Surigao

Surigaonons will fight you over it: their kinilaw is the country's best, tuna or tanigue cured in vinegar and calamansi, then jolted awake with ginger, chili, and a little tabon-tabon. Eat it where it's freshest — the seaside eateries by the port and market.

The pasalubong that proves you actually went to Surigao: glutinous rice, brown sugar, calamansi, roasted peanut and coconut milk wrapped in a banana-leaf cone. Buy a dozen at the public market — this is its home turf, and they vanish fast.

This is a fishing province and it tastes like it — poot-poot ginamos, a pungent condiment fermented from tiny fish, shows up beside grilled and vinegared seafood everywhere. Spoon it over rice at a market carinderia for the full saltwater hit.

Surigao's 'Little Venice' is a fishing community of stilt houses over mangrove shallows, where families make their living raising crabs and lobsters in pens beneath the floorboards. Hire a paddle boat through the channels and buy seafood straight from whoever caught it.

Every September the city explodes into street-dancing thanksgiving rooted in the rain rituals of the Mamanwa and Manobo. Born in 1984 after Typhoon Nitang flattened the place, it's Surigao saying salamat for surviving — pounding drums, painted dancers, zero pretension.