Down a path and through a gate, you travel through time. 

Puerta Real, Royal Gate, was built by the Spanish in 1636 for the Governor-General’s formal occasions and processions and stood until the British invasion in 1762. Rebuilt in a different location in 1780, the 1780 Puerta Real gate stood until the Battle of Manila devastated Intramuros and the rest of the city.

Today, my daughter, Hannah, and I are here for the Malasimbo music festival. 

It’s a heady affair where a flock of beautiful, wealthy, hip, and/or reggae-pilled, convene for the last time before the show moves to exclusive, private Balesin Island next year, when the ticket prices double and the access cost becomes eye-wateringly high. 

An odd fate for a musical genre described by Britannica as focused on “freedom, social justice, peace, and love. Born in Jamaica in the late 1960s, the genre acts as a voice for the oppressed, advocating for equal rights and resistance against systemic inequality, poverty, and colonialism.”

Somehow, the relentless forces of inequality conspire to take resistance music for the oppressed and offer it to the very wealthy. But the economics of a reggae festival in the Philippines probably consign the affair to the rich and their taste-makers. 

In the Moment, though, we’ve passed through a gate that no longer guards into a garden of great music and beautiful people beatitudenous and dancing. I’m with my daughter on the eve of her 19th birthday.

The post came up on Facebook the way these things do — algorithm catching some signal I'd given off about the neighborhood, surfacing Skarlet's announcement. Skarlet Brown, Jazz Night, Hooga. Bobbet Bernadas on keyboard. I booked early because she fills rooms. Work pulled me out before the set ended.

Hooga sits near Jupiter and Saturn, technically outside Pobla. I claim it for Poblacion anyway, along with another favorite, Cache (the Makati branch). It holds maybe forty people, serves drinks and food. There's a brisk movement of their charcuterie plate. The listening room style and Danish reference are more than matched by the low-key friendliness of its owner.

Manila's Music Force

Myra has been performing as Skarlet Brown since well before Poblacion was known for much besides girlie bars and knock-off Viagra.

Put3ska broke through in 1994 with "Manila Girl," a song with a brisk ska beat that wrote the city back to itself. The band won Best Live Act and Best New Artist at the NU Rock Awards in 1995. She was named Vocalist of the Year by NU 107 in 1997. "Manila Girl" outlasted all of it. Posted to YouTube nine years ago, the song has 392,000 views and is still in rotation thirty years later.

I got to know Skarlet several years ago when she played a Thursday night gig at Ortigas' Metrowalk with an amazing band that featured Aya Yuson on guitar. Her rendition of Billy Strayhorn's "Take the A Train" made me a regular fixture. Later we would collaborate on an ill-fated recruiting stunt for my BPO with great bands (Urbandub, Radioactive Sago Project), which she hosted.

"Get to This, Get to That"

Watching her tonight, I reflect on how Skarlet is to Manila's music scene what Poblacion is to Manila itself — both refuse to be a single thing.

Poblacion was a residential barangay before it was a nightlife district, was a nightlife district before it was a food destination, is a food destination now while becoming something else.

Skarlet was ska before she was jazz, was jazz before she was a Nick Joaquin poetry laureate (twice — 2024 and 2025), and now she’s belting tunes on a small stage on Jupiter Street.

The Heart of Music NGO she co-founded in 1998 has been running healthcare for low-earning musicians for twenty-eight years. Live performance in Manila cancer wards.

In a less altruistic, yet very communal way, Pobla embodies its own dynamism. New venues keep testing the edge to the stars: Jupiter and Comet, and Mars. New eateries, nightclubs, rooftop venues, boutique hotels, backpacker hostels, live music all pile into Poblacion weekly.

The Queen of Ska plays Jupiter Street.

I'm on the bus tonight. Nine hours, Manila to Banaue, the last stretch a mountain climb the driver takes winding up dark, twisty, turny roads. Somewhere in the dark between Nueva Ecija and the Cordillera I've been thinking about Spider Jerusalem at the Reservations.

What Spider Sees

The arc runs through Transmetropolitan Vol. 2: Lust for Life — Warren Ellis, Darick Robertson, 1998. Spider visits zones where people have opted out of the City's velocity entirely, choosing to live inside a preserved culture rather than the future that's consuming everything. 

What gives him pause isn't the strangeness of it. It's the seriousness. These people looked at everything on offer from the “future” and said no, and then built a wall around what they wanted to keep. Spider, who is not sentimental about anything, recognizes the weight of the decision. What unsettles him is the implied contract on the other side of the wall — if a culture is preserved with that kind of intention, the people outside are implicated. 

Timelessness in the Cordillera 

The Ifugao terraces are not a Reservation. Nobody building a wall. But I've been thinking about Spider's problem anyway, because what I'm heading toward has a similar contour.

The terraces above Banaue have been farmed continuously since the seventeenth century. The Ifugao cut them into the Cordillera during the period of Spanish colonial expansion from the lowlands — not as monuments, not as landscape architecture, but as food security, a way to feed a community that had pushed itself higher into the mountains to stay out of reach. 

The engineering involved is not simple. The Ifugao developed an entire ecosystem — irrigation systems sourced from mountaintop forests, sacred woodlots called muyong, and village-centered communal labor. The water moving through those channels tonight has been moving through them for four hundred years.

What grows in them is tinawon — an heirloom rice variety that exists at scale nowhere else on the planet. One harvest per year. The production calendar runs from October through the June-to-August harvest, which means months of continuous labor for a yield grown almost entirely for household consumption — not a cash crop, a subsistence crop, which means the terraces produce food but not necessarily income.

Viewpoint Saints (Again)

The women at the viewpoints are part of this economy. The terraces produce food. The viewpoints produce cash. 

Their bodies attest to decades on the terraces. It is the cumulative record of the actual labor that built and maintains the thing you came to photograph. The women who work the viewpoints carry that record in their spines, and when they straighten for the camera — and they do straighten, completely, the headdress leveling, the spine lengthening, the whole apparatus of the Ifugao idea assembling itself for the duration of the shutter — they are doing something more than posing. 

In View of the Facts

The terraces visible from the main Banaue viewpoint — the ones on the twenty-peso note, the ones in every photograph — are not the UNESCO listed site. They were excluded from the 1995 inscription because modern structures compromised the integrity criterion. The actual UNESCO clusters are at Batad, Bangaan, elsewhere. What you're looking at from the viewpoint road is a National Cultural Treasure.

