Exploring the Philippines’ last frontier
For the first 15 minutes of the boat trip, it was all sunny skies and Instagram photo-stockpiling. I was confident that a Spartan breakfast of coffee and crackers would spare me from the horrors of seasickness that secondhand stories had warned me about. Batanes had been bright and sweltering the past couple of days, and I took the delightful weather as a good omen for crossing a wide swath of the notoriously choppy Luzon Strait to get from Batanes’ Basco Port to Itbayat, the Philippines’ northernmost municipality. Besides, the falowa (motorized ferry) I had boarded, the M/B Veronica, had no seating, meaning I could lie down in case I felt queasy. “It’s all good,” I thought to myself.
But as with most ignorant assumptions, I was way off the mark. Here’s the most important tip I could give to anyone thinking of going to Itbayat by falowa: Take your anti-nausea medication beforehand. Don’t be a baby about it; just take it.
Itabayat’s Chinapoliran port where boats arriving from and departing to Basco typically dock. Image by September Grace Mahino.
Nearly an hour into the trip, I was curled up on the bottom of the boat, trying not to roll against other passengers every time the boat lurched vigorously. I had been feeling queasy for a while, especially with the mid-morning heat, but believed it wasn’t anything a piece of candy couldn’t fix. Barely a minute after I’d popped a mint into my mouth, I instinctively scrabbled my way to the boat side to hurl, and out it all came: the candy, the coffee, the pulpy mash of crackers, immediately swallowed by the white-crested waves. A nearby passenger grabbed the back of my shirt, afraid that in my preoccupation with emptying my stomach, I’d pitch forward into the water with the boat’s next drunken lurch. As soon as I slumped down to the floor, defeated by vomiting, someone handed me a plastic bag (and would continue to do so four more times for the rest of the trip) while another passenger offered to rub White Flower oil on my temples, which I gratefully accepted. “It happens even to long-time mariners,” he reassured me. Overwhelmed by puking, I could offer only a faint, close-eyed “Thank you” to the Itbayatens’ kindness.
Later on, as other passengers were getting off the boat, I made one last painful retch. Through the misery, I registered how pretty the lemon-yellow of my upchucked bile looked against the ridiculously blue water and how comforting it was to have someone rubbing my back. That turned out to be one of M/B Veronica’s crew members who took pity on me even as his other hand was busy helping another passenger walk her way to the front of the boat.
At the Paganaman fishing port, the boats are tethered along the steep incline leading to the Itbayat national road to keep them from being smashed to bits by the waves. Image by September Grace Mahino.
There are YouTube videos of passengers first setting foot on Itbayat by making a leap from a vigorously bobbing boat to a slick quay, with some getting soaked from incoming waves. At the Chinapoliran Port, a long and steep set of concrete stairs further welcomes them and their wobbly sea legs to the island, as crew members and porters briskly haul in luggage, supplies, sometimes even motorbikes and bicycles from the falowas, then loading them with Basco-bound passengers and their bags. There’s a system to the flurry of activities, and while everyone is amiable with each other—probably happy to be on dry land again—the crew members and Coast Guards sharply observe the maintenance of safety and order.
Chinapoliran is less than a minute’s ride away from Mayan, the nearest barangay. Here, the town square lawn is where kids play sports (softball for girls, basketball for guys) and the public school holds its intramurals. Facing the square are the Santa Maria de Mayan Church, whose construction began in 1845 and was finished 40 years later, and the town hall, where all visitors must drop by first to pay the tourist fee before proceeding to anywhere else in the island.
The view from Mauyen Cliff. Image by September Grace Mahino.
Closer to Taiwan than to the rest of Luzon, Itbayat isn’t the country’s northernmost island. Six more, much smaller land masses—Di’nem, Mavulis, Misanga, Siayan, North, and Y’Ami—are situated further up north, but they’re uninhabited. So in terms of civilization, Itbayat is the Philippines’ last frontier.
“On clear nights, we can see Taiwan’s city lights from where we’re standing. It’s not true, though, that we can hear their roosters crowing,” local tour guide Bong De Guzman tells me as he gestures toward the country’s general direction. We are at the recently constructed viewing deck on Mt. Karoboboan, the island’s highest point that rises 280 meters above sea level. From where we stand, the whole of Itbayat looks like an uninhabited island, all undulating terrain covered in various shades of green. Though the sunset is muted by low-lying clouds, there is enough light to see that no sign of electricity from any of the town’s five barangays could penetrate the generous cover of trees.
The placid Kavaywan Lake. Image by September Grace Mahino.
