Bicycle touring the Philippines: Ifugao Province

Ifugao Province — this why I wanted to come to the Philippines, and it did not disappoint! The headhunters are long gone. On the internet you can still find bicycle touring accounts of slippery, muddy roads, but those are mostly gone as well. When we did find a dirt road in the cordillera, it was usually being improved — concrete coming soon.

There were washed out and broken sections, of course, but they were usually short.

Ifugao is also known for its wood carvings, and you can see lots of them at the excellent museum in Tam-an, south of Banaue.

Perhaps it’s more fun to see them in the field:

My favorite carvings were the wooden scooters, used in an annual 5km downhill race ending in Banaue.

In these steep mountains we often saw cable systems to move goods up and down the slopes where there are no roads (common in Turkey’s Black Sea mountains as well). These could be powered by a car engine:

or more commonly a motorcycle engine:

but the best system we saw had a water source at the top. The person at the top filled 4 20l containers with water. The 80kg of water pulled a 50-60kg load of goods up the slope. The folks at the bottom dumped out the water, filled the platform with another load (and tied on the 4 empty 20l containers), and the process repeated. Great!

The mountains of Ifugao are a working agriculture landscape. Jeff and I entered the province at about 2400m above Tinoc and continued to see vegetable terraces as we had in neighboring Benguet as well.

We noted that the roads in Ifugao were less steep. For example, we climbed 900m over 15km (6%) up to O-ong compared to 1100m over 8.5km (13%) through Ballay a couple days earlier.

The vegetables, however, were sometimes planted on such steep slopes that I wondered how they didn’t just wash away in the first rain storm.

Ok, enough of the preamble. For me Ifugao was really all about the rice terraces. I’ll illustrate with photos.

UNESCO-listed Nagacadan:

Namulditan:

Amganad:

Banaue:

Guihob:

UNESCO-listed Batad:

Bangaan, UNESCO again:

Ducligan:

Adoyungan:

Mayoyao, the fourth and last (there are five) UNESCO Ifugao rice terrace cluster than I visited:

Aquinaldo:

The beautiful terraces filled the river valley on the long descent from Jacmal via Awayan to Mongayang, all the way down to 300m, the lowest I had been since leaving the flats two weeks earlier.

This area felt remote, and people started asking me if I was sure the road really went through to Mountain Province. “Isn’t it closed?” a woman asked.