Rina

Excerpt from a super-draft-work-in-progress:

"A definite highlight of Sabtang Island is the overnight homestay at Barrio Chavayan. Tourists usually “do” Sabtang on a day trip, setting out early in the morning and rushing to catch the early afternoon boat back to Batan to avoid the strong waves later in the day. Since we had more time in our hands, we decided on a more leisurely overnight stay, sleeping at an honest-to-goodness Ivatan stone house and basically taking over the kitchen of kindly Lolo Mariano and Lola Aurelia as we prepared our dinner. In the morning, we trekked over to the Sumnanga village at the other side of the island, where we took a boat to Vuhus Island for some more snorkeling before heading back to the pier for the trip to Batan."

I'm playing hooky right now by taking the time to upload this, so I took the easy way out by just copy-pasting the Sabtang paragraph from an article on Batanes that Abby and I are co-writing (o ayan Abby, in-announce ko na para pressure, he he). I also put some more details in the photo descriptions. Some things that are not likely to make it to that article-in-progress, though:

- For some stupid reason I failed to realize that my camera was set on ISO 800 for a whole morning, so my Nakabuang beach shots were ALL grainy. Sheesh. That's the sort of stupid mistake that one ought to never, ever do in Batanes.

- During our morning trek from Chavayan to Sumnanga, I looked like Bumblebee because I had two yellow life vests strapped to my backpack. Also a walking advertisement for the Batanes Seaside Lodge, whose owner very kindly let us bring the life vests, take it to another island, and keep it overnight besides.

- We were told that the trek would take about an hour, but it took us two hours to reach Sumnanga. It wasn't the whole group's fault, I was one of the slow ones and of course they had to wait, he he. It seriously ate up the snorkeling time, but it was great that aside from the snorkeling, sight-seeing, photography, throwing up in boats, and what-have-you, we were able to add hiking to the list of things we did in Batanes. Definitely a great one-week adventure!