Food

We were dead hungry after our 13-hour trip, so we had lunch first. Menu is limited so if you’re staying for a couple of days, you can opt to go out and try other restaurants. They have all-day breakfast which comes with meat-veggies-black rice. Food tastes fine but a bit pricy running at P220-P250 per order.

There are welcome drinks too but limited to choice of coffee or mountain tea.

We also tried some of their pasta which comes with toasted bread, price range is the same. Etag carbonara is a must try since they use traditionally preserved meat which is known to the Mountain Province.

Breakfast is free. Continental breakfast includes toasted bread, egg, choice of 2 spread (try their bugnay spread which is made from wild berries). I forgot to take pictures!

If you’re a coffee lover, prepare to splurge P95-P150 for a (small) cup of coffee outside your breakfast set. Pantry also closes 9pm, no more orders after that, keep snacks that you can nibble at wee hours.

5. Customer service.

If you’re looking for hotel type service, this is not the place for you. No room service. No special treatment of that sort. Sometimes, staff won’t even smile at you if they meet you at the corridors. You can say it’s pure accommodation, service is available in the pantry area only. Best to manage your expectations.

Front desk is okay, I cannot say that we had a warm welcome, just so so. When we arrived, no one helped with our bags even though they were joking around by asking the other staff to help my son with his load. Front desk officer helped though when we were about to enter our room. They were able to arrange a simple request and got us a tour guide.

When I feedback about the bedbug bites and showed them my hand as well as my son’s finger, the desk officer apologized but such a drawback to say that “they do not have control over the insect”, which I think can be improved by saying, “but rest assured we will check or clean the room”. After all that is our last day and they will benefit from the feedback.

Overall, this hostel is okay in terms of peace and quiet. But customer service can still be improved. Lighting and road condition (rough with chances of “balahaw”) can also be improved in the parking area.

Rating: 3/5

Coffee Heritage House
Sitio Nadatngan, Brgy. Madongo
Sagada 2619 Mt. Province
Philippines

The fire surveyor | God’s messenger in disguise!

It was just another ordinary day of February.

I was working as usual, while my husband was playing with the kids.  A man knocked on our door and asked me to participate in a fire survey.  I do not like to be disturbed during work hours and knowing that it is just another fire survey are enough reasons for me to say no.

So for unknown reason, I entertained the guy.  Went out of the front door and talked to the man named Domer, a typical bubbly guy.  Okay and for as long as he is talking with sense and he won’t waste my time.  He carried out his drill and I listened intently.  The guy highlighted different samples of fire incidents caused by various fire hazards like candles, electrical appliances/plugs and the number one cause of fire in the Philippines (according to him), the LPG tank.  Several questions about the preventive measures that we are taking were asked and we discussed my awareness regarding the issue.  I said I was confident enough that our family and house are safe and nowhere near harm.  He asked for my permission to check our cooking area and again I said yes.

Confident enough, I led him to the kitchen.  He checked the stove, A-okay.  The LPG tank as he scrutinized is fine since it bears the quality markings and it has a ring-type handle.  The man told us that it is important that the tank is sealed when bought and the metal body should be non-corroded.  Very good, now I can really say that I feel safe and confident about this issue.

Oh, but wait!  We nearly dropped our jaws when he checked the LPG hose!  We were all shocked to see that it is already deteriorating.  One more spark of flame can send our house to ashes and take lives to say the worst scenario that can happen.  I felt a sudden flush of fear and an instant flashback came into my mind– I just cooked lunch about an hour ago!

He then pulled a new/sturdy hose and LPG safety device from his bag.  He was about to start a demo and gave several tips on fire prevention.  I won’t narrate this chapter in detail and to cut the story short, we bought the regulator for an expensive fee and he left.  After a few minutes, I realized that it was fast.  The device (even if it comes with the hose & clamps) is exorbitant!  I researched about it and find several links that says that it can be bought for only 10% of the price that he offered us.  Some say it was a scam, starting out as a “fire survey” just like how we were approached.

Alright, I think we were scammed!  But should that matter now?  We already have the safety device installed and paid the fee.  But I chose to cling to the fact that the man literally saved our lives!  The incident is a proof that God still works in His own way.  I wish to conclude that it was a blessing in disguise.  Since I never entertained surveys before (there are lots who came by and I never said yes).  I would never let anyone enter our house just because I am always suspicious and it is hard to deal with strangers nowadays.  And checking our LPG hose can be the last thing to enter our minds, but he came out of nowhere and it was even a weekend!

I do not want to overreact but I believe that God is there.  He sent someone to save us from danger.  Sometimes we just need to listen and open ourselves.  Truly God is ever faithful even if we are so hard-headed and we forgot to call on Him most of the time.  People need to accept that though we are in control over things, we still need God.  He is our Father and like a child we can always call up to Him and be in a relationship with Him.

This I share to everyone.  Open your hearts and see things in a different light.  For all we know, these people may be God’s messengers in disguise.

Why Women In China Do Not Get Breast Cancer?

By Prof. Jane Plant, PhD, CBE

I had no alternative but to die or to try to find a cure for myself. I am a scientist – surely there was a rational explanation for this cruel illness that affects one in 12 women in the UK?

