A Philippine festival can be a memorable addition to the intrepid traveler's Philippine adventure. The Philippine calendar is peppered with fiestas and festivals, every month with choices of destinations, colorful cultural windows scattered in a landscape teeming with diversity and folklore, celebrating their history and ethnic roots, the Virgin Mary, the Sto Niño or one of its countless patron saints – saturated with religiosity with zany and surreal pinches of paganism and, often, with extreme doses of bacchanalia.

For travelers who suffer the tropical weather, the months of January and February are blessed with predictably pleasant weather, Siberian-tempered, free of rain and humidity. Both months are festival-rich, the Black Nazarene celebration and Atiatihan in January, the Bamboo Organ Festival and the Chinese New Year in February.

For January, Atiatihan is the worthwhile destination for the intrepid traveler – a two-day bacchanalian revelry that celebrates the Sto Niño in a non-stop looping and intersecting parade of a motley multitude of participants, costumed and painted, libating, dancing and marching to the rhythm of drums and bands, Sto Niños borne in shouldered floats, cradled in arms or raised high above the intoxicated colorful celebrating masses. It is the quintessential religious festival of pure pagan fun teeming with uninhibited and cathartic third-world zaniness – Pinoy street theater at its best.