Substantial food and medical aid has finally began reaching the desperate survivors of the Philippines super typhoon.
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/ 5 December 2007
After putting his seedlings to bed in the world-famous Banaue rice terraces in the northern Philippines, farmer Gabriel Balicdon works as a tourist guide and buys rice from the grocer. Built by Ifugaos — illiterate mountain farmers and woodcarvers — at about the same time the Pyramids of Egypt and the Great Wall of China were being constructed, the terraces look like giant staircases leading to the clouds.
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/ 17 October 2007
Rickety old jeeps barrel through a dry northern Philippines riverbed, setting off a dust storm that coats the visitors bouncing around on the back seat. The landscape around Mount Pinatubo is evolving again 16 years after a gigantic volcanic eruption killed more than 1 500 people and sent a cloud of ash into the atmosphere cooling world temperatures for years.
"There is no right or wrong way," the trail master tells his nine fellow bushwalkers as they trace a little-known passage through the Philippines’ Sierra Madre range. "But whining is not allowed." The city slickers enter a different world in the sleepy village of Daraitan just 50km east of Manila. Here there are no roads, no bridges, no electricity, no telephones, and no 24-hour convenience stores.
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/ 21 October 2005
Catalino Bactat has spent nearly all his adult life guarding Ferdinand Marcos, from the time when his boss was the most powerful man in the Philippines and now as a mass of dried tissue in an airless glass case. "He was a good man, the president was a disciplined man. He was not a soldier for nothing," Bactat says of Marcos.