Rice terraces

Fast forward: Flight to Manila, where we kill another gritty day waiting for our overnight bus to the north of the island. Bus trip highlights of which include subzero air conditioning, and a middle-of-the-night pee-and-snack break at the apparently all-night balut stand.

A couple of forms of transportation later we are in idyllic Sagada, where we decide to stay in a former monastery, now an inn with running water and a toilet with a seat. It's about five degrees cooler, has a ban on tricycles and a 9 pm curfew for jeepneys, and is generally more conducive to not having the will to live ground out of us than the previous 24 hours have been. We love it.

A couple of boys who look about ten follow us around for a bit and then end up leading us to:

• some coffins hanging from a high cliff
• a local waterfall and swimming hole, where other locals eventually produce a whole unplucked chicken which they roast over a fire
• a hut of a couple of weavers and their children, with whom we snack and gesture after buying some impressive products

Eventually we agree that we must move on, though we could easily have stayed a few more nights.

In the transport hub of Bontoc, we stop at a museum featuring human jaw bone ornaments, a basket for carrying head-hunting bounty, a photo of a man playing a nose flute, and a re-created Ifugao thatch village. Lunch at a place that I wrongly suspected would give us gastrointestinal distress, and then on to our next attraction: rice terraces. Our next few days feature:

• Banaue: 2,000 years old, mud walls
• Banga-an: Descending into this valley, wending our way through the rice terraces completely surrounding this (hamlet? what's the word for a collection of about a dozen thatch huts?)
• Batad: Amphitheatre-like rice terraces reached through a surreal rainforest/jungle hike of prehistoric-looking tree ferns and blue centipedes

The rice terraces are intellectually awe-inspiring and experientially mandala-like. The people here are extra-friendly. The countryside is extra-beautiful. The air is extra-less-hot. We could stay here forever. But the butanding beckon, and after a few days we clamber onto the bus for Manila again.