I recently attended a friend’s wedding in Tagaytay and was surprised by the construction activities in the city. Tagaytay is really turning into a legit weekend getaway with the improved accessibility to Manila, and multiple attractions already in place.
The day before the wedding, my friends and I decided to meet at Bag of Beans at Twin Lakes for a quick catch up over sunset coffee and dinner. I have no expectation of the place as I think it’s just one of the stand-alone coffee shops with a scenic view of the Taal lake and volcano. Really surprised at how Megaworld has transformed this once boring hillside terrain into an Instagram-worthy, dining, and relaxing stop-over along the Tagaytay-Nasugbu Highway.
Twin Lakes is a mixed-used lifestyle development of Megaworld which includes a shopping village, and a French chateau-esque residential development. There’s also an actual vineyard somehere there. We only decided to stay for a while but since we were mesmerized, we stayed a little more longer to enjoy the clear night sky and feel the cool mountain breeze while sipping another cup of coffee.
This European-inspired hotel totally altered the Tagaytay viewscape. Giving you that European-architectural familiarity with a Philippine-tourism icon in the background.
Over the years, I was out of touch with the attractions and lifestyle offerings of Tagaytay, although I still kept monitoring her on the sideline as one of the fastest growing skylines in the Philippines.
Tagaytay can be easily accessed from Manila from the new Paranaque Integrated Terminal Exchange (PITX). Public transport within the city is a bit of a challenge though. Taxi or Grab is non-existent, and taking tricycles between hotels can be very costly. Thank goodness to a friend who drove me all the way there from my hotel in Ortigas, and all the way back during the wedding day.
Tagaytay is reachable by about 2 hours on weekends through the scenic and still my favorite expressway in the Philippines, SLEX (South Luzon Expressway).
Accessibility to Tagaytay is already getting better and hope that the plan for the Cavite-Tagaytay expressway pushes through to further cut travel times and improve tourism connectivity with the capital. There’s huge potential to bundle Manila with Tagaytay as a destination. In a region stuck in the tropics, you can never go wrong selling a cool, breezy mountain resort story to its 635 million residents.
More pictures of the shopping village.
alexstravs 