My personal paradise is the Philippines. Not the beaches and beer Philippines, though. You can keep that. It’s the Philippines that’s covered in pines, isn’t shy about its headhunting past and sees nothing wrong with blasting “Gangnam Style” whilst lasering a dancing Psy on an ancient monument in a three centuries old piece of Old Mexico in Asia. It’s a Philippines where you can visit an embalmed dictator, enjoy smoky sunrises over rice terraces stacked up the mountainside and smoldering sunsets into the South China Sea. If you’re lucky, you’ll even see the Virgin Mary appear on the side of a church after sundown.

It took about a week for my family to see that Philippines on a trek from central Baguio City through the mountains and down the coast to Vigan and Luzon’s northernmost tip and we may have made some questionable decisions along the way, but it’s not hyperbole to say it was the trip of a lifetime.

Baguio: The City of Pines

Our journey to the north began in Baguio City, end of the line for long-distance buses from Manila. Once in Baguio you’re on your own to find transportation through the mountains.

Designed by American architect Daniel Burnham as a place for U.S. officials to escape the heat of Manila during the early 20th century, Baguio City is a popular destination for lowland Filipinos seeking to trade the capital’s smog and heat for the scent of pine forests and crisp mountain air. It’s a great place to wear a jacket with your shorts and flip-flops, this is still the Philippines after all.

We’d been to Baguio before, so we skipped the major tourist spots and instead the little-known Aguinaldo Museum, which is dedicated to the first man to be proclaimed president of the Republic of the Philippines, Emilio Aguinaldo. It presents the story of his life and a very focused, Aguinaldo-centric look at the Filipino’s fight against Spain and later the United States. Most Americans don’t learn about that part of our shared history with the Philippines, and this isn’t the best place to start learning, but for anyone interested in Philippine history it’s collection is not to be missed.

The museum is dim-light with a reverent ambience as a guide tells the story of Aguinaldo. Many of the president’s personal effects, uniforms, weapons and even the cross used to swear him in are on display. The tour culminates with a viewing of their greatest artifact, the first flag of the Philippines.

Enshrined in a room dressed like the courtyard of a Spanish villa with life-sized mannequins of Philippine Revolutionary figures stand in the balconies looking down, the flag is the focal point in the room with nothing to distract or take away from its importance. Faded and slowly deteriorating, it’s still largely intact and it can be clearly seen how little the design has changed from then to today.

Kaingan: Hidden Shrine and Unexpected Company

Despite the lack of organized transportation it was surprisingly easy to find passage out of Baguio. Reputable-ish looking transporters and tour guides hang around the bus terminal willing to haggle for a few days of service. There was a discount for bartering in Tagalog, but a penalty for being a foreigner, so the price evened out and we came to something we could agree on.

When we lit out the next morning we found our crew had gained an extra member. Our driver’s tour guide friend decided to tag along on the trip, though he swore it wasn’t an attempt to extort extra money from us and that he was simply along for the ride.

Despite our initial mistrust, he was a real good guy. When I mentioned I liked history he suggested we stop at the site Gen. Tomoyuki Yamashita surrendered himself to American troops near the end of World War II. Now the Kaingan Shrine, it also houses a small museum on the traditional ways of the mountain peoples, commonly called Igorots, though they prefer Ifugao. This included clothing, baskets, weapons, tools, all the minutiae of pre-modern mountain life. This was our first brush with this history on the trip as we learned about how they lived until fairly recently. The Ifugao, until the Americans put a stop to it, where headhunters and I was surprised to see just how much their dress and culture was like that of the Borneo headhunters despite thousands of miles of separation and different altitude. The shrine itself was even shaped like a giant Ifugao house made of cement. A house is composed of a tall, shaggy roof that almost completely covers a wooden house on stilts and is reached via ladder.

The scenery along the way was impressive as we drove from the pine-tree covered and smoke-scented mountains down into through a valley back into the tropical Philippines we’re all familiar with and back up into the hills.

Banaue: Skulls and Sunrises

Banaue is the town with a view literally worth a thousand pisos as its famous rice terraces are pictured on the back of the bill. Standing at any one of the mountain-side overlooks, all of the mountains and valleys as far as I could see had been bent to the will of rice farmers over the course of centuries. The mountains were stepped almost to the top, the rice terraces unevenly shaped as they followed the contours of the landscape. Even more impressive is that because of this geography all the rice is hand-picked with no animal or mechanical assistance, just as it has been done since the Ifugao began planting rice. The scene was both surreal and beautiful and everywhere we looked. During our short stay we saw the terraces under a few different lights- bright blue sky, foggy, overcast, rainy, sunset and most spectacularly, sunrise. Up early, I watched the sky and mountains turn orange and black as light struck at odd angles casting shadows and changing as the sun gained altitude. I called over my family to come watch and was politely told to take a picture, they were sleeping.