I had suffered the loss of one breast, and undergone radiotherapy. I was now receiving painful chemotherapy, and had been seen by some of the country’s most eminent specialists. But, deep down, I felt certain I was facing death. I had a loving husband, a beautiful home and two young children to care for. I desperately wanted to live.

Fortunately, this desire drove me to unearth the facts, some of which were known only to a handful of scientists at the time.

Anyone who has come into contact with breast cancer will know that certain risk factors – such as increasing age, early onset of womanhood, late onset of menopause and a family history of breast cancer – are completely out of our control. But there are many risk factors, which we can control easily.

These “controllable” risk factors readily translate into simple changes that we can all make in our day-to-day lives to help prevent or treat breast cancer. My message is that even advanced breast cancer can be overcome because I have done it.

The first clue to understanding what was promoting my breast cancer came when my husband Peter, who was also a scientist, arrived back from working in China while I was being plugged in for a chemotherapy session.

He had brought with him cards and letters, as well as some amazing herbal suppositories, sent by my friends and science colleagues in China.

The suppositories were sent to me as a cure for breast cancer. Despite the awfulness of the situation, we both had a good belly laugh, and I remember saying that this was the treatment for breast cancer in China, then it was little wonder that Chinese women avoided getting the disease. Those words echoed in my mind. Why didn’t Chinese women in China get breast cancer? I had collaborated once with Chinese colleagues on a study of links between soil chemistry and disease, and I remembered some of the statistics.

The disease was virtually non-existent throughout the whole country. Only one in 10,000 women in China will die from it, compared to that terrible figure of one in 12 in Britain and the even grimmer average of one in 10 across most Western countries. It is not just a matter of China being a more rural country, with less urban pollution. In highly urbanized Hong Kong, the rate rises to 34 women in every 10,000 but still puts the West to shame. The Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have similar rates. And remember, both cities were attacked with nuclear weapons, so in addition to the usual pollution-related cancers, one would also expect to find some radiation-related cases, too.

The conclusion we can draw from these statistics strikes you with some force. If a Western woman were to move to industrialized, irradiated Hiroshima, she would slash her risk of contracting breast cancer by half. Obviously this is absurd. It seemed obvious to me that some lifestyle factor not related to pollution, urbanization or the environment is seriously increasing the Western woman’s chance of contracting breast cancer.

I then discovered that whatever causes the huge differences in breast cancer rates between oriental and Western countries, it isn’t genetic.

Scientific research showed that when Chinese or Japanese people move to the West, within one or two generations their rates of breast cancer approach those of their host community.

The same thing happens when oriental people adopt a completely Western lifestyle in Hong Kong. In fact, the slang name for breast cancer in China translates as ‘Rich Woman’s Disease’. This is because, in China , only the better off can afford to eat what is termed ‘ Hong Kong food’.

The Chinese describe all Western food, including everything from ice cream and chocolate bars to spaghetti and feta cheese, as “Hong Kong food”, because of its availability in the former British colony and its scarcity, in the past, in mainland China.

So it made perfect sense to me that whatever was causing my breast cancer and the shockingly high incidence in this country generally, it was almost certainly something to do with our better-off, middle-class, Western lifestyle. There is an important point for men here, too. I have observed in my research that much of the data about prostate cancer leads to similar conclusions.

According to figures from the World Health Organization, the number of men contracting prostate cancer in rural China is negligible, only 0.5 men in every 100,000. In England, Scotland and Wales, however, this figure is 70 times higher. Like breast cancer, it is a middle-class disease that primarily attacks the wealthier and higher socio-economic groups ¨C those that can afford to eat rich foods.

I remember saying to my husband, “Come on Peter, you have just come back from China. What is it about the Chinese way of life that is so different?”

Why don’t they get breast cancer?’
We decided to utilize our joint scientific backgrounds and approach it logically.

We examined scientific data that pointed us in the general direction of fats in diets. Researchers had discovered in the 1980s that only l4% of calories in the average Chinese diet were from fat, compared to almost 36% in the West. But the diet I had been living on for years before I contracted breast cancer was very low in fat and high in fibre. Besides, I knew as a scientist that fat intake in adults has not been shown to increase risk for breast cancer in most investigations that have followed large groups of women for up to a dozen years.

Then one day something rather special happened. Peter and I have worked together so closely over the years that I am not sure which one of us first said: “The Chinese don’t eat dairy produce!”

It is hard to explain to a non-scientist the sudden mental and emotional ‘buzz’ you get when you know you have had an important insight. It’s as if you have had a lot of pieces of a jigsaw in your mind, and suddenly, in a few seconds, they all fall into place and the whole picture is clear.

Suddenly I recalled how many Chinese people were physically unable to tolerate milk, how the Chinese people I had worked with had always said that milk was only for babies, and how one of my close friends, who is of Chinese origin, always politely turned down the cheese course at dinner parties.

I knew of no Chinese people who lived a traditional Chinese life who ever used cow or other dairy food to feed their babies. The tradition was to use a wet nurse but never, ever, dairy products.

