Batanes!

Initially appeared on vox.com on 6/20/2010.

What's not in Batanes?  Well -

It doesn't have beaches of powder-white sand where carefully-sculpted and clantily-scad bodies strut around, begging to be seen.

It doesn't have stalls renting out banana boats, parasails, and jetskis by the hour.

There are no bars or nightclubs promising - and delivering - debauchery into the wee hours of the night.

And even if your tastes in vacations have a more historical bent - there are no ancient churches for devotees, nor age-old graveyards for explorers of the macabre.

What it does have are breathtaking views.  To call Batanes picturesque is an understatement of almost criminal proportions.  It a place where the earth, the sky, and the ocean were fused into one, populated with a smattering of people and livestock, and painted in vibrant pastel colors.

Sadly, my measly descriptive abilities don't have enough horsepower to convey the splendor that is Batanes.  You'll have to settle for pictures that we took during our four-day stay... which is not to say that our paltry photography skills do the place any justice, but it'll have to do.

(Gianina's already uploaded most of the vacation pics on Facebook.  These are panoramas that i *think* she hasn't put up there.  The longer panorama pics are stitched together using a cross-platform open-source program called Hugin.)

Day One had us touring northern Batan.  We went to the weather station -
which is apparently the highest point on Batan island and later stopped
by some "rolling hills."

On Day Two we took a 45-minute bangka ride to Sabtang island.

I stood on a cliff...

...and took pictures of the the local fauna.  Gianina (and the rest of our tour group, in fact) was nice enough to humor my sudden preoccupation with the livestock.

On Day Three we went on a tour of southern Batan.  We stopped at a "viewdeck" and i was able to get what is perhaps my favorite panorama of the whole vacation.

We then proceeded to a leisurely lunch in "Marlboro Country."

That evening we had dinner at Fundacion Pacita, where i took some snaps of this mountain at sunset.

A concept i've heard consistently is that going Batanes is like going to another country.  I've heard comparisons to New Zealand, Australia, and even Scotland; which i really wouldn't know, since i've never been to those places.  While i appreciate the sentiment (it is, after all, "the thought that counts"), i feel that it ultimately sells our country short; it is a comparison that is at best misguided, and worst a backhanded compliment.  Batanes is emphatically not the NZ/Australia/Scotland/___ [insert foreign land here] of the Philippines.

Batanes is Batanes: home of the Ivatan people and the majestic northern frontier of the Philippines; a land of stunning vistas and amazing natural beauty; a spectacular showcase of our Inang Bayan in all of her wondrous glory.