Banaue Hapao Road Risks and Rewards
From the well paved and very accessible Banaue town proper, you have the option of going to Hapao, another community with its own set of rice terraces. You have to traverse more than 9 km on a very difficult and dangerous track which has always been a challenge. Sections cemented, but most unsurfaced and is merely a cut on the side of the mountain (with very steep slopes), which after every rainfall is blocked by mudslides until road crews can appear to clear it, often taking days to do so. If you are in Hapao and a landslide occurs well then you’re trapped until it’s cleared because there is no other way out of the Hapao Valley (it’s a dead-end road).
We unwittingly went through this risky Banaue Hapao Road on our way to Native Village Inn. Paradise yes, but the risk was we could get stuck in paradise. We thought of turning back. But it seems that the native Ifugaos in the area frequented the road enough. They had overloaded jeepneys and one time a bus came through the road. So we pressed on.
It was a pee in your pants experience. The road was muddy. My steering was delayed and sliding. The rear driving wheels were slipping. And the braking was delayed. Our Toyota Fortuner used city tires and was not a 4×4. There was a one time a jeep on head on stopped and said we should pass, that it was big enough. Are you nuts???? Hell, we’ll fall by the cliff if we did that. I stopped and backed up to a house. My wife got out and their driver went out and made arrangements with the house owner to move his tricycle from the parking lot because we needed the space to have the jeepney pass through and the bus behind him as well.
Of course our urban cowardliness was there, but this seemed normal for the Ifugao people who lived there. So we pressed on and made our way to Native Village Inn.
Instead of our planned 2 nights, we thought of cutting it by 1 day to attempt to go back to Banaue town proper because being possibly stuck in paradise was just unacceptable because we had reservations in our other destinations and this was just the first leg of our trip!
Luckily we met a jeepney driver who drove up a family to the inn. We got his number. In the morning we were hoping to have sunny weather, but it was not so. In fact it was raining in the early morning and still drizzling in the morning. We waited until 8am. Then we decided to call Lambert, the jeepney driver. We asked him to come by public transportation (tricycle), then be our navigator going down the Hapao Banaue road to Banaue town proper.
Lucky for me, my wife volunteered to drive this time. Sure enough we had a head on incident with an overloaded jeepney but we had the confidence of a local driver and guide Lambert and he made the arrangements so we could pass through one another without falling off the cliff. Lambert himself stood an inch or two at the edge of the cliff, but that seemed normal to him and the other Ifugao children.
View the actual video of our cliff hanging driving adventure negotiating with a fully packed jeepney head on. It’s in Tagalog though. I was just describing that Lambert was guiding us, and the cliff was dangerously beautiful and it seemed normal for Lambert to be standing inches from doom. And later Lambert said that the jeepney driver was uneducated for not backing up instead. And at the end you hear our rear tires slipping trying to push our vehicle along.
So lessons learned here:
- If you really want to go to Hapao or Native Village Inn you need to go through this road, there is no other way.
- This is normal to the Ifugao natives, in fact this road is already progress for those who reside in Hapao.
- If you want to go through this with your own vehicle, use off road tires, and a 4×4 vehicle and hire a local Ifugao guide to accompany you.
- Fear of falling off a cliff is true and ever present… but at least you have the best breathtaking non stop rice terraces views unavailable in Banaue town proper.
I’m glad we survived this and experienced the paradise that is Native Village Inn. Of course your sense of risk and reward may be different from mine.