Northern Exposure

This year, I made a personal vow to visit the three places in the Philippines that I've always wanted to visit but have never managed to: Palawan, Boracay (unimaginable, right?) and Batanes. Of the three, Batanes seemed to be the hardest to go to because it is the remotest (and there are no promo fares on SEAIR!). However, thanks to an HR policy change that spurred my office colleagues and myself to use up our leave credits, I suddenly had a plane ticket to Basco.

I felt like I wasn't stoked enough for my trip to Batanes and this is mainly because it came three days after I arrived from my trip to Australia. The holiday down under had long been planned and cannot be pushed back so in the end, I only worked 10 or 11 days in the month of May.

I have not ridden a 32-seater since childhood (oh those PAL Sunrisers that flew from Dumaguete to Cebu!) so I was a bit nervous when I boarded the plane. Good thing I was armed with a 1,000-page book and got myself lost in 12th century England through most of the trip. I caught more than a glimpse of the Batanes landscape as we were about to land and I realized that we were in for a treat.







With narrow streets and limited lamp posts, poblacion Basco can be dealt with in an hour or so. I am quite used to the rural life having lived on an island for the better part of 20 years so this spontaneous hieing off to the northernmost tip of the country was somehow nostalgic for me - the smells of early morning smoke coming from wood-fed stoves made of earthen clay, the aroma of damp soil ridded with a mixture of chicken and cattle dung, and the unmistakable whiff of frugal fish deep-frying in oil stirred up many memories from my childhood.





We spent the next three days going around the islands of Batan and Sabtang. The tour organizer ingenuously engineered the tour to build up to a breathtaking climax, showing the sights in order of awesomeness, the next sigt even more amazing than the one before! Batanes offers such picturesque backdrops that both photoholics and camwhores will be be swooning with sensory overload.







Batanes isn't the cheapest local tourist destination in the Philippines. In fact, it may be one of the most expensive, and this explains why he have not run into the usual lot of fellow holiday-takers during the whole time we were there. However, the +20k or so that I spent was very much worth it - seeing the famed stone houses of Sabtang Island for the first time and feeling the coarse, unfinished walls made of coral and limestone, taking in the vista of 'mountains tumbling into the sea' as many a song romanticize, realizing that the Philippines is such a beautiful country, a sudden burst of national pride stirring inside you not matter how undeserved you may think it is, and of course, being gently wakened by the sound of waves quietly making their way to the shore in the early light of morning.