My little journey back in time

Batad is a small village in the middle of rice paddies on the slopes of the beautiful Cordillera mountains. It is inhabited by the native Filipinos of the Ifaguo tribes. There is no road leading to Batad. The only way to get there is by hiking. Moreover, there are no roads in the village. In order to get from one place to the next, one has to walk on the stone walls of the rice terraces (very carefully, because some walls are up to 5 meters high).

Batad has become a somewhat tourist destination in recent years, meaning that there are maybe a dozen tourists coming for a day's hike, and five of them staying for the night. And I should add that the vast majority of these tourists are Filipinos.

With the advent of tourism came certain developments. Since 2005 the village has electricity and there are two guesthouses with restaurants. One of the guesthouses has hot water. Fortunately, these changes touched only the part of the village which lies on the tourist walking trail. The main part of the village is happily nestled far below the point where most tourists go. A lot of people there still live in traditional huts, cook on the fireplaces and in the evening gather around bonfires to spend time with their families (as far as I observed, only two houses in the main village were plugged).

This is not a joke. In the evening I could see from the terrace of my guesthouse the fires in front of people's houses. And when I was walking through the village during the day (or rather when I was walking on stonewalls of rice paddies between the houses), I saw people cooking on the fire and using traditional wooden tools to process rice. And they don't do it for tourists, this is simply their way of living.

Staying in Batad, I felt as if I was transported in a time machine back to history. And Batad is only one of many hidden villages in the Ifaguo region. One can take a guide and hike to some other, even more isolated settlements. And I am pretty sure that there is still a number of villages not penetrated by visitors from the outside world...