Santa Cruz Island
A pink beach that has to be seen to be believed — and earned to be reached.
Articles
An Overview of Negros Island: Two Provinces, One Mountain Range, and How to Plan Your Visit
Every traveler to Negros Island faces an early decision: which province to visit? A central mountain spine divides the island into two provinces, each with unique cultures, economies, and attractions. Negros Occidental, on the west, is known as the sugar ...
Read More →
Ocean and Marine Life of Negros Island: Apo Island, Dauin, and the Waters of the Coral Triangle
The waters surrounding Negros Island lie within the Coral Triangle. This is a roughly triangular area of tropical seas bounded by the Philippines, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea. It contains more species of reef fish, coral, and marine invertebrates than ...
Read More →
The Culture of Negros Island: Two Languages, One Island, and the Festival That Refused to Stop Smiling
I watched the MassKara Festival street dancers for the first time and understood. I learned something about Negros Island that the history books had been circling around. The dancers were not performing happiness. They were insisting on it. The masks, ...
Read More →
Cebu Island Diving: What the Sardine Run, the Whale Sharks, and the Threshers Actually Ask of You
The first time I dived in Cebu, I was already in the water. The boat captain had said sardines, and I pictured a school. What I dropped into at Moalboal was not a school. It was a city. Millions of ...
Read More →
Hobart, Tasmania: What the Island Capital Keeps Revealing Long After You Leave
The first thing you see when the plane descends toward Hobart, Tasmania, is the mountain. Not the harbor, not the colonial streetscape, not the waterfront that every travel summary leads with. Mount Wellington. It sits above the city at 1,271 ...
Read More →
Baguio City: What the Summer Capital of the Philippines Keeps Hidden in Plain Sight
In the late 1970s, I walked through Camp John Hay not as a tourist. I was U.S. military, there on rest and recreation leave, and the facility had been built specifically for people like me. Pine trees, organized pathways, and ...
Read More →
The Sinulog Festival of Cebu: The Dance, the Devotion, and the Lechon
The noise hits you before you see anything. The Sinulog Festival of Cebu fills the streets of Cebu City with an estimated two million people on the third Sunday of January, and their collective voice produces a sound you feel ...
Read More →
The Banaue Rice Terraces: What Two Thousand Years Actually Looks Like
The first view of the Banaue Rice Terraces from the main viewpoint does something unexpected. It makes the scale incomprehensible. You know they are large. You read that they cover more than 10,000 square kilometers in Ifugao Province. Those numbers ...
Read More →
Vigan City: The Colonial Streets, the Burnay Pottery, and the Food That Survived
Vigan City survived the Second World War for a reason that is easy to overlook when you are standing on Calle Crisologo taking photographs. General Yamashita withdrew his forces from the city without fighting for it. His decision, whether strategic ...
Read More →
The Chocolate Hills of Bohol: The View, the Season, and the Science
The first thing the Chocolate Hills Bohol delivers is a problem of scale. You stand at the top of Viewpoint One in Carmen, and the hills extend in every direction to the horizon. More than a thousand of them. All ...
Read More →
Hidden Beaches in Thailand That Most Travelers Never Reach
The fisherman who changed my plan didn’t speak much English. He pointed south, said ‘Koh Kradan,’ and held up three fingers. Three hours by boat from Pak Meng. I had three nights booked in Koh Lanta. I canceled them. That ...
Read More →
Hidden Beaches in the Philippines Most Travelers Never Find
The first time I found Cagbalete Island, I wasn’t looking for it. I was on a bus outside Mauban in Quezon Province, talking to a man named Rolando who sold dried fish at the market. He mentioned, almost as an ...
Read More →