Isolated even from Basco’s relative modernity, there’s a kind of cruel beauty to the island—cruel because it doesn’t allow you to get too close and too comfortable. One would think that after the ordeal of getting there, a visitor is entitled to enjoy what they came for, but depending on the fickle weather, some of Itbayat’s natural attractions might be closed to unlucky tourists. “The rocks at Torongan Cave are still too slippery to walk on because of the heavy rains last weekend so we won’t be going there,” Bong tells me. The cave is the site believed to be the first landing place of Austronesians from Formosa in 4000 BC, the most ancient dwelling place in the whole of Batanes. It’s a pity I won’t get to see it, because based on travel blog photos, the cave provides a perspective of the sea that’s different from the view atop the island’s cliffs.
Not that those cliffs present anything less than spectacular. At Mauyen Cliff, every effort to capture the immense beauty of the vista in a photograph is futile. The varying shades of blue and green, maybe, but not the sun’s warmth, not the whipping wind, and not the cliff’s vertigo-inducing steep drop.
A cogon hut or jinjin, the indigenous form of housing, at the Yawran Village. Image by September Grace Mahino.
On bright, sunny days, the colors on the island seem extra vibrant: The sea is startlingly blue against the verdant landscape, and the clay loam is an intense reddish brown that creeps into a shoe sole’s every groove. All three intense colors can be seen together at the Kavaywan Lake, except the blue is a calm reflection of the sky. Cows and carabaos graze on the pastures surrounding the placid body of water, and an occasional local would go fishing in it. Kavaywan is quite big, though not suitable for swimming, and Bong informs me that pilots flying in to Itbayat use it as a landmark to signal the start of their descent.
A good length of the island’s national road is paved and bracketed by medium-height walls made out of bleached coral, and it leads to Itbayat’s six ports. At Paganaman Port, where fishing vessels dock, the sharply curving slope promises a lower body workout to those curious to see where it leads to. The small lagoon waiting at the bottom is worth the physical effort, however, with the pounding waves creating a whirlpool that gushes into an underground passage before getting flushed back to the sea on the other side of the port. To get closer and feel the power of the water’s rush, one has to clamber down the sharply pockmarked and cratered rock shelf that, personally, reminded me of what I imagine the moon’s surface to be.
The strange yet beautiful rock garden at Rapang Cliff. Image by Jemaica Pensigan.
A similarly unusual topography can be seen on Rapang Cliff, a natural park of forests, cliffs, and rocky hills, with a pasture where cows and goats graze and bonsai ariuz trees grow near a rock garden of hardened and bleached corals that’s almost alien in its beauty. The cliff is one of the most photographed attractions on Itbayat, but like the island itself, it requires a bit of effort to be seen. A tricycle can only take a tourist (and their guide) so far, and the rest of the way is a two-and-a-half-hour hike of moderate difficulty. Hikes start at 3 a.m. for tourists to make it to the cliff by sunrise, then return to Mayan for a quick breakfast before catching the 9 a.m. falowa back to Basco. Again, a casual overnighter can’t get too close or too comfortable.
The Itbayatens, though, are so much more hospitable than their island’s terrain. The day of my visit also happens to be the feast day of the Virgin Mary, and Bong says we could get free lunch from the barangay’s communal meal. At the gathering, a group of women holds court over the crowd and plastic tubs full of warm food. One tub contains turmeric rice wrapped in glossy kamansi leaves and another contains viand—uvud balls (the heart of the banana tree mixed with ground pork), slices of beef, and fried fish—also wrapped in kamansi. The women are handing out food to everyone gathered around them, each one making sure that every single person who drops by gets their share. Bong explains, “That’s how we celebrate fiestas here. People contribute how much they can—it doesn’t matter if it’s a hundred or 10 pesos—then everyone gets to eat.”
Coconut crabs—locally known as tatus—used to be a sought-after delicacy in Batanes but its capture has been severely restricted since it was declared a “threatened species” by the Bureau of Fisheries and Aquatic Resources. Image by September Grace Mahino.
That brings home to me how priorities this far up north are so different and much more desirable than the ones that preoccupy me back in the city. Harsh elements may have kept certain modern comforts and conveniences from coming in to the island, but it’s hard to experience FOMO when you’re expected to deal with what’s right in front of you, with the knowledge that your comfort and success are relative to how much those around you are able to support you. Itbayat is a lovely, remote island, but no one here acts like one.
A version of this story was published in the October 2016 issue of Garage Magazine. Lead image by September Grace Mahino.