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There's much competition to be the eighth wonder of the world. Everything from Niagara Falls to Elvis's ghost has been nominated. The brochure for the Philippine's contender modestly acknowledges that it is but one of a throng: "The Banaue Rice Terraces — One of the Eighth Wonders of the World". I stand dwarfed amid these colossi, convinced that none of the other human-made pretenders to the "Eighth Wonder" throne approaches the grandeur of this "stairway to heaven".

"We actually call them the "stairway of the gods", says my guide, Jun. Countless hand-hewn rice terraces scale the folded valley walls around us. It is as though we are within an enormous walk-in wood-cut print whose lines, thousands of irrigated terraces, might have been gouged by the gods themselves. Notched into precipitous green slopes, these long, contoured ledges of water cup the blue reflections of a dazzling sky.

The Banaue (pronounced "Ban-AH-wee") rice terraces, at 1300 metres elevation in the Central Cordillera of Luzon Island, are the longest continuous "Men At Work" project in human history. Construction began perhaps 3,000 years ago and is still going on.

Just as building the terraces was a long haul, so too is reaching them via an eight hour road journey from Manila. Inching the car free of the capital's jeepney jams, we head north across the central plain of Luzon.

"Geronimo!" calls Jun near a Central Cordillera village called Lamut. He's pointing to a group of wooden American Indians standing by the road. Endowed with elaborate feather head-dresses and muscles, and facial expressions as mobile as Richard Gere's, these acacia braves are the product of a little tin-roofed factory. We stop a while to watch young sculptors with flying chisels carve tribes of life-sized “cigar store Indians” for export to North America.

Grandiose metaphors like "stairway to the sky" and such suggest that the Banaue terraces might be a kind of transcendental escalator. They almost are. My first knock-out glimpse of them is from a roadside lookout. The full view, however, is both obscured and enhanced by a group of elderly Ifugao tribal men and women, decked in hornbill head-dresses, tattoos and spears, who have placed themselves strategically in the middle of the vista for "a peso a picture" photo opportunities.

These are the descendants of one hundred generations of Ifugao mountain people who built the terraces. The Ifugao and neighbouring Igorots were once avid head-hunters who strenuously resisted Spanish colonisation. They no longer lop heads, but are still disdainful of Luzon's "lowlanders". As recently as the late 1980s, they confiscated the head of some rotter from Manila who was said to have thoroughly earned it.

The Banaue creations, covering thousands of hectares, are the world's finest example of rice terracing. Often compared in labour intensity to Egypt's pyramids and the Great Wall of China, the Philippine's "Eighth Wonder" excels those stalwarts of the "First Seven" team in two aspects: the terraces are still used daily for their original purpose, and are believed to have been constructed not by slave but voluntary labour.
"If you placed all the terraces end-to-end," says Jun, "they would reach more than halfway around the world. Or ten times the length of the Great Wall."

It feels as though we've hiked about that far. We sweat our way up a 300-metre-high manicured mountainside that is stepped from river to summit with stone retaining walls, all shaped with only simple hand tools. The ancient Ifugaos first reinforced the base of a slope with great river rocks, then built the layered tiers of terrace walls upon this footing. It's estimated that the mass of stones in the walls is greater than that of the pyramids of Egypt. Construction was done only with human labour, as is maintenance, irrigation and farming even today; the slopes are too steep and narrow for animals and machines.

After a day of tramping around these awesome amphitheatres and into animistic villages adorned with the skulls of wild pigs and water buffalo, we return exhausted to the Banaue Hotel. Built by Ferdinand Marcos’s administration in 1969, it has a hangar-sized lobby and an interior lined with a forest of hardwood. It may be but another of "Ferdy's Follies", yet next dawn when I step onto my balcony to face a giant's staircase of rice terraces framing distant blue peaks, it delivers a view like the morning of the gods.

Just below the hotel is one of those curious progeny of modern tourism: an instant traditional village. I climb down to the little settlement of Tam-An where Helen Ayudoc, 28, is working in front of a small wooden hut, called a bale, raised on poles and thatched with cogon grass.

"Would you like to meet my Grandfather?" she asks. "Certainly," I answer. "He's dead," she adds, cheerfully.
I'm as much at a loss for words as is Grandad "Popo", whose bones Helen keeps neatly folded in a big woven blanket. Displayed gently yet without ceremony, Popo is like a favourite, though now retired puppet. He is twenty three years dead, after having lived, according to Helen, "for 140 years".

"When someone dies," she explains, "we move the body from house to house, according to who can afford to kill a pig and hold a party. Then the person is buried. After a year we dig up their bones and store them along with our other ancestors under the eaves of the bale."

We leave Banaue (an otherwise nondescript town of about 40,000 people) and climb further into the mountains. Taking one last look back at the terraces, and thinking that today they seem like stacks of green gambling chips for the gods, I am relieved to be quitting this hand-made landscape's provocation to gargantuan, but always inadequate metaphors.

Up through the Cordillera valleys we wind on ragged roads, through the provincial capital of Bontoc. Country kids freewheel downhill on home-made wooden scooters that look like something from The Flintstones.

Four hours drive from Banaue we reach the craggy, pine-strewn town of Sagada which, at 1,480 metres, is about as close as the Philippines gets to "alpine". It looks like a hill station in India and serves a similar function. Members of Manila's literati escape to Sagada's temperate climate when the capital's coastal sweat becomes too much to bear.
Tourists too find it magnetic, and often come for a few days, only to stay for weeks. With several good lodges, trekking and caving, plus plenty of anthropological interest in its ancient "hanging coffins" and Igorot culture, Sagada is a fine retreat.

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