30/08/2026
🚴♂️ Cabanatuan → Baler → Cabanatuan: Two Days, Two Roads, One Ride That Refused to Repeat Itself
Some rides are about the numbers. This one was about the road — or rather, two completely different roads, stitched together by one destination.
Two days. Roughly 245 km. Close to 2,600 m of combined climbing. One town in the mountains, one town on the Pacific, and almost 30 riders who turned a there-and-back into something that never once felt like a there-and-back.
This is the story of Cabanatuan to Baler, and Baler back to Cabanatuan — by two entirely different roads.
🌄 Day 1: Into the Sierra Madre
The ride out of Cabanatuan starts deceptively gently. Flat agricultural roads, rice fields, small towns, long straight sections through Nueva Ecija — the kind of terrain where a group settles into a rhythm before anyone's really thought about it.
Then the mountains start closing in.
By the time the route crosses into the Sierra Madre, the whole character of the ride flips. The road narrows. Traffic disappears. The green gets thick and close. Somewhere in there, 116 km and 1,440 m of climbing later, the GPX profile peaks at 681 m — not as one brutal wall, but as a rolling sequence of climb, short recovery, climb again, descend, repeat. It's the kind of profile that rewards patience over panic.
The Sierra Madre is the longest mountain range in the country, and riding through it is a genuinely different Philippines than the one most people picture. No towers, no jeepney horns, no wall of noise — just forest, small communities, and a road that seems to know it's heading somewhere remote.
That remoteness isn't just scenery — it's history. Baler stayed cut off from the rest of Luzon for a very long time precisely because of these mountains, and roads like this one were what finally stitched the coast to the interior.
🌊 Baler: More Than a Surf Town
After close to six hours of climbing and descending, the landscape opens up and the Pacific arrives — always a little sudden, always worth it. Baler is best known now for surfing and adventure tourism, but the history underneath is genuinely wild: this is where a handful of Spanish soldiers held out inside the town church for nearly a year during 1898–99, long after Spain had already lost the Philippines everywhere else — a siege now remembered as the symbolic full stop on more than three centuries of colonial rule. It's also the birthplace of Manuel L. Quezon, the first President of the Philippine Commonwealth.
So you don't just ride into a surf town. You ride into a place that quietly carries a lot more weight than its beach cafés suggest.
The waves, admittedly, didn't show up this time. No surfing. Nobody minded much — after a day like that, a flat, warm ocean to float in is its own kind of reward. You don't need every box ticked. You just need to have earned the one you get.
🌧 Day 2: Same Two Towns, a Completely Different Ride
This is the part that made the whole trip. Day 2 isn't Day 1 in reverse — it's its own route entirely, cutting back through the interior on a different line, with its own rhythm of rolling climbs and descents. The numbers alone tell part of the story: 129 km, 1,270 m of climbing, topping out at 476 m — lower than Day 1, but stretched out over more distance and, as it turned out, considerably more weather.
Day 1 had been close to perfect — comfortable, dry, straightforward cycling weather. Day 2 had other plans. Rain came and went for most of the ride, and the final 20–25 km turned into a proper tropical downpour. At a certain point there's no strategy left for staying dry — you're already soaked, and the only real question is how much fun can be had with that fact.
Turned out: quite a lot.
The route also included a short gravel section that, under dry conditions, would have passed without comment. After hours of rain, it had washed out into something closer to a mudslide — puddles, slipping wheels, a fair amount of laughing, and a road ride that had unofficially been upgraded to an adventure ride. This is exactly the kind of moment where the right bike, and the right attitude, make all the difference.
🚴♂️ The Group Makes the Ride
Around 30 riders means 30 different paces, and that's most of the appeal. There's always someone to chase for twenty minutes, and someone to ride quietly next to for the next twenty just talking about bikes, coffee, or nothing at all. A big group ride like this has a completely different texture than a solo effort — it flexes with whoever's around you at any given moment.
And after two days, a mountain range, a downpour, and a mud pit — there was really only one correct way to finish: grilled tuna in Baler, tired legs, wet kit, and the usual post-ride stories that get slightly better with each retelling.
🙌 The Thanks That Actually Matter
None of this happens by accident. Route planning, ride leads, support vehicles, logistics, food, safety — a hundred small decisions that nobody notices when everything goes right. Big thanks to Bikes & Coffee Manila, Rideout Manila for putting the whole weekend together and making it possible to just show up and ride, without thinking about any of the rest.
And to everyone who rode, waited, pushed, shared wheels, and laughed through the mud — thanks. The route is the excuse. The people are the reason it's memorable.
🌏 Two Days, Two Roads
What made this trip work wasn't distance or elevation — it was that it never repeated itself. Agricultural plains into mountain forest, mountain forest down to the Pacific, and then a completely different landscape back. Roughly 245 km across the two routes, well over 1,000 m of climbing on each day, and two rides that had almost nothing in common except where they started and ended.
Climbs, fast sections, quiet backroads, jungle, ocean, rain, mud, grilled tuna, and a group that made every kilometre of it better.
