Going down from the view point to the village of Batad. We get a great view of the famous rice terraces. These terraces were built more than two thousand years ago and are still actively maintained to this day. Although the terraces have been showing their age, they are still doing what they have always done across the centuries – provide rice.
The village of Batad is nestled in a valley between mountains. The village itself isn’t really that big, it only consists of scores of houses. Constrast this with the overwhelming size of the rice terraces. This gives the visitor an idea of how grand this is. The entire mountain side was carved by hand into terraces with each terrace irrigated with water to grow rice.
Rice is more easily grown in plains but this is something that the natives do no have a luxury of. It also showcases the ingenuity of their ancestors in building something a massive as the rice terraces. Come to think of it, if the village was that small, why build something so big? Nevermind, since the entire mountainside was carved, it gives that impressive ampitheater like appearance, with the village in the middle of it all.
I realized that it was taking us quite a while to be able to get down to the village. There is a long flight of stairs from the viewpoint. This is the villagers’ link to the outside world. I dread to think of climbing these flights of stairs everyday to get to work or to school. But I’m sure there are people who do exactly that. I thought that walking down the stairs will be much better than climbing up, but after a few minutes of walking down, my knees were already starting to hurt. It felt like my kneecaps would just pop out any moment. So I started to do my “picture taking” by stopping regularly. It didn’t really matter to me since I was surrounded by this majestic scenery.
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