The other day, TJ and I took a little trip to the La Mesa Ecopark, a little something new to do, instead of me plopping on their couch and doing nothing but play We Love Katamari. I did a bit of research and found that it's pretty accessible, cheap, and supposedly had lots of things going on.

When you enter the village you have to go through to get to the park, you have to leave your ID at the gate, and then just follow the directions in the link above. It was pretty cool crossing the water, which a sign claimed was about 79 feet deep at the time. Parking is easy-peasy, and you'll have no trouble spotting the ticket booths. You pay P50 if you're a Quezon City resident, P20 if you're a student, and possibly some other fee if you're not from Quezon City.

Inside, we saw signs proclaiming the existence of wall climbing facilities and a zip line. A zip line! Whee! After a few minutes of tottering around, we spotted no such zip line, and the wall climbing area was, well, not in shambles, but no one was around to assist any hopeful climbers.

There were little playgrounds aplenty, lots of picnic tables, and a fishing lagoon as well, with mighty big fish in them too. We chose to sweat it out and went for a short hike, during which we pretended to be Uruk-Hai hunting for the Fellowship. Fun times, fun times.

I was little put out because we didn't spot the boating area when a welcome sight greeted us--bike rentals!!! It was almost a dream come true, until we found out that for P70, you can bike within the roped-off area not really stretching too far from the bike rental place. Blecch.

Exiting the park and walking in the parking area, we spotted another road further down where the Ecocenter was being built so we headed in that direction. And there we saw the boats! Yay! You can do the boat thing for 30 minutes for P100 per boat and though it was a small area, it was still a blast. I kept saying a la Frodo in The Two Towers, "We're going in circles!", hehe, because we were for a while, but we eventually crossed the boating area properly. For some reason, one of the people in the other boat when we first got there took a picture of us paddling away. Ye gods. It was also funny how some groups of females there kept yelling and squealing about how they didn't know how to row. Geesh.

Overall, it was a nice trip. The biking area could at least be stretched to, oh, the whole park, maybe. I'd like to see wall climbing authorities there. And I hope like hell the bathrooms are clean.