New to the Philippines I had the good fortune in 1995 to attend the MVP February Lecture Series Windows on the Philippines where I heard Winnie Zarate deliver a talk with slides on the Batanes Islands off northern Luzon. I could not know then that the speaker would one day become a valued colleague and cherished friend. I cannot tell you what she said, but the magical spell she wove stayed with me, and when the opportunity recently arose—Sony Ng organizing a tour to these exact same islands—I signed up with alacrity. And the magic lives on.
 

In a geological time frame the 10 or so islands that constitute the Batanes date from not much before yesterday. It is said they were pushed out of the ocean floor when the great volcano Mt. Iraya erupted about 325 BCE—less than three thousand years ago. Other geological forces contributed to the gradual build up of reefs and marine terraces that make the islands what they are today. And Mt. Iraya, thought to be no longer active, towers like a benign protective sentinel above the ridges.
 

The land area is small, approximately 23,000 hectares, bordered by the Pacific Ocean on the east and the South China Sea on the west—450,000 hectares of territorial waters. Some believe the original inhabitants migrated to the three inhabited islands from Formosa, now Taiwan. Others think that with the uninhabited northernmost island of YAmi lying only 50 miles below Lyon, the southern most island of Taiwan, the original inhabitants of Lyon must have come from YAmi.

Recent archaeological finds on Batan, including burial jars with remnants of human bones, may, when the evidences are in and sorted, tell a different story. Maybe, just maybe, people went both ways. The site is important enough to have brought internationally noted anthropologist and archaeologist Peter Bellwood to Batan. Unfortunately we were unable to gain access to either the site or the artifacts which have been placed under security. We were able to view a broken burial jar retrieved from a residential site during the landscaping of a garden. The bones had been removed.

Guidebooks say that while from July through December the islands are bleak, inhospitable, with cold rains and wind, from March through June they become a veritable Paradise. Paradise, yes—and cold, yes. Sony told us to take sweaters but even then we were unprepared for the perhaps “unseasonably” cold wind and intermittent rain, all of which failed to dampen our high spirits. Undaunted we made our first stop a small shop where we purchased jackets and long sleeved shirts. Dry goods are received by sea or air from Manila, as are all other non-locally produced items, making size and style something of a challenge. Being resourceful souls we did manage to find something to keep us relatively warm and dry—and Sony looked quite mod in her pink child's jacket.