This is the Reservation logic arriving through paperwork rather than walls. The designation performs the preservation. The viewpoint economy services the designation. The women with the headdresses serve this exchange.

In the truth of Transmetpolitan fiction, the City tolerates the Reservations partly because they are useful — contained, visible, a conscience the City can credit without changing anything about itself. 

Meanwhile, in the Cordillera tourists at the Banaue viewpoint perform appreciation. The heritage designation performs the preservation. The transfer — the obligation Spider identified, the attention that changes you — mostly doesn't happen. 

People leave with a photograph and a fee paid but do not understand what the water system requires, or what disappears if the young people of the Cordillera decide, reasonably, that there are easier ways to earn a living. 

The bus climbs into Ifugao in the dark. I won't see the terraces until morning, when the fog is still in the valleys and the carved hillsides shrouded, misty. The women will be at the viewpoints by then, working early because the light matters and the early bird.

Jonathan Richman has a song called "I was Dancing at the Lesbian Bar." The narrator ends up somewhere he didn't plan, and finds it's fine. Better than fine.

Here’s my Lesbian Bar analog/Bangkok story.

First: Rajadamnern

I made the booking after a friend came back from Bangkok and said the Muay Thai show was worth it. That's it. Parth and Eshita would be in Bangkok at the same time, so I thought: what could be more Thai than Muay Thai? A friend went, liked it, end of diligence.

It was a travel intersection that could produce a good story. We agreed to meet at Rajadamnern. 

I arrived from Sukhothai: took the metro to Sukhumvit, checked in, showered, and caught a motorcycle taxi at Terminal Twenty-one and hurtled across town. 

At the gate, security stopped me: the GoPro stick and mini Maglite were available upon exit. Fair enough — herding farangs into a Muay Thai arena is a pretty challenging proposition.

What I had imagined was something akin to the UFC Muay Thai channel. The Thai version with less production.

Vegas in Bangkok

Rajadamnern is a slice of Vegas. Purpose-built for the western gaze, lit accordingly. 

The ring sits inside a full LED broadcast rig. There is a jumbotron. The MC works the crowd in English, flinging t-shirts at the audience and leading something that can only be described as ocho-ocho dancing — a call-and-response chant-shimmy that the crowd, to its credit, commits to completely.

Roaming camera crews troll the stands for honkies willing to mug for the big screen. Most oblige.

The fights are real. Kicks land hard. The corner work between rounds — trainers working cuts, talking into fighters' ears, the second holding the bucket. That’s serious shit. 

Muay Thai as a fighting system developed through centuries of warfare — Thai kingdoms against the Khmer Empire, against Burma, the body as a weapon when everything else was gone. 

Rajadamnern, opened in 1945. The signage outside calls it the world's first Muay Thai stadium, which is probably true. The art form is older than the building. This place gave it a roof, a ticketing system, and eventually a merch wall.

On departure, we see the merch (also serious shit). It includes a floor-to-ceiling wall of Muay Thai shorts in every color of satin — crimson, gold, teal, silver — all bearing the Rajadamnern name and the founding year 1945. Hugely overpriced. 

The satin catches the LED light, turning the whole display into something between a cultural archive and a duty-free counter.

Then: Buddha & Pals (Lesbian Bar)

Parth and Eshita had done recon: at some point, they got a recommendation from locals: Buddha & Pals.

Boy howdy!

Buddha & Pals lives in an old shophouse. The plaster peels from the brickwork in layers. Crystal chandeliers hang from exposed ceiling beams. The bar shelves behind the counter are stacked with bottles and mismatched glassware. It’s got a distinctive New Orleans vibe. The entrance, from the street: red neon script, two chairs, a round table, nothing else.

On the window, written in chalk: Tere... Soul Mama. The Jazz Rebel.

No camera crew. No ocho-ocho. No t-shirts.

The pizza was good. The beer was cold. The music was American soul, played by Thai musicians and sung by “Tere Soul Mama/Jazz Rebel” (I want that on my business card).

There’s a whole meditation on rebellion, jazz, and so forth. Anyway, we stayed until they stopped playing.

Two stops, one night. 

Spectacle first — real fighting wrapped in Vegas production, the history of a martial art packaged. Something quieter after — a crumbling shophouse, good pizza, cold beer, music that was a balm and damned entertaining in equal measure. 

Perfect nights are rare. Perfect nights with new friends: rarer still.

Parth and I walk off the platform at Hua Lamphong with photographs done and nowhere in particular to be. We met to talk about marketing, projects, and generally chop it up. His wife, Eshita, is somewhere else.

They have a month in Bangkok, working remote out of Mumbai — Parth running his own marketing work and building out his side of the influencer thing, the kind of thing that makes you attuned to the city, every turned corner is a small reconnaissance.

We drift north and west. Not by plan. Charoen Krung pulled us toward Yaowarat the way a slope pulls water. The light went late-afternoon on the shophouse facades. 

Our last stop of the night was Glass Half Full, a small craft cocktail bar on Luean Rit Alley, just off the main Chinatown drag. A faux-hutong — a constructed pocket of shophouse atmosphere built next to the real one. 

The place is owner-run, and a large Bengal cat named Cren presides here. He’s large and sports a shirt collar and neck tie that make sense in context.

In Bangkok, even the bar cat seems dispatched from central casting.

And now a short dérive

We might call a large bar cat with a collar and tie and attractive spots a spectacle, in that spirit that obstreperous band of artists and theorists in Paris, working in the late 1950s under the name the Situationist International. 

Their main figure was Guy Debord, who distilled Marx and Heidiger to argue that modern capitalism had figured out how to replace lived experience with its own image. You don't live a life anymore; you consume a representation of life. The city is no longer a place you inhabit; it's a surface you're managed through — by advertising, by zoning, by tourism infrastructure, by the logic of consumption. Everything authentic gets absorbed, packaged, and sold back to you as a simulation of itself.

They had three tools for fighting back. 

• The dérive — drift. Stop following the city's intended routes. Let yourself be pulled by the psychogeographic currents of the place, the moods and textures different urban zones exert on your behavior. 
• Détournement — hijack. Take an existing cultural form, an advertisement or a religious image, and subvert it to mean something it wasn't supposed to mean. 
• Psychogeography — the study of how the built environment shapes feeling and motion. Different neighborhoods exert different psychological pressures. The SI wanted to map those pressures and use them on purpose.

