12/05/2014
Batanes: This is the life!
Want to recharge your batteries? Escape from your worldly cares? Touch base with your innermost self?
Batanes beckons!
There is something about being in Batanes that tells you, this is how the world was meant to be: pollution-free environs… awesome natural scenery… a crime-free community… hospitable people whose traditional way of life thrives in the modern world.
You can’t escape the fact that Mother Nature reigns supreme here and the Ivatans learned to adapt to her vagaries a long time ago. Homes have meter-thick walls where Ivatan hunker down when storms sweep through the islands. Farm plots are protected from the winds and sea spray with hedgerows; adaptations found nowhere else in the Philippines. Taking in this the melding of culture and the natural landscape, one realizes it is unique to Batanes. It is the quintessence of the hardy, resourceful and resilient Ivatans.
Getting a feel for Batanes will not give you a fill of it though. Instead it will give you a craving for more. Indeed, there is something about seeing a sunset that owes nothing of its spectacular show of colors to suspended particulates or dining alfresco without malodorous fumes assaulting our nostril that tells you, this is how the world was meant to be. That otherworldly feeling is perhaps best captured when you walk down its roads in the dark without being afraid and ask yourself, “When was the last time the dark felt so comforting, so relaxing?” That freedom from fear is not an ephemeral sensation. It is backed by the fact that Batanes is one of the few places on earth that can boast of zero incidence of crime.
If Batanes had nothing else to offer -no fishing, no boating, no swimming, no diving, no cultural emersion, no Honesty Café, no Spanish-vintage churches, among others- this otherworldly peace and serenity would be reason enough to visit. Truly, Batanes is a place to lose one’s self and find it again… renewed.
Luckily, this foretaste of paradise is just a plane ride away.
- AIR REPUBLIQ want to thanks Ms. Bona Resurreccion and Mr Noli Gabilo
