Bontoc looks like exactly what it is, the administrative heart of a mountain province, with a busy market, jeepneys parked nose to tail and a river, the Chico, curling through the middle of everything. About ten thousand people live here, hemmed in by the steep green flanks of the Cordillera, and the town has long been the main trading point for the Igorot villages scattered through these hills. For a long time, Bontoc was associated with headhunting in the foreign imagination, an image the locals have grown tired of, and a visit to the small museum on the hill gives a more honest picture of the culture, with its stone houses, tattoos, weaving and rice rituals.
The Halsema Highway, which brings you here from Baguio, is the highest road in the Philippines, climbing to well over two thousand metres through pine forest and vegetable terraces before dropping toward Bontoc in a long, winding descent. It is a hard road, narrow in places, with landslide scars, cloud that rolls in off the ridges and stretches where the pavement gives way to gravel or mud. Rain makes it treacherous, and landslides can close it for a day or two in the typhoon season, from roughly July to October, so the dry months from November to April are the sensible time. Buses and trucks dominate and the drivers are good, if unhurried. Leave the early hours for the high sections, since the mist usually builds by midday.
Bontoc has fuel and plenty of small restaurants where rice and local pork are the default. From here the road runs on to Sagada, about eight kilometres away, famous for its hanging coffins, limestone caves and cool, pine-scented air, and to Banaue, where the rice terraces that built the region's reputation stand in great tiers. The terraces were cut over centuries, without machines, by people moving stone and soil by hand.
Wear layers. Mornings in the high Cordillera are cold enough for a jacket and gloves, while the afternoon sun at lower elevations can be fierce. The smoke of cooking fires, the smell of wet pine and the sound of a distant gong from a village feast are small things that stay with you long after the mud has been washed off the bike.