I watched the MassKara Festival street dancers for the first time and understood. I learned something about Negros Island that the history books had been circling around. The dancers were not performing happiness. They were insisting on it. The masks, hundreds of them, painted gold and white with fixed smiles, were not decoration. They were […]
The first time I dived in Cebu, I was already in the water. The boat captain had said sardines, and I pictured a school. What I dropped into at Moalboal was not a school. It was a city. Millions of them, moving in formation thirty meters below the surface, compressing and expanding in shapes that
The first thing you see when the plane descends toward Hobart, Tasmania, is the mountain. Not the harbor, not the colonial streetscape, not the waterfront that every travel summary leads with. Mount Wellington. It sits above the city at 1,271 meters, and from the air it looks as if it has not yet decided whether
Hobart, Tasmania: What the Island Capital Keeps Revealing Long After You Leave Read More »
In the late 1970s, I walked through Camp John Hay not as a tourist. I was U.S. military, there on rest and recreation leave, and the facility had been built specifically for people like me. Pine trees, organized pathways, and a golf course that looked completely out of place in the middle of the Philippines.
Baguio City: What the Summer Capital of the Philippines Keeps Hidden in Plain Sight Read More »
The noise hits you before you see anything. The Sinulog Festival of Cebu fills the streets of Cebu City with an estimated two million people on the third Sunday of January, and their collective voice produces a sound you feel in your sternum before you locate its source. The chant is “Pit Señor,” a Cebuano
The Sinulog Festival of Cebu: The Dance, the Devotion, and the Lechon Read More »
The first view of the Banaue Rice Terraces from the main viewpoint does something unexpected. It makes the scale incomprehensible. You know they are large. You read that they cover more than 10,000 square kilometers in Ifugao Province. Those numbers do not prepare you for the moment you stand at the viewpoint railing and try
The Banaue Rice Terraces: What Two Thousand Years Actually Looks Like Read More »
Vigan City survived the Second World War for a reason that is easy to overlook when you are standing on Calle Crisologo taking photographs. General Yamashita withdrew his forces from the city without fighting for it. His decision, whether strategic or otherwise, meant that no firebombing, no artillery, no urban combat carved through the colonial
Vigan City: The Colonial Streets, the Burnay Pottery, and the Food That Survived Read More »
The first thing the Chocolate Hills Bohol delivers is a problem of scale. You stand at the top of Viewpoint One in Carmen, and the hills extend in every direction to the horizon. More than a thousand of them. All are roughly conical and the same height. All are wearing the same brown coat of
The Chocolate Hills of Bohol: The View, the Season, and the Science Read More »
The fisherman who changed my plan didn’t speak much English. He pointed south, said ‘Koh Kradan,’ and held up three fingers. Three hours by boat from Pak Meng. I had three nights booked in Koh Lanta. I canceled them. That kind of detour is how you find the hidden beaches Thailand keeps to itself. Phuket,
Hidden Beaches in Thailand That Most Travelers Never Reach Read More »
The first time I found Cagbalete Island, I wasn’t looking for it. I was on a bus outside Mauban in Quezon Province, talking to a man named Rolando who sold dried fish at the market. He mentioned, almost as an afterthought, that there was an island an hour offshore. At low tide, the sand went
Hidden Beaches in the Philippines Most Travelers Never Find Read More »
The last time I crossed from Hagnaya to Bantayan Island, the ferry was full of locals coming back from the market in San Remigio. I was the only foreigner on board. The crossing costs less than fifty pesos and takes about an hour. I spent most of it talking to a woman named Alicia who
Visayan Islands Tourism: Six Hidden Beaches in Cebu and Bohol Read More »
