Full Circle
Day 89: Manila to Banaue

A group of Ifugao tribespeople, descendants of those responsible for the feat of agricultural engineering that we can't actually see, clearly think we're mad to be up here on a day like this, but drift towards us anyway and begin what is obviously their tourist routine. A thin, stick-legged old man in an embroidered red tunic, holding a spear and smoking a pipe, and a lady in a feather head-dress, wait to be photographed in front of the cloud. Somewhere a flute starts playing. A shopkeeper pulls the covers off rows of carved wooden bowls, statues of the Virgin Mary, animals and rosaries. Then, for a brief and tantalizing moment, the mist breaks to reveal a breathtaking amphitheatre of tiered embankments. Fields cultivated since the time of the Romans rise a thousand feet up the mountainside supported by a system of walls and terraces which channel rainwater through a series of thirty or forty controlled falls before allowing it to join the churning caramel coloured flow of the river far below. Nigel barely has time to press the camera button before the great white wave obscures the Eighth, and Most Elusive, Wonder of the World once again.
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PALIN'S GUIDES
- Series: Full Circle
- Day: 89
- Country/sea: Philippines
- Place: Banaue rice terraces
- Book page no: 132
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