Rice Rice Baby

Not enough mazes are set in rice terraces. So ridiculously hard to find your way around and all the locals laugh at you because you're getting visibly confuzzled, then they run past you up a non-existent set of steps whilst balancing five planks of wood on their head and dragging a pig on a lead.

So yeah, I've spent the last 24 hours giving my Jap. Enc. inocculation a test in the rice terraces at Batad. It's a funny place, Batad; the only way to get there is 12km on an unmade track, then an hour down a footpath. Which probably makes it quite problematic for the locals to do their week's shopping. The rice terraces were pretty incredible. They're something like 3,000 years old and still using the same irrigation system. Well better than the Incas.

The Philippines seems to be challenging my acceptable-ways-to-travel preconceptions. I'd always assumed that you shouldn't travel an hour down an unmade road on the roof of a bus, turns out I was wrong. Not the most comfortable hour of travelling, mind.