These ideas semed pretty amusing back when I would read books like Debord’s Society of the Spectacle without irony. But upon reflection, I suppose that I am often driven to encounter cities through the dérive, and détournement remains a potent tool for design and content creation. 

The triumph of spectacle

Bangkok is a city the spectacle has substantially won. 

Siam was never colonized. Not in the 19th-century way the rest of the region was colonized. The Rattanakosin period runs unbroken from 1782 to the present — the same dynasty, the same capital, the same continuous administrative memory. 

It’s a city that has held its self-image intact for two and a half centuries has the confidence, the budget, and the institutional muscle to package itself. The Grand Palace operates as theater because it has had two centuries to learn how to operate as theater. The tuk-tuk choreography is choreography. The vintage register of Charoen Krung is consciously maintained. Yaowarat is managed neon.

The version of the spectacle the SI argued about is one where everything authentic gets absorbed and converted into a piece of well-made simulation, and the well-made simulation is good. Run by people who care. Made by hands that know what they are doing.

Glass Half Full has a cocktail on its menu called PM2.5. 

Named, presumably, after Bangkok's air quality reading — the particulate-matter index that lights up red on every weather app every dry season, indicating a public-health problem of the kind that other cities still treat as an emergency. At Glass Half Full, the air pollution is a cocktail. 

That is the spectacle in its sophisticated form. The air itself, named, mixed, garnished, priced. And Cren isn't a coincidence either. Bangkok is comprehensive and breathable. 

The city has the confidence of a place that has decided what it looks like and serves you at street level with two hundred years of institutional skill behind the serving — and now, for those who care to engage at the next tier, with a cocktail program that has absorbed even the bad parts of the city back into its menu.

There are cracks. The canal tributaries on the Thonburi side, the boats don’t work them anymore, and Bangkok management hasn't reached them. Bang Rak has back lanes where the spectacle thins. The dérive is still possible.

Meanwhile, back in Manila

And then there's El Gato.

El Gato. The Virgin of Guadalupe form — the mandorla, the rays, the downward gaze — hijacked. Standing on a leopard skull. Painted feral in (very fetching) tequila bar in Makati Cinema Square (since they closed the cinema it’s called Makati Central Square).

El Gato is one of a trio of bars including the Fat Cat, a whiskey bar cum speakeasy that offers a respectable selection of handsomely priced bourbon, jazz on the turntable, and a literal Fat Cat.

That was always the axis: Same animal. Two completely different relationships between a city and its own image.

History = tragedy 

In February 1945, the United States Army and the Japanese Imperial garrison fought through Manila for a month, building by building, and what was left at the end was a city more thoroughly destroyed than anywhere in Allied territory except Warsaw. 

The Japanese expecting certain death and with a deep cultural prohibition on surrender, brutally murdered the civilian population. No one really knows why Yamashita didn’t declare Manila and open city. 

Conversely, the U.S. Army’s logic was something along the lines of needing to destroy the city to save it. Expertly covered in, James Scott’s book, Rampage: MacArthur, Yamashita, and the Battle of Manila. He notes that the battle took 1,000 American and 16,000 Japanese combatants, at least 100,000 unarmed Filipino civilians were killed. 1 in 10 Manilans died during the battle. 

Intramuros — the walled colonial core, the institutional and architectural memory of three and a half centuries of Spanish rule — was effectively erased. Churches, archives, university libraries, the residential fabric of the old city, all of it went in the artillery duels and the house-to-house fighting. Manila was rebuilt with no money, no plan, and no time to mourn before the next political crisis arrived. 

Today, the city perseveres 

Marcos, the EDSA revolutions, the OFW economy, the rise of BGC out of a former military base, the layering of one developer's vision on top of another developer's vision. 

Manila runs on competing nighborhood logics. Poblacion bleeds into Rockwell. Binondo runs on rules nobody wrote down — the oldest Chinatown in the world, four and a half centuries of commercial muscle memory, no signage, no map. Quiapo is its own republic. The BGC towers appear behind a fance at the end of a barangay lane. Isaw smoke reflected by glass facade.

Manila's air is also bad. Manila’s air does not have a cocktail named after it. Bad air remains bad air. It hangs over the jeepneys and the construction dust and the burning trash on the side of the C-5.

The dérive in Manila is one way to navigate a city that no consensual self-awareness. There is no managed surface to drift against, because there is no managed surface. 

Manila & Bangkok

Each city teaches a different kind of attention.

Bangkok teaches you to notice the seams in a managed surface — the places where the curation slips, where the institutional grip gets tired, where the older city shows through the frame. 

Manila teaches you to find pattern in incoherence. That's a different skill, and a harder one. 

Bangkok rewards patience and a good walking pace. Manila rewards a tolerance for not knowing the rules and a willingness to be wrong.

The Bangkok-to-Chiang Mai overnight train runs on schedule.

I’m behind, as usual — three hours into the journey before I realize that Phitsanuloke stop is Thailand provincial and my arrival is too late for the last bus north west to Sukhothai. Some deft Facebook messenger action remedies the pick-up (shout out to the good people of Thai Thai Sukhothai Resort). 

The Conductor

The Conductor knows this. He knows things.

His uniform is Thai Railways issue. The cloth is starched and threadbare at the collar and the cuffs, worn from washing and ironing. The crease in the trousers is a straight line from hip to shoe. The name badge sits level. The cap sits level, gold-band announcing his rank.

Time

At the appointed hour he walks the length of the car and drops the upper berths. The upper bunk folds down, the mattress follows, the linen appears from an invisible Conductor compartment. Pillow. Blanket. Privacy curtain pulled closed.

At the appointed stop, he notifies me that Phitsanuloke is close and I gather stuff, happy that the ride is over. At this point I’ve been on the road for 18 hours since Manila. I have a while to chill in the vestibule, but it’s good to stand and I’m ready for the last leg of the journey.

Signifier

The Conductor shepherds the other passengers out to the vestibule where he prepares to jump off and direct the new crop onboard. He organizes the list of departures and arrivals on his clipboard ledger, carefully noting which berths will change hands using a fountain pen.

Jody, our man in Banaue, did something he'd never done before. He quoted me a fuel surcharge.

The tricycle ride from the junction to Batad runs along an unsealed road that the locals call "the dancing road" for reasons your spine will understand within the first kilometer. Today, Jody walked me through the math — diesel cost, distance, the return trip. He explained the numbers had changed and he wanted me to know why.