As nice as the rice terraces are to view from afar, to truly appreciate their scale they must also be walked and that morning we followed a father, his toddler on his shoulders, through the terraces on the narrow dirt lip around the watery rice paddies. After walking a spell we came to a small settlement of traditional Ifugao huts and traditional-style huts made of corrugated metal where our guide told us they eventually plan to start having cultural shows to help drum up money.

Before leaving we stopped into a souvenir shop where the owner announced we were the first guests of the day so he rolled out the family bones. A blanket holding the remains of his ancestors to be precise. I’m not going to call them fake or real or question exactly what that was all about, but we politely accepted his hospitality and handled grandfather’s remains. Then we paid him 300 pisos because now he needed to slaughter a chicken for bringing out the bones.

Our unexpected tour guide knew a bit about these parts so he took us to a little off the main path museum that became one more highlight on the trip. The Hiwang Village is a collection of huts turned repository for local artifacts. The caretaker brought out a ladder so we could climb into a few and see the trove of rice god idols and woodwork. Outside was a colony of stonework statues and Buddha.

Decorating a few of these huts were trophies from their headhunting days, human skulls lashed to animal skulls. When I asked the caretaker what the significance was for that he told me there was none, just decoration. He explained most of the skulls are from World War II, when the Japanese came the Ifugao revived the old ways and visited them upon the new interlopers.

Inside one of the skull adorned huts was a Japanese sword, likely a very old family heirloom due to its fine work and European-style hilt, which was popular to do with old swords in the late 1800s. Inside was the sword, outside was the former owner’s skull. I made a mental note not to annoy headhunters at this point.

Beyond the rice terraces and skull trophies, Banaue itself feels like a rural shanty town, a mix-mash of solid buildings and those made of bare cinderblocks and corrugated metal with American country music playing from inside bars.

Travelling with large sums of money is generally not a good idea, but coming out here we learned it’s the only option. The town’s only ATM is just for show and personnel at our hotel told us that credit cards don’t always work here.

After leaving Banaue for our next stop we were treated to many more rice terrace views because while Banaue’s are the most famous, they are not unique to that town.

The scenery changed again as we neared Sagada, the road winded along the side of the steep mountain where we had a potential rockslide to one side and a steep drop off the other. Occasionally rockslides had partially blocked the road and our driver carefully took us around. Almost at Sagada we came to a deep cut in our path with a rickety-looking temporary bridge laid over it. A sign read, “No Heavy Vehicles” and before I could question what constitutes “heavy” our driver sped on over it. Welcome to Sagada.

Sagada: Spelunking and more Bones

Surrounded by hiking trails, mountains to climb and caves to spelunk, Sagada is an outdoors paradise. And if I hadn’t gotten enough macabre in Banaue, they also have the famous hanging coffins.

A traditional funerary custom is to hang the coffin off the side of a cliff, usually held in place with poles or on a ladder-like string of coffins strung together. Outcroppings of coffins can be seen in the general area, but a very well-known set is a short hike through Echo Valley out behind the St. Mary the Virgin Episcopalian Church, which is another local quirk. The mountains are one of the few areas that never converted to Catholicism despite the church’s none-too-subtle methods of coercion, guess it’s hard to threaten headhunters. So they’re not Catholic. They’re primarily Protestants as those missionaries came to the area with the Americans to start schools and hospitals in the early 20th century.

Hiking in the woods to look for coffins was fun and easy, but the real challenge was spelunking. Taking off our shoes and putting on clothes we didn’t mind getting wet in we entered Sumaging Cave. Don’t get me wrong, we didn’t just go exploring a random dark cave without experienced supervision. Sagada has some strict rules concerning tour guides and to enter the cave we first had to get one from the town information center. He also showed us a few burial caves were old coffins were stacked atop each other in massive piles and pointed out another set of hanging coffins along the way to Sumaging, he was good like that.

Sumaging is exciting and a bit dangerous and my little sister constantly teased me about my lack of balance the whole way down to the bottom. Going down an incline of smooth, wet rocks with a lantern for light we relied on hand and foot holds to get from point to point. The cave rock formations are beautiful and sported descriptive names like the water-filled Dinosaur’s Footprint and the Pregnant Woman. Despite that I had to remain on alert as one bad step could cause a bad fall and it would be very difficult to get an injured person back up, especially a six-foot tall man such as myself. The cave itself is also pitch black except for the light our guide’s lamp and a headlamp he’d given my sister, adding an extra level of excitement and caution to the situation.

The cave bottoms out in a pool of water leading to a narrow underground river that leads to another cave. I’ve a few minor phobias and both claustrophobia and a healthy respect for drowning are among them, I’d managed to screw up the courage for the cave but I couldn’t bring myself to try out that narrow, watery track.

Itutuloy…

Originally published in Stripes, and Stripes: Destination Paradise.