I leaned my head against the cool window as Davao unraveled in shades of green. As our plane descended after an 80-minute flight from Cebu, I couldn’t have imagined how deeply the journey ahead would affect me.
SunStar Lifestyle was invited to join the region’s first national media Coffee and Cacao Tour from July 21 to 25, 2025. Before this, I had heard of the concept of “purposeful travel,” but the articles I read never seemed to do justice to the term, often reducing it to a buzzword. In my four days in the Durian Capital, I learned that travel could be less about escape and more about connection.
It took walking with farmers at the foot of Mt. Apo and planting coffee seedlings with them under the heat of the sun for me to understand. In less than a week, I realized coffee here was more than a pick-me-up; it was a bold symbol of peace.
Here’s everything I learned from Davao’s coffee landscape, curated by Cybercrib Trips.
Roots in sacred ground
At the nursery in Upper Catigan, Toril, I held a six-month-old coffee seedling for the first time. We were told that the secret to Davao’s coffee lies in Mt. Apo’s volcanic soil. Others credit the cool elevation, which produces beans with bright acidity.
The Bagobo Tagabawa elders led us to a house where we bowed our heads and lifted our hearts. Their words were a dialogue with the spirits of mountains, rivers and ancestors.
Floreces Tadla of CES Travel and Tours explained a ritual performed before harvest, where elders chant and pray to seek guidance from their supreme being and the unseen guardians of their land. Though we did not witness the full rite, the prayers we joined reminded us that this mountain, Apo Sandawa, has been sacred ground for as long as anyone can remember. Here, agriculture equals reverence.
Standing ankle-deep in earth, I became convinced that what truly sets Davao coffee apart are the prayers poured into every planting.
It takes a tribe
The Bagobo are among the largest Indigenous groups in southern Mindanao, composed of three sub-groups: the Tagabawa, the Clata (Guiangan) and the Ubo. Tagabawa itself means “people of the south” (“bawa” meaning south). For generations, they have lived along Mt. Apo’s southern slopes, where their ancestral domain overlaps with the habitat of another enduring symbol, the Philippine Eagle.
A few minutes uphill, Datu Lawrence Bayocboc welcomed us to their tribe’s coffee nursery. The Bagobo Tagabawa cultivate Catimor Arabica here — a hardy, disease-resistant variety that farmers in Southeast Asia often rely on despite its controversial reputation in specialty coffee circles. When tended with the kind of care we saw here, it thrives on Mt. Apo’s slopes and can yield unexpectedly sweet, complex cups. They also taught us that each leaf of a coffee seedling marks a month of growth.
Guided by their hands — Kuya Noburo among them — we dug, layered soil, sprinkled chicken manure and tucked seedlings into the earth. We marked each one with a wooden stake bearing our names, a remembrance of what we had done. Someday, we could return to check its growth or, when it is ready to be processed into beans, even have it delivered to our homes.
Before leaving, we gathered for food prepared by the community. My favorite was nilotlot na balanghoy — cassava wrapped in banana leaves, boiled until soft and earthy. Its warmth and simplicity felt grounding, much like the people who shared it. A simple act, yet one that drew me into something larger — the continuity of land, lineage and life.
Coffee, a path to peace
In Davao del Sur, coffee has become integral to reconciliation. In Managa, Bansalan, we met farmers who are part of Coffee for Peace (CfP), a social enterprise that brings indigenous and migrant communities together through shared training and livelihood.
“Why not make coffee an instrument for peace?” asked Gerome Sumagaysay of CfP. “In conflicted areas, when people sat at the same table, they were drinking coffee. Over coffee, they shared what hurt them. And there was no bloodshed, no killing. So why not use coffee to heal and rebuild?”
CfP now trains farmers to grow quality coffee, process it properly and price it fairly, empowering them to compete in both local and international markets.
One farmer, Alwin Dinoy, recalled how he once planted vegetables, only to watch them rot before reaching the market. Coffee, by contrast, gave him a sustainable livelihood. “We had nothing until coffee came to us,” he said. Now, his life has changed for the better. There is food on the table and his children are able to get an education.
Equal participants
We tried our hand at cherry sorting, running our fingers through heaps of red and yellow fruit, learning to tell the ripe ones from the rest. Farmers showed us the patience behind natural, honey and washed processing, the weeks of sun-drying, the careful hulling, the precise roasting. For a solid five minutes, I just stood there, listening and realizing how much unseen labor hides behind a single cup.
After an hour, we traveled up to Purok Pluto, Sitio Balutakay, Barangay Managa, Bansalan, Davao del Sur, where we were received by the humble Marivic Dubria. Once a 4Ps beneficiary (the national poverty reduction program that provides conditional cash transfers to poor households), she used part of the assistance to buy her first coffee seedling. From there, she transformed her small farm into an award-winning enterprise. Her Arabica beans, grown on the same Mt. Apo slopes, won at the 2019 Philippine Coffee Quality Competition and later reached Seattle and Europe. Today, she is known as Davao’s “Coffee Queen.”
Farmers here are not only taught to grow better beans but also to value their work, to price their harvests with pride. In doing so, they are no longer mere suppliers but equal participants in the market.
Today, the Davao region is the second-largest coffee producer in the Philippines. Coffee planting was never on my bucket list. Trying out cafés? For sure. But this experience in Davao opened my eyes to the power of coffee — not its caffeine, but its ability to change lives.