How a Fuel Crisis Reaches Banaue

The numbers have changed everywhere in the Philippines, but the Cordillera feels it differently. 

Banaue sits at the end of a long supply chain that runs over mountains on two-lane roads. Everything arrives by truck — fuel, food, building materials, the goods that stock the small shops along the main road. There is no rail. There is no shortcut. There is only diesel and distance.

Philippine diesel hit ₱119 per liter in late March, more than double what it cost eight weeks earlier. The spike traces back to the Middle East conflict and the disruption of shipping through the Strait of Hormuz, where roughly a fifth of the world's oil supply passes. The Philippines imports nearly all of its petroleum. When the Strait tightens, pump prices here don't adjust — they lurch.

In the Cordillera, it hits harder. 

Seventy-nine gas stations across the region have closed. Twelve of those are in Ifugao province, where Banaue sits. Stations still operating have imposed purchase limits — twenty liters per transaction — which sounds manageable until you're the driver hauling vegetables down to the valley or the guide running tourists to Batad and back. 

The president declared a national energy emergency in late March. On the ground in Banaue, the emergency looks like a gas station with a handwritten sign and a locked pump.

The Imbayah Festival Banaue Won't Have This Year

The Imbayah Festival was supposed to happen this April. It would have been significant — the municipality had returned the festival to its original three-year cycle, and 2026 was the year. Executive Order 2026-028 suspended it. The language cited energy conservation and responsible governance.

The Imbayah is not a tourism promotion with tribal dances bolted on. 

The word comes from bayah — rice wine — and the ceremony marks the elevation of a family to kadangyan, the Ifugao nobility. It was formalized as a public festival in 1979 by Mayor Adriano Apilis Jr., who saw Ifugao traditions being overshadowed by modernization and booming tourism. The whole point was continuity. Banaue is not the only casualty. Mountain Province cancelled its Lang-ay Festival under the same directive. 

Across the Cordillera, culture is what gets suspended when the fuel runs out.

What Diesel Can't Touch

The terraces don't need diesel. They were engineered — by hand, with stone — long before internal combustion. Water still flows through the same channels. Rice still grows in the same mud. The system that built and maintains these mountains is, by design, self-sustaining.

But everything around the terraces runs on fuel. 

The tourism economy that gives Jody his livelihood. The transport network that connects twenty thousand people to the lowlands. The festivals that keep a younger generation tethered to traditions they might otherwise leave behind. A place built for permanence now depends on a supply chain that starts at the Strait of Hormuz and ends at a locked pump on a mountain road.

Jody just did the math out loud and let me decide if the ride was worth it.

Once you cross the river into the Island City, you realize that Bangkok is obsessed with the new, Ayutthaya is defined by a local mistrust of change.

Here, the city refusals to let the modern world overshadow the ancestors: building codes that forbid any structure from rising higher than the main chedi at Wat Yai Chai Mongkhon.

This place moves with the river and the heat.

The Architecture of Legitimacy

Ayutthaya’s history is written in its masonry. After founding the city in 1351, King Ramathibodi I (U-Thong) established a style of conquest.

He marched on Angkor and brought back thousands of Khmer war captives—skilled artisans and builders who recreated the Prang (sanctuary towers) in the Siamese heartland. These weren't just buildings; they were structural echoes of the Khmer Empire, built specifically to validate the King's spiritual authority.

By the 15th century, the aesthetic shifted toward the bell-shaped Chedi, a Sri Lankan influence that mirrored the kingdom’s deepening connection to Theravada Buddhism.

These ruins have survived four centuries of monsoon floods and the catastrophic Burmese invasion of 1767 because of a sophisticated foundation: organic mortar mixes of lime, sand, and sticky rice that allowed the bricks to breathe rather than crack.

Field Notes

• Logistics:
  Railway of Thailand offers 3 tiers.
  • 3rd Class: 15–30 THB. No A/C, just the breeze of the Central Plains and the smell of the engine. These are often unreserved, so you just show up and grab a wooden bench.
  • 2nd Class: 65–345 THB. You can choose between fan-cooled or air-conditioned, and seating or sleeper berths.
  • 1st Class: Expect to pay 600–1,200 THB for a private A/C cabin. Available on the long-distance express trains that stop at Ayutthaya.
  • You can book your seats here for Express and Rapid classes. 3rd class on most trains is usually a station-buy only—just walk up to the counter and ask for the next train north.
• Base:
  Stay at Baan Tye Wang Hotel. It’s a boutique riverside sanctuary on a quiet canal where you can watch monitor lizards glide past. They offer complimentary bicycles.
• Move:
  Most people bike. As usual, I prefer to walk, although it's a hike from Baan Tye Wang to most of the ruins.
• Icons:
  Don't miss the Buddha head at Wat Maha That, slowly being claimed by banyan roots—a living archive of the city’s fall.

I used to walk past them.

The Ifugao women at Banaue viewpoints — traditional dress, feathered headdresses, beads layered deep — sitting on stone walls overlooking the terraces. They pose for tourist photos. A hundred pesos, two hundred. Your phone, their patience. Click, salamat, next.

I used to think this was the part of travel I didn't like. The performance. The transaction dressed up as culture. So I'd aim my camera at the terraces instead.

This trip, I got to a viewpoint at six in the morning. Two women were already there. Not posing. Arriving. Walking bent over uphill in the cool air, adjusting their wraps, settling onto the rocks like they were punching a clock. Which they were.

The brochure version says the terraces are 2,000 years old. The archaeological version is more interesting. 

Radiocarbon dating and botanical analysis from UCLA's Ifugao Archaeological Project place the shift to wet-rice terracing around the 1600s — roughly when the Spanish were pushing into the northern Philippines. The Ifugao didn't retreat into the mountains to hide. They consolidated. They converted to wet-rice agriculture as an economic and political strategy, building the infrastructure that would let them resist colonization for over two hundred years while the rest of the archipelago was Hispanized. The terraces aren't monuments to a static past. They're resistance infrastructure, built by people who saw what was coming and engineered their way out of it.

The women of the viewpoints are the descendants of that shift. They spent decades working those terraces — you can see it in how they move, the careful way they lower themselves onto the ledge.