Culturally, the Chinese find our Western preoccupation with milk and milk products very strange. I remember entertaining a large delegation of Chinese scientists shortly after the ending of the Cultural Revolution in the 1980s.

On advice from the Foreign Office, we had asked the caterer to provide a pudding that contained a lot of ice cream. After inquiring what the pudding consisted of, all of the Chinese, including their interpreter, politely but firmly refused to eat it, and they could not be persuaded to change their minds.

At the time we were all delighted and ate extra portions!

Milk, I discovered, is one of the most common causes of food allergy. Over 70% of the world’s population are unable to digest the milk sugar, lactose, which has led nutritionists to believe that this is the normal condition for adults, not some sort of deficiency. Perhaps nature is trying to tell us that we are eating the wrong food.

Before I had breast cancer for the first time, I had eaten a lot of dairy produce, such as skimmed milk, low-fat cheese and yoghurt. I had used it as my main source of protein. I also ate cheap but lean minced beef, which I now realized was probably often ground-up dairy cow.

In order to cope with the chemotherapy I received for my fifth case of cancer, I had been eating organic yoghurts as a way of helping my digestive tract to recover and repopulate my gut with ‘good’ bacteria.

Recently, I discovered that way back in 1989 yoghurt had been implicated in ovarian cancer . Dr Daniel Cramer of Harvard University studied hundreds of women with ovarian cancer, and had them record in detail what they normally ate. wish I’d been made aware of his findings when he had first discovered them.

Following Peter’s and my insight into the Chinese diet, I decided to give up not just yoghurt but all dairy produce immediately. Cheese, butter, milk and Even many proprietary brands of margarine marketed as soya, sunflower or olive oil spreads yoghurt and anything else that contained dairy produce – it went down the sink or in the rubbish.
It is surprising how many products, including commercial soups, biscuits and cakes, contain some form of dairy produce. can contain dairy produce. I therefore became an avid reader of the small print on food labels.

Up to this point, I had been steadfastly measuring the progress of my fifth cancerous lump with callipers and plotting the results. Despite all the encouraging comments and positive feedback from my doctors and nurses, my own precise observations told me the bitter truth.

My first chemotherapy sessions had produced no effect – the lump was still the same size.
Then I eliminated dairy products. Within days, the lump started to shrink. About two weeks after my second chemotherapy session and one week after giving up dairy produce, the lump in my neck started to itch. Then it began to soften and to reduce in size. The line on the graph, which had shown no change, was now pointing downwards as the tumour got smaller and smaller.

And, very significantly, I noted that instead of declining exponentially (a graceful curve) as cancer is meant to do, the tumour’s decrease in size was plotted on a straight line heading off the bottom of the graph, indicating a cure, not suppression (or remission) of the tumour.

One Saturday afternoon after about six weeks of excluding all dairy produce from my diet, I practised an hour of meditation then felt for what was left of the lump. I couldn’t find it. Yet I was very experienced at detecting cancerous lumps – I had discovered all five cancers on my own. I went downstairs and asked my husband to feel my neck. He could not find any trace of the lump either.

On the following Thursday I was due to be seen by my cancer specialist at Charing Cross Hospital in London. He examined me thoroughly, especially my neck where the tumour had been. He was initially bemused and then delighted as he said, “I cannot find it.”
None of my doctors, it appeared, had expected someone with my type and stage of cancer (which had clearly spread to the lymph system) to survive, let alone be so hale and hearty.

My specialist was as overjoyed as I was. When I first discussed my ideas with him he was understandably sceptical. But I understand that he now uses maps showing cancer mortality in China in his lectures, and recommends a non-dairy diet to his cancer patients.

I now believe that the link between dairy produce and breast cancer is similar to the link between smoking and lung cancer. I believe that identifying the link between breast cancer and dairy produce, and then developing a diet specifically targeted at maintaining the health of my breast and hormone system, cured me.

It was difficult for me, as it may be for you, to accept that a substance as ‘natural’ as milk might have such ominous health implications. But I am a living proof that it works and, starting from tomorrow, I shall reveal the secrets of my revolutionary action plan.

Source: Extracted from Your Life in Your Hands, by Professor Jane Plant
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This article was passed on to me; do share it to your friends and loved ones too. As the saying goes, prevention is better than cure. –starfreak

Family Comes First

After several attempts, finally we were able to watch Click last night.

The plot focused on Michael (Adam Sandler), tired of using different remote controls for different gadgets. He figured that he wanted a universal remote that would control his life and everything around him. He chanced upon a store – Bed, Bath and Beyond where he met Morty. The latter gave him this remote that would change his life, to note that the item is non-returnable. He was able to get hold of his life the way he wanted it to be, until he realized that he does not want this kind of life at all.

I used to think that this was another flimsy story, but I was wrong. There’s a moral story behind it and in fact a very important lesson was taught –Family comes first. No matter how busy we are, especially in terms of career. Even if your reasons are genuinely focused on your desire to give the best for your family, we must never take our family for granted.

It is a sad thought that due to busy schedules, family time is always compromised. But remember that the time spent with our spouses, children and loved ones is time well invested and spent.

So keep it in mind, FAMILY COMES FIRST.