Rico Hizon

Planting, cultivating and harvesting rice is back-breaking work, but the modern Ifugao who live below the terraces still carry on the tradition of their ancestors. After preparing a bed, planting water-soaked seedlings and draining the pools, they must tend to their unique walled terraces, which require near-constant care. To do so, they haul mud and hard, round stones up the slopes from the river to reinforce the steep walls.

According to Bangyay, there are far fewer hanging-coffin burials in Sagada than in previous generations. Yet, she strongly believes the tradition will continue. In fact, she herself hopes to one day enter the afterlife this way, transforming, as she says, from ‘a tourist guide to a tourist attraction’.

The names Alden Richards and Maine Mendoza may not be familiar to you if you're not a Filipino. But their meteoric rise in the Philippines on TV and social media is difficult to ignore. Outside of the Philippines, they are probably best known for smashing global social media records, when the #AlDub hashtag generated more than 41 million tweets about them in just a few hours.