Younger Ifugao leave for the cities because subsistence farming doesn't generate income. Some terraces get converted to other cash crops, some are abandoned altogether. The system that held for centuries is thinning out. So the women who maintained the thing tourists come to photograph found a way to be part of the photograph. So the women who maintained the thing tourists come to photograph are part of the picture.

A hundred pesos is about $1.75 USD. The women show up before dawn. They sit for hours. They smile, adjust a headdress, lean in with a stranger, do it again. It's work — repetitive, physical, performed by women in their seventies and eighties who could reasonably be done working but aren't, because the economics of rural Ifugao don't offer that option.

This is social security where formal social security doesn't exist. You put on the clothes your grandmother wore. You sit where the view is best. You offer your presence to people who traveled nine hours on a night bus to see what your family spent generations maintaining. 

I got my photo. I paid more than I needed to. Not out of guilt — out of recognition that the transaction was fair.

Four hundred years ago, their ancestors looked at a colonial army and built their way out. Now these women look at an economy that's moved on without them and do the same thing.

The alang sits apart from the sleeping house, elevated. The walls are old wood, darkened by decades of smoke and weather. The thatch overhead is dense enough to keep out the sideways rain that comes through the Cordillera. Inside, in the cool dark that smells of earth and dried grain, the rice waits.

And at the threshold, the Bulul.

Seated. Legs extended forward, hands resting on knees — frozen, attentive. The carved face is worn where generations of hands have pressed offerings against it: rice wine, blood, the small and large urgencies of generations.

The Ifugao make these vessels under ritual conditions and at personal spiritual risk. The deity Bulul inhabits the wood, dwelling in the family granary. It accepts the blood offering at consecration. In return, it watches: stored grain, seed stock carried over from last season, the space between a good harvest and a bad one.

It is the easiest object in Ifugao material culture to photograph and the hardest one to understand.

The Double Name

The Metropolitan Museum of Art's catalog entry notes that the Bulul is both the name of a class of ancestor spirits and the name of the carvings that serve as vessels to house them.

In most traditions, the image and the thing it represents are distinct — the icon points toward the deity, the map toward the territory. The Bulul collapses that distinction. The carving does not represent the ancestor spirit. After consecration, it is the ancestor spirit, present in wood, bound to a specific granary and a specific family.

Collectors prize old bulul for that deep, almost lacquered surface — the patina that signals age and authenticity. But the darkness is not age alone. It is the accumulated record of every offering the figure has received: pig's blood at consecration, chicken's blood at planting, grease from food offerings stacked over decades. 

Wood & Blood

The making is a problem of ritual before it is a problem of sculpture.

Ceremonies mark every stage, from the selection of the tree through the harvest of the wood, the carving of the figure, and the performance of the rites that call the ancestor spirit into the vessel.

The carver is a ritual technician operating under obligation and risk. An improperly made Bulul — carved from the wrong wood, consecrated without the correct invocations, rushed through any stage of its creation — is dangerous. The Ifugao treat the figure with care because the alternative is sickness entering the household through the granary door.

Bulul are traditionally carved from narra, the hardwood associated in Ifugao cosmology with health, happiness, and prosperity. Once the carving is complete, it is consecrated through a ritual that involves reciting the myth of Humidhid, the deity who made the first bulul. The figure is then bathed in the blood of sacrificial pigs.

Blood is the medium of the transaction. During tunod, the rice-planting season, the Bulul is touched by hands dipped in the blood of a chicken or pig. Over time, the blood darkens the wood. Grease from food offerings layers onto the blood. The surface compounds.

Form

Male and female bulul are often made as pairs, with sex-referenced objects — the mortar for the female, the pestle for the male — included in the composition. 

Posture carries its own grammar. Standing Bulul guard the granary and the rice storage. Seated or squatting Bulul are oriented toward good harvests and healing. 

Standing forms are associated with the northern part of Ifugao; seated forms with the southern part, Kiangan and its surrounds. A Bulul is not a single object with a fixed appearance but a family of related forms. 

The face is almost always reduced to essentials. Eyes indicated by slits or low relief. Mouth closed or barely open. The expression, where one can be read at all, is attentive in the way that a person waiting is attentive.

Individuating a bulul would miss the point — the figure is a vessel for a class of spirit, not a specific ancestor's likeness.

Context

The cosmology behind the Bulul involves not one deity but a layered set of relationships.

Nabulul is a god who inhabits bulul figures, guarding the rice and making the harvest plentiful. Bugan is his spouse, a goddess who also inhabits bulul figures with the same function. And then there is Namtogan: a Hephaestus-like paraplegic god of good fortune whose presence made the rice harvests and the community's livestock bountiful.

Namtogan was staying with humans at Ahin when the community began neglecting the bulul. He left. His departure brought a curse: misfortune, poor harvests, sickness. The people eventually persuaded him to return. When he did, he taught them how to create bulul and how to perform the rituals the figures required. The curse lifted.

The bulul tradition is framed as a remedy for neglect. The arrangement is binary and conditional.

The figure protects the granary as long as the granary acknowledges the figure. Cease the offerings, and the agreement dissolves. The wood goes back to being wood.

The System Holds

The National Museum of the Philippines explains: before consecration, a carved figure is tag-tagu — a human shape in wood, devoid of signification. After the rituals, the blood, the invocation of Humidhid — it becomes Bulul. Something else entirely. A vessel with a tenant.

The working Bulul works within a longer system — a watershed above, a field of rice below, a calendar of planting and prohibition, a stack of relationships that the figure sits at the bottom of. It is the terminal node of a working infrastructure.

Modernity has brought pressures on that infrastructure. Young people leave the terraces. Commercial rice displaces tinawon. The muyong above the fields — the forest that feeds the system — is cleared for cabbages. Each of these is a break in the stack.

And yet in Hungduan and Kiangan, young Ifugao cultural workers are relearning the mumbaki's practice, families still seal their granaries at tungul, and the first sheaves of the harvest still come back to the threshold before anyone eats.

The bulul watches. The wood absorbs. The arrangement holds, for now.

Hapao, Hungduan, Ifugao — March 27

The road from Banaue drops into Hungduan through a series of switchbacks that suggest the mountain is reluctant to let you in. Jody had let me into 7th Heaven a few hours earlier and reviewed my hiking options in his capacity as local guide. He dispatched his cousin who calls “brother” in consanguineal fashion.

We went to Hapao.

