kat3samsin

Everyone who’s lived in Manila has a jeepney route that feels personal. Mine is a short loop that runs through the residential stretches of Pasay, past two schools and a wet market, and terminates at an unmarked lot behind a carinderia. It is, in my opinion, the best 23-minute ride in the city. The route has one driver: Tito Melchor. He is 71. He inherited the route — and, he is careful to…

Taytay, on Palawan’s northeast coast, was the colonial capital of the province from the Spanish era until 1903 — Fort Santa Isabel, built in 1667, still stands in the town proper. Most travelers pass through Taytay on the way to El Nido without stopping. This is a mistake. There are small fishing communities here, the reefs are less trafficked, and the pace is closer to what the rest of northern…

Calbiga, in Samar, is the gateway to Langun-Gobingob — the largest cave system in the Philippines and the second-largest in Asia — and has one of the smallest tourist footprints I’ve encountered. Getting there is a mild production, and the locals, I think, prefer it this way. I stayed at Calbiga Tita Flor’s, a two-room homestay in the town proper run by a woman who used to teach elementary school…

Baguio in the rainy season is the correct Baguio. The crowds thin, the pines smell like pines again, and the strawberry farms of La Trinidad — the valley just below Baguio, the provincial capital of Benguet — are muddy and, because of the mud, mostly empty. This is when you should go pick strawberries. La Trinidad is one of the few places in the Philippines cool enough for strawberries to thrive,…

Taal Heritage Town in Batangas is the kind of place where every other house is older than your grandmother and the streets are paved in the specific uneven way that ruins luggage wheels. I love it here. I am not sorry about the luggage wheels. The Basilica of Saint Martin de Tours is famously one of the largest Catholic churches in Asia, rebuilt in 1858 after the 1754 eruption of Taal Volcano…

I’m not going to tell you to skip the Chocolate Hills. Everyone should see them once, preferably in late afternoon when the shadows stretch. But once is enough. For the second day in Bohol, the move is Loboc River — specifically, the evening cruise and the slow stretch downstream afterward. Yes, Lola Connie is here too. She appeared in the Ivana, Batanes post. She also has a small operation here.…

Everyone who goes to Buscalan goes for Apo Whang-Od, the mambabatok who has become, in her hundreds (age debated, but she is ancient by any count), one of the most documented tattoo artists in the world. I’m not going to write about her here; that’s been done, and done better than I can. I want to write about the walk in, and about Ginalyn’s Cold Shop. The walk to Buscalan is two kilometers of…

Camiguin is a small island off the northern coast of Mindanao with seven volcanoes, which means, depending on how you count, it has either too many or exactly enough. You can, in a single day, hike up Mt. Vulcan Daan — the “Old Volcano” that erupted in 1871 and buried the town of Catarman, whose sunken cemetery now sits offshore — and be swimming in the ocean by 11am. I’ve done it twice. The…

Ilocos Norte is empanada country, and Batac is its capital. The empanadas here have a distinctive orange crust — colored with achuete, the annatto seed that also dyes Filipino kare-kare — and they’re filled with longganisa, grated green papaya, and a raw egg that cooks as it fries. They are, in my opinion, the best fried thing in the country. I am prepared to fight strangers about this. There’s a…

Dumaguete, the “City of Gentle People” on Negros Oriental’s eastern coast, has a boulevard along Rizal Avenue that’s one of the underrated pleasures of the Visayas. Every evening at sunset, it turns into a tambay city — people sitting, watching the water, not doing much, which is a Filipino art form and an underrated tourism activity. The trick is to find the right bench. The right bench is three…

Bantayan Island is mobbed during Holy Week and dead quiet for two full weeks afterward. This is the correct window to go. I arrived on a Tuesday three days after Easter. The ferry was almost empty. The resort-rowed stretch of Santa Fe beach looked like a party after the party — a single flip-flop in the sand, a forgotten paper lantern caught in a tree, the smell of old bonfire. On the main road,…

Holy Week in Marinduque is the Moriones festival — men in Roman-soldier costumes parading through towns, pageantry, theatrical reenactments of the blinded centurion Longinus. Every guide will tell you to go. Go one week earlier instead. I stayed with Tita Mely’s Homestay in Boac — two rooms, a garden with a half-broken swing, and a dog named Puti who will sit on your foot if you sit still long…

Puraran Beach, on the east coast of Catanduanes, has a reef break that surfers call the Majestics. During typhoon season — August through October — the waves get serious. During the rest of the year, the beach is mostly yours. I was there in February. The swell was small and perfect, which is to say nobody was there but me, a black dog named Teddy who belonged to nobody and everybody, and the…

Romblon calls itself the marble capital, and it isn’t wrong. What nobody tells you is that most of the actual carving happens in Alcantara, up in the hills, in one-room workshops that look, from the road, like ordinary bungalows with too much white dust on the window screens. The workshop to go to is Pusod ng Bato — “Stone’s Center” — run by Nanay Tere and her two sons. Nanay Tere is 67. She…

Kayangan Lake is the famous one. Twin Lagoon is the famous second one. Lake Cabugao is not on any of the boat tour maps, and the locals I asked about it had two responses: either they pretended not to know the name, or they leaned in and told me to talk to Kuya Boy. Kuya Boy is 61. He runs a paraw — a small outrigger — that can seat four people if nobody has opinions about personal space. He is…

Most guesthouses in Sagada point their windows toward the rice terraces because that’s what you came to see. Echo Trail Guesthouse does not. Its single window faces a limestone wall about six feet away, and you can reach out from the bed and touch the rock. This is the point. The owner, Ate Gina, is 52 and a retired high school geography teacher. She built the guesthouse in 2020 during the…

Batanes has two seasons: the season they tell tourists about, and the other one. The other one is better. I went in late January, which locals call the kalimaw weeks — the wind turns and the sky gets a particular kind of gray that isn’t moody so much as useful. It’s the gray that makes the stone houses of Ivana look like they’re holding something back. I can’t explain it better than that. The…