These elegant solutions to the agricultural problem of trying to grow rice in a steeply mountainous region are a meagre 2,000 years old. And while they are undoubtedly a wonder for a tourist, for the Ifugao people of northern Luzon they are still today their main source of sustenance.
The problem with mountainous regions hundreds of kilometres north of Manila is that they tend to be pretty inaccessible. So inaccessible that not even that many Filipinos make the journey. Even the bus station was out of the way, stuck as it was in a far-flung northern suburb of Metro Manila called Sampaloc.
I was pretty tired from my trip to Brunei so fell asleep in the taxi from my centrally located hotel out to Sampaloc, and the chaos that greeted me when the cab driver dropped me off brought me back to reality with a jolt.
I stood at the side of the road, the dumb white man with the rucksack on his back, just staring. This was culture shock.
Some kids were playing basketball in the street, stopping every 10 seconds to let traffic through, and so I concentrated on them - something relatively familiar to focus on.
I have to be honest, I was frightened.
There were no other tourists in sight, I was getting funny looks from the locals and I had no idea if the taxi driver had dropped me in the right place or not.
He could have played some evil trick on me and was sat round the corner with his mates running a sweepstake on how long it’d be before I was robbed/knifed/kidnapped/beheaded (the southern parts of The Philippines are off-limits to westerners as the locals tend to kidnap them and chop their heads off).
The fact Bes had given me a mobile phone with a GPS locator on it and made me promise to stay in touch at regular intervals did little to calm my nerves. And neither did the bus station when I found it.
I think it probably had more to do with the fact I’d just woken up and was disorientated than it was a genuinely dangerous place, but I was glad to be on the grimey old coach and on our way.
It was a 10-hour overnight journey in theory, but ended up taking a bit longer because the engine conked out at 4am in the middle of nowhere, so while we all woke up and wondered around in a daze the driver hit something with a hammer and we set off again.
As we climbed up into the mountains at dawn the next day we had to stop again as a mud-slide had blocked the road ahead.
God know’s how they did it so quickly this far away from anything up in the mountains, but within half-an-hour a Cat had been summoned and was moving logs and debris out of the way - presumably it‘s a pretty common occurrence.
I couldn’t see how the road was in any way clear, but when a tricycle went through our bus driver took this as a sign that he could too so he wheel-spun and side-slipped his way through the mud and we were on our way again. A brave bit of driving, but I was... nervous.
We eventually arrived at about 10 in the morning, knackered and swearing I was going to walk back to Manila rather than go through that again.
But in one of those nice surprises that always seems there to put a smile on your face when everything’s going to rat shit, some kind soul had printed a welcome message outside the hotel. Which was sweet!
That first morning was glorious, the sun was shining, my room had a heart-stopping view over the landscape below and I’d survived the journey. Happy days.
I had a quick stroll around the village and snapped a couple of pics of the terraces while the sun was shining.
And I’m glad I did, because for the next two days it pissed with rain and was permanently cloudy. The view from my room the next morning wasn’t quite so spectacular.
There was one window the next afternoon when the clouds lifted above the level of the village and I could see the terraces. I hopped into a tricycle,
And my driver Lukas drove me up through the village to the best vantage points.
They may be blessed with a beautiful landscape, but the indigenous people are certainly not blessed with wealth, despite the tourists who do make it up here. Banaue is pure corrugated iron, chickens scratching in the dirt, hand-to-mouth poverty.
A few of the locals had dressed up to get a few pisos from the gringos so I was in no mood to haggle to take their picture and handed them a fistful of pisos.
When I’d stopped thanking somebody, somewhere that I’d been born with all the advantages I have been I was able to take in the terraces fully for the first time. And they were breathtaking.
When the clouds began to descend again, closing the all-to-brief window I’d been granted to see this wondrous place, they just added an extra element to the terraces’ mystery.
The journey back to Manila was predictably hellish, but I just closed my eyes and pictured those lush ancient paddies. The locals call them steps to heaven. And for good reason.
