Banaue

It was a long 8 hour van drive to the town Banaue.  I was still bun burned and tired from the island and this is when my feet really started to swell and I started getting sick.  We made it though with no issues.

Banaue was up very high and was pretty different than the other parts of the Philippines I'd seen so far.  Almost everywhere we looked was a great view and they even had pine trees.

The main reason we came up here was to see the famous rice terraces.  They are 2,000 year old rice fields cut into the mountains.  For more info here is the wiki link.  We hiked down for a closer look.

The hike wasn't bad, but I did have to go to the bathroom.  At the bottom they had a bathroom I could pay to use but it was one of the worse ones I'd seen and my real concern was that it only had a curtain and there were lots of people outside it.

One interesting thing about it was that all these people had to make this 1ish mile hike to and from their houses every time they wanted to leave the small village.  Cars couldn't drive down.  We saw people carrying eggs and food down to their houses a couple of times.  They had an elementary school at the bottom but that was it.  Older kids had to walk up and they pay for a ride to school.  Because of the cost they stayed somewhere near the school during the week before coming home on weekends.

This next picture is of a different rice field and village.

Here we are walking up.

This next picture is one I took from the car.  You can see the rice a little better here.  Notice how the road goes all the way to the very edge?  It was super curvy and pretty scary.  There were parts where the road eroded away, other parts we could see the ground underneath the road had eroded away making it even more scary.  Sometimes it was best not to look.

The hotel we stayed at that night had a mini model of an old home.

This next picture was the view from our room.

One nice thing about this town is that it was quit a bit cooler.  I wasn't checking all the time but I'd guess it was in the lower 70s with some overcast and even slight sprinkling.