The terraces at Hapao and Hungduan are the quieter end of the UNESCO corridor. Banaue draws the cameras; Batad draws the hikers who want to say they descended to the amphitheater. Hapao draws almost no one, which is an argument for going. The water sits still in the paddies at this hour.

The walls — stone and packed earth, built without mortar, rebuilt and rebuilt across generations — hold the terraces above the valley floor the way a hand holds something carefully but without tension.

My guide talked as we walked, the easy talk of someone on familiar ground. At some point he told me about an American.

The man had arrived in the area with maps. He spent time surveying the land above the terraces, the kind of surveying that requires equipment and patience and a reason you don't explain to everyone. He built a house. A big house, by local standards. He stayed long enough for the house to become a part of the landscape of the valley.

Then he left. Suddenly, in the way that people leave when the leaving is not the plan but the consequence. He deeded the house away — cleanly, no negotiation, no sale — and was gone.

Legend

The gold has a name and a general. General Tomoyuki Yamashita — the Tiger of Malaya, last Japanese military governor of the Philippines — commanded the defense of the islands through 1944 and into 1945 as American and Filipino forces closed in from the south and the coast. 

His forces, retreating into the mountains of northern Luzon, are said to have brought with them the accumulated loot of Japan's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere: gold bullion, silver, jewels, artifacts, the contents of banks and temples from twelve occupied nations, shipped first to Singapore and then to the Philippines when Japan still expected to hold the archipelago.

The operation had a name: Golden Lily, ordered by Emperor Hirohito's brother, Prince Chichibu. The plan was to cache the treasure in the Philippine mountains until the war was over, then recover it for reconstruction. The war did not end the way the plan assumed.

Yamashita was captured in Hungduan, Ifugao — the valley I was standing in — and surrendered formally on September 2, 1945. He was tried for war crimes and hanged in Los Baños the following year. He took whatever he knew with him.

The treasure, if it exists, was never recovered — not verifiably. Ferdinand Marcos spent decades and the resources of a dictatorship looking. 

A Filipino treasure hunter named Rogelio Roxas claimed in 1971 to have found a golden Buddha and gold bars in Baguio, and sued Marcos for stealing them; a Hawaiian court ruled in his estate's favor, but the treasure itself remained unaccounted for. 

Historians have argued the logistics make the whole enterprise improbable — by 1943, Japan had lost control of the sea lanes, and shipping that much gold into the Philippines at that stage of the war was strategically nonsensical. The National Historical Institute's Ambeth Ocampo is quoted in the Inquirer: “despite all the treasure hunters, their maps, oral testimony and sophisticated metal detectors, nobody has found a thing.”

Yamashita surrendered in Hungduan.

That is not a legend. That is a documented fact, carved into the local historical record. And it is what gives the legend its grip on this particular valley — not generalized Cordillera myth, but specific geography. The general was here. His last stand was here. If he left anything behind, it is somewhere in the terrain above these terraces.

The DENR has issued cease-and-desist orders to illegal treasure hunters in the Cordillera for decades. 

Digging destabilizes the soil foundations that hold the terrace walls. Erosion follows. The terraces, which took generations to build and which UNESCO considers irreplaceable, are more vulnerable to a man with a metal detector and a map than to almost anything else. The treasure hunters are destroying the actual treasure to look for a legendary one.

Jody would tell me the next day, back in Banaue, about the big houses. 

There are houses in the area — a few of them, scattered — that are larger than the economy of subsistence rice farming should be able to produce. Jody mentioned the houses are there, people have theories about how they got built, the theories all point in the same direction.

Wealth

The paddies at Hapao caught the morning light as we came around a ridge. The water in the upper terraces was higher than the valley below, held there by engineering that is a remarkable feat of hydrology — a gravity-fed irrigation system that has moved water from forest to field for centuries without a pump or a pipe. 

The gold may be there or it may not. The American with the maps may have found something or he may have simply been an American with maps who built a house and left when the project ended. The big houses may be evidence of discovery or evidence of other sources — remittances, savings, family land sales, the ordinary accumulation that takes place in any community over time.

The terraces are here. The walls have been rebuilt after every typhoon, every landslide, every generation that considered leaving and mostly stayed. The system still moves water from the forest above to the rice below, as it has while Yamashita's gold, if it exists, was looted from a bank in Singapore or a temple in Burma.

Whatever is under the ground, the ground still produces rice.

In late January 1968, the city of Hue ceased to exist in any meaningful sense. What replaced it for twenty-five days was a killing ground — block by block, room by room, the old imperial capital reduced to rubble and body counts. The Perfume River ran through all of it, indifferent, the way rivers are.

It is a very pleasant city now.

Huestory

Hue became the imperial capital in 1802 when Gia Long, first emperor of the Nguyen dynasty, unified Vietnam after a century of civil war and chose a city on the Perfume River as his seat. He built a Citadel modeled loosely on the Forbidden City in Beijing — a walled imperial enclosure of palaces, temples, and administrative buildings covering nearly five square kilometers. It was the political center of a unified Vietnam and, more than that, the cultural one.

The emperors who followed were not merely administrators. Minh Mang expanded the Citadel. Tu Duc wrote poetry and built a retreat complex of such refinement that it functioned as a second court.

The Nguyen line produced rulers who understood that legitimacy in Vietnam required more than military authority — it required cultural weight.

What accumulated inside those walls over a century and a half was the full register of Vietnamese high culture: nhã nhạc, the royal court music so elaborate and specific that UNESCO would eventually inscribe it as a world intangible heritage; a cuisine built around the aesthetics of the imperial table, still distinct from anything else in the country; silk, lacquerware, the conical hats that became a national symbol but originated here as court goods. Hue was where Vietnamese civilization had chosen to concentrate itself.

The French arrived in 1883 and kept the emperors in place as ceremonial figures, which is what empires do with inconvenient dynasties. The Nguyen line continued, diminished, until Bao Dai abdicated in 1945. But Hue remained what it had always been — a city that understood itself as the center of something, even after the center had been removed.

By 1968 it was a city of 140,000 people, a university town, relatively prosperous, the kind of place that had managed to hold itself slightly apart from the war grinding through the countryside around it. That distance was about to close.

And then Tet Happened

On the morning of January 31st, 1968, a National Liberation Front flag flew from the main gate of the Hue Citadel. It would stay there for twenty-five days.

The force that put it there had moved into the city in the early hours, using the Tet ceasefire as cover, coordinating with the broader offensive hitting more than a hundred South Vietnamese cities simultaneously.

