Viva Pilipinas

We're a little behind on our blogging, so we are writing about the Philippines from Bangkok! It is incredibly hot here and we're having a great time. We had a wonderful visit with Grace, a co-worker of Charlie's from Backcheck, who is now working in Manila.
We visited Intramuros, the old Spanish fort on the river in Manila. The Spanish colonial architecture was really nice.
Manila wasn't our favourite, it has a few nice spots, but on the whole we didn't really like it as a city. The bast part of the Philippines, for us, was a tiny town in northern Phillipines called Sagada. It's nestled in the mountains and has great things to do.
One of the things we saw was a "cemetary" of hanging coffins. The hilltribes in the region "bury" their dead in coffins on the sides of cliffs, where the are in plain sight of the community. They do this for many reasons: they do not want to carry the earth, they want the earth to carry them; and they believe it is important for the dead to remain present in the community. Our guide told us that it is the village chiefs decide how a certain person will be buried (other options include cave burial or ground burial) and that many people in the community are now Christian and have been for generations but do not have control over how their family members will be buried. He said it is difficult for people not to have a say over their own funeral rites.

People in the mountain province are mainly agriculturalists, and rice is one of the major crops. They plant the rice in terraces dug out of the sides of the mountains and avoid erosion by making small patties enclosed in brick walls. The bus ride through these mountains was long, uncomfortable, and beautiful!

We spent many hours one day looking for a small waterfall we heard of. We finally found it and had to walk through the rice terraces to get there.
We hiked up 1600 meters to the top of a mountain and saw a magnificent panoramic view.
We went caving one morning for a few hours, down 150 meters into an underground river. On the rock formations we took off our shoes and our feet had lots of traction on the rock.