Batan Island is the main island of Batanes, the smallest and northernmost
province of the Philippines - some 162 km north of Luzon and only 190 km south of Taiwan,
adrift in the storm-swept Luzon Strait. It is crowned by Mount Iraya,
a heavily forested stratovolcano rising 1,009 m straight from the sea, with a
1.5-km summit crater filled by a younger cone. The four towns of Batan - Basco,
Mahatao, Ivana and Uyugan - cling to the coast beneath it.
Iraya is the northernmost active volcano in the country: a pyroclastic-flow deposit
has been radiocarbon-dated to about 1,500 years ago, and a historical eruption was
reported in 1454. PHIVOLCS still lists it as active. Its basaltic-andesitic lava
built the boulders now polished round at Valugan Beach, while the wind and rain
off the strait have shaped the treeless Vayang Rolling Hills and the communal
pastures of Racuh a Payaman - "Marlboro Country". This is the homeland of the
seafaring Ivatan, who ride out the typhoons in thick-walled houses of lime and
stone and once raised fortified idjang strongholds on the ridges.
Dive below the surface. Orbit the camera down through the water. No open
bathymetric service covers the strait at this resolution, so the underwater relief is
modeled from distance-to-shore: a thin turquoise fringe around the rocky coast dropping
swiftly into the deep blue of the Luzon Strait, where the Pacific meets the West
Philippine Sea.