In Hue, the plan went better than almost anywhere else. By dawn, the NVA and Viet Cong controlled most of the city. The MACV compound held. A few isolated positions held. Everything else was gone.

The political objective was clear: hold the imperial capital long enough to demonstrate that the war was unwinnable, that the South Vietnamese government could not protect its own cities, that the population — given the opportunity — might rise.

The population did not rise. But the flag flew, and the cadres with their lists went to work, and the executions began in the first days of the occupation. The mass graves at Gia Hoi and the salt flats and the jungle west of the city would not be found until the battle was over. When they were, the count of civilians killed ran to somewhere between 2,800 and 6,000: teachers, civil servants, priests, anyone whose name appeared on a list.

All Hell Ensues

The Marines who went into Hue were not prepared for what they found. They had been fighting a war of ambushes and tree lines and villages that burned easily. Hue did not burn easily. Hue had to be taken apart piece by piece, and the pieces kept shooting back.

What followed was some of the most brutal urban combat American forces had experienced since the Korean War — block by block, house by house, room by room, through a city that had stood for a century and a half and was now being measured in sectors and fire zones.

The Marines called in artillery. They called in air support. General Westmoreland had initially ordered restrictions on heavy fire to protect the historic structures. Those restrictions were lifted.

The Citadel walls — six kilometers of them, three feet thick, built by Gia Long's engineers to project permanence — became a military objective, pocked and cratered and eventually breached.

The ARVN forces fighting alongside the Americans took casualties that were proportionally higher and received proportionally less coverage. The battle belonged, in the American telling, to the Marines. In the Vietnamese telling it was more complicated.

By February 24th it was over. The NLF flag came down from the Citadel gate. The cost: roughly 150 American dead, 400 ARVN dead, an estimated 5,000 NVA and Viet Cong dead. And the city — what remained of it.

Hue Citadel Today

You walk into the Citadel now through the Ngo Mon gate, the same gate the NLF flag flew from for twenty-five days in 1968, and what strikes you first is the quiet. Not silence — there are tourists, vendors, schoolchildren on field trips — but a quality of stillness underneath the noise that old walled places sometimes hold. 

The restoration is partial and honest about being partial. Where the palaces stood and don't stand anymore, there is maintained ground and explanatory signage and the particular melancholy of a foundation outline. The Thai Hoa Palace survived. The Emperor's Reading Room did not.

The Citadel is a city within a city — the outer walls enclose roughly five square kilometers, and inside those walls sits a second enclosure, the Imperial City, and inside that a third, the Forbidden Purple City, where only the emperor and his household could enter. 

Three concentric rectangles of diminishing access, each one more sacred than the last. The logic is Chinese in origin, borrowed from Beijing, adapted to Vietnamese geography and Vietnamese ambition. The Perfume River runs along the southern wall. The flag tower — built in 1807, survived everything — anchors the southern approach.

What the French left alone, time wore. What time left, the battle of 1968 took.

The Forbidden Purple City took the worst of it — nearly all of its structures were destroyed during the fighting, and what you walk through now is largely open ground punctuated by gates and pavilions and the occasional surviving building that seems surprised to still be standing. The Thai Hoa Palace, the Hall of Mandarins, the Hien Lam Pavilion — these survived and have been restored somewhat.

Mornings Before the Heat Blankets Everything

The Perfume River runs through all of it still, indifferent the way rivers are, and in the early morning before the heat arrives, it is the most pleasant place in the city to be. The light is doing something specific to the water that I can't hope to describe. Women in áo dài cycle along the south bank. The city is waking up around a river that has been waking up around for two thousand years.

Hue today is what cities become when they survive something they had no business surviving.

The population has grown to roughly 350,000. The university is still there — Hue University, one of the oldest in Vietnam, producing the kind of educated, unhurried urban class that gives a city its particular quality of life. The streets in the old quarter are narrow, tree-lined, and scaled for bicycles.

Hue Food

Any account has to reckon with the food, which is not incidental to the city's identity but central to it.

The royal court cuisine that developed under the Nguyen emperors never left — it adapted, it democratized, it moved from the palace kitchens into the street stalls and family restaurants that line the alleys south of the Citadel, and what you find there is the most refined and specific regional cuisine in Vietnam, which is saying something in a country that takes food seriously everywhere.

Bún bò Huế — the spiced beef noodle soup that bears the city's name is nothing like phở. The broth is deeper, more complex, built on lemongrass and shrimp paste, with a heat that arrives late and stays.

Bánh khoái, the crispy rice flour pancakes, the rice cakes, the small dishes that arrive in sequence at a proper Hue meal — this is court cuisine filtered through five generations of people.

Hue is a university town on a river with extraordinary food and a Citadel that is still partly standing and a quality of life that the Vietnamese consistently rank among the best in the country. The tourists come for the history and stay for the meals. The locals seem quietly aware that they live somewhere worth living, which is its own form of civic pride — less loud than Hanoi's, less frantic than Saigon's, more comfortable with itself.

I'll Be Back

The dead are still dead. The walls are still standing. The food is extraordinary. This is what's left, which is more than anyone had a right to expect in February 1968, and the city seems to know it, and has chosen — quietly, without drama — to be worth the visit.

Somewhere in Tom Wolfe’s Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test he quotes Ken Kesey about “being on the bus or off it.” 

Every time I board the bus I make a quiet pact with myself to figure out a better way. There isn't one. The overnight ride to Banaue is that kind of a thing where you need to commit to several hours of discomfort. In this case, it effectively (for better or worse) selects for people who are committed to the trip.

You get on at night, you ride through the thick Filipino night in a seat not designed for lumbering, old Kano like me. You half-sleep the whole way. You can't work. You can't really read. You get your earbuds in or your headset on, find a podcast or a playlist, and drift in and out for eight hours.

The bus stops three times. You get out, pay five pesos to use a toilet, buy a water, and get a cuppa ramen or snacks from a small food court. 

You arrive at 4 or 5 in the morning. You cannot check in. So grab a guide, get to Batad early, or find the tourist office in town and get moving before the heat comes up.

Why Getting There Is the Point

Banaue is difficult to reach. There are no flights. There is no rail connection. The road from Manila is nine to ten hours, mostly overnight, and the last stretch is a steep, twisty-turny mountain climb.

