The Chocolate Hills are more than a thousand limestone cones standing across the middle of Bohol, in the Philippines, and the strange part is how alike they are. No single one stands out. Each is a steep grass-covered mound between thirty and a hundred and twenty metres high, and the field of them runs to the horizon in every direction. The cones are marine limestone, a reef lifted out of the sea and then dissolved by rain into humps. The long staircase at Carmen puts you on a deck where that repetition is the whole view. At first light fog settles into the hollows and the cones float on it like islands; within an hour or two the sun has burned it off and gilded the slopes, and the first buses are in. An hour away the deck at Sagbayan Peak gives you the same field with room to stand.
A low flight shows what no deck can: the cones marching to the edge of sight, with thin footpaths threading between them. On the ground the scale flips. The trails at the base put each mound well over your head, steep and grassy, and the pattern you came for disappears into single hills. The colour moves all at once. Cogon grass covers every cone, and after weeks without rain in the late dry season it browns together, deepening to chocolate from about late March into May; by June the rain has taken it back to green. Bohol tells the hills differently: two giants quarrelled and threw boulders and sand at each other for days, or one giant, Arogo, wept for a mortal woman named Aloya until his tears hardened where they fell. What nobody can do is count them. The mounds crowd and merge at the base, so every survey has to decide where one cone ends and the next begins, and no two have agreed.