Batanes North Batan Island Full Day Tour

Batanes is the Philippines' northernmost province and most remote island group, a Y-shaped archipelago of 10 islands sitting closer to Taiwan than to Manila. It is unlike anywhere else in the country: rolling green hills instead of jungles, stone houses built to withstand 300 kph typhoons, Ivatan people with Taiwanese Austronesian roots, and an overwhelming sense of peace that descends the moment you step off the tiny ATR aircraft.

The North Batan circuit is the essential first day. Naidi Hills is a grassy highland studded with a Japanese World War II lighthouse and cattle roaming free under 360-degree cloud skies — on a clear day you can see the Itbayat Island to the north and the Taiwan Strait beyond. Valugan Boulder Beach is one of nature's more dramatic creations: instead of sand, the shore is covered entirely in smooth volcanic boulders the size of watermelons, deposited here by centuries of typhoon waves crashing from the Pacific.

Marlboro Country earns its nickname honestly — vast open grassland on a plateau above the sea, with wind-bent trees and stone-walled pastures that look photographically identical to the Scottish Highlands. Local horses and cows graze freely. Lunch is served in an Ivatan home: luñis (pork fat preserved in lard), coconut crab if in season, and uved balls (taro-wrapped fish), an ancient Ivatan preservation technique still practiced today.