The easier option is Sagada — better infrastructure, more accommodation at the mid-range, popular with Manila weekenders. Banaue draws a different crowd: European long-haulers, serious trekkers, the occasional researcher.

This guide covers the two ways to make the trip from Manila — Ohayami or Codas bus and private hire (usually a Toyota Hiace).

Your Options

Three ways to get from Manila to Banaue. The differences come down to cost, comfort, and how much control you want over the journey.

Ohayami/Coda Bus is the default. Overnight departure from Sampaloc, Manila, dedicated Banaue route, cheapest of the three. The trade-off is a full bus, fixed schedule, and the comfort level you'd expect from a long-haul Philippine bus — functional, not comfortable.

Private Hiace makes sense if you're traveling in a group, carrying equipment, or need flexibility on departure time and stops. Cost is significantly higher but splits reasonably across four or five people. You also get door-to-door, which matters if you're moving gear.

Ohayami & Coda Bus

Ohayami is the dedicated Manila–Banaue operator and the default choice for most travelers. Two departures nightly — 9 PM and 10 PM — from their terminal on Lacson Avenue in Sampaloc, near UST. Not Cubao. Get that right before you plan your ride there.

Coda departs from the HM Transport terminal in Cubao — corner of Monte de Piedad and Maryland, a few minutes walk from Araneta Center. Three evening departures to Banaue: 8 PM, 9 PM, and 10 PM. Travel time is roughly the same as Ohayami — nine hours, conditions permitting. Note that Coda buses continue on to Bontoc and Sagada.

Fare is around ₱700–1,000. Air-conditioned, 2x2 reclining seats. Some buses have Wi-Fi and a screen, though neither is guaranteed to work. You can book buses with a toilet on board if you like the chemical toilet odor, but I don’t recommend it. Book online at or walk in — advance booking is the safer call on weekends and holidays.

You arrive in Banaue between 4 and 6 AM depending on traffic and road conditions. 

Private Hire (Toyota Hiace)

A private Hiace makes sense if you're traveling in a group, carrying serious equipment, or want flexibility on departure time and stops along the way. Door-to-door, no terminal, no fixed schedule.

Rates aren't fixed and aren't easy to find outside of direct inquiry. Two ways to find a vehicle: through a travel aggregator, or search Facebook for drivers in Banaue travel groups or Ifugao transport services. Facebook will typically be cheaper. Either way, confirm the rate covers fuel, the driver's return trip, and any toll fees before you commit.

Split across four or five people, the cost becomes more reasonable. As a solo traveler or a pair, the bus is the better call.

Ascend & Arrive

Most of the journey is flat and forgettable — Nueva Ecija in the dark, the bus doing highway speed, most passengers asleep. Solano is where that changes. The lowland ends, the road starts to climb, and the driver slows down.

The hairpins into Ifugao province are a thing. The bus leans on the bends. If you're awake for it you'll feel the road working.

Depending on the time of year, you might catch the sunrise across the relentlessly verdant mountains. The views from the bus window on that final stretch are the first payoff of the trip — ridge lines, terraced slopes, the valley opening below. You haven't arrived yet and it's already worth it.

Banaue town is small. Coda drops at the tourist office in the town center. Ohayami stops about a kilometer up the road. At 5 AM it's quiet — a few tricycles, a food stall or two coming to life. 

After you pay the tourist fee (P50, I think), and if you’ve been smart and booked a room you haul over to the lobby to hang out or chat with a guide to plan the day. 

The Return

Ohayami and Coda both run evening departures back to Manila, leaving Banaue between 4 and 5 PM and arriving in Manila the following morning. Same road, same duration, opposite direction.

Book online before you need it — both operators have ticketing on their websites. If you haven't booked, you can pay the conductor directly if there's room on the bus, but on long weekends and peak season that's a gamble. Don't leave it to the morning you're departing.

If you're continuing to Sagada or Bontoc rather than heading straight back, Coda is already running that route — you're already on the right bus.

The phin filter is a small metal doodad. You compress ground coffee into the chamber, pour hot water, and wait. The water drips: twenty, thirty seconds per cup.

Meanwhile, you sit on a plastic stool the size of a child's chair, watching the street.

This is not how coffee was served in 1850, when the French planted the first Arabica trees in the Tonkinese highlands. Coffee was supposed to be a cash crop, a source of colonial wealth, something to ship back to Marseille and Lyon. The Vietnamese were expected to grow it, not drink it.

By 1940, milk was scarce in Hanoi. Someone whipped an egg yolk with sugar and condensed milk into a foam. They poured strong coffee over it. 

The phin filter arrived later, it became the vessel for a national taste that had evolved: Vietnamese coffee, using Vietnamese-grown Robusta beans instead of imported Arabica, sweetened with condensed milk.

A Different Bean

This is the coffee you encounter if you arrive in Hanoi on any morning and choose a plastic stool on the pavement. 

Vietnam is the world's second-largest coffee producer. Vietnamese coffee typically uses robusta beans. The Robusta bean is not the world's favorite. It is stronger, more bitter, and less nuanced than Arabica. 

The French built the plantations and established Robusta as the default bean. Robusta has a bad reputation in the global specialty coffee world—it is often relegated to instant coffee, to budget blends, to the commodity bottom. 

The Current Moment: A City with Multiple Truths

In Hanoi, coffee is woven into the cultural fabric. A wave of coffee culture has found a natural home among Hanoians, who appreciate both tradition and refinement in their daily rituals.

When you walk Hanoi, coffee all but hits you in the face. Cafés are everywhere. 

These third-wave coffee shops are cropping up across this vibrant city. Homegrown baristas offer pour-overs, roast single-origin beans from the country's highlands, and sell specialty blends from across the world. 

Nevertheless, tradition abides (Dude-like).

If you sit long enough in Hanoi's oldest quarters—around Train Street, through the 36 alleys of the Old Quarter, you will find this coffee unchanged. Little plastic stools. Metal cups.

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Overheard in Lembongan, Bali, some years ago, “Dogs must be happy here.”

This was an occasion for me to reflect on cultures that embrace reincarnation.

Maybe our spirits float into the celestial species assignment machine, which tallies our life and automatically drops our souls into the next appropriate karmic match: marmot, wildebeest, Dali Lama, or puppy.

I’m reserving judgment on that one, but dogs do seem to gravitate toward abundant food and evolved people. So with Sagada.

Some dog selfies. They’re people, too, after all.