This Korean Content Creator Plans to Visit All 82 Provinces of the Philippines

For the uninitiated, Jessica is a South Korean content creator who has found a home in the Philippines. She initially moved to the country at a young age to study, and after years of temporary stays and back-and-forth visits, she decided to live independently here for good in 2022.

Jessica has lived many lives, although she is only 25 years old, from being a K-pop trainee to being a contestant on the survival show Idol School. There is one thing that has remained constant: her sincerity in showcasing Philippine culture through her YouTube channel.

In 2021, she gained a wide audience through Korean Ate on Golden TV, a segment where she introduces Filipino food and culture to her fellow Koreans. She introduced the Trabaho series on her personal account the following year, a time when the Philippines had shifted to large-scale online or remote work. She highlighted and immersed herself in “offline” jobs that are “the backbone of the economy” in many ways, such as being a street food vendor, a manicurist, and a mall housekeeping staff member—and she didn’t stop inside the metro.

She also tried being a sugar farmer in Negros Occidental, a lechon maker in Cebu, and a parol maker in Pampanga, to name a few. That was also the year she launched the Paborito series, where she explores hidden restaurants in Manila.

Regarding Trabaho, she explains, “Many of these jobs are so essential to our daily lives, yet the people behind them often go unnoticed, and some traditional livelihoods may even disappear over time. I wanted to document and celebrate those stories while they’re still here.”

Come March 2026, Jessica has introduced the Probinsya series, documenting her journey to visit the 82 provinces of the Philippines.

“The more I look at this map, the more I realize how little I actually know about it,” she says in her video announcement. “I’ve lived in the Philippines for more than a decade, but if someone asked me what it’s really like to travel from Manila all the way up to Ilocos, from Cebu all the way down to Tawi Tawi at the southern edge of the country, I honestly wouldn’t know. So I’m going to find out.”

In conversation with Preview, Jessica expresses, “Probinsya came from my desire to create a travel series, but Trabaho definitely planted some of the seeds.” The research she made about different professions led her to traveling across the country and being exposed to different cultures, which is what made her curiosity grow.

She explains her plans to stay in each province for a minimum of 24 hours excluding travel time, moving only by land or sea and flying only when there is no other way. “Many travelers have completed all 82 provinces, but I wanted to experience the Philippines as one continuous journey rather than a collection of separate trips.” She continues, “More importantly, I felt that staying on the road was the only way to truly show the country’s scale—the distances, the geography, and the realities of traveling across an archipelago.”

The journey has already begun for the content creator, who has released episodes for 11 provinces. She undoubtedly faces unique challenges in this adventure, and “planning the logistics” has been a big one. She expounds, “Every province requires months of research, coordinating with local contacts, mapping out routes, and figuring out how each stop connects to the next before I even set foot there.”

As it is “a very personal project,” Jessica does not have a production team and handles everything herself—from conceptualizing and planning to filming and editing.

“Along the way, I’ve been fortunate to receive support from a few people in certain areas of the project, and I’m incredibly grateful for that. But because every stage of this project teaches me something new about the province, I’ve chosen to stay as hands-on as possible.”

In this series, she visits each province with an item to check off her bucket list, from learning how to raise a “super carabao” and breed butterflies to diving into a sunken cemetery beneath the sea and tracing the lost years of Jose Rizal prior to his exile.

“Many of them were places or experiences that had been on my personal bucket list after living in the Philippines for over a decade. For provinces that are already well-known, I intentionally looked beyond the places and stories people have seen countless times, hoping to highlight lesser-known experiences and people that deserve just as much attention.” She shares that she’s looking forward to exploring Mindanao, a place she has “dreamed of visiting for years.”

It’s worth noting that some of her episodes are released as fundraisers. For instance, proceeds from her Batanes video will be donated to the Pacita Abad Foundation in support of the Ivatan community, and her Tarlac video to the Tarukan Christian Church for the Aeta community. Proceeds of her La Union episode will also be given to CURMA to support marine conservation efforts.

“It allowed the videos to give something back to the communities they featured,” she says. “I would love to do this for every province, but each fundraiser requires a tremendous amount of additional planning and coordination, so realistically I can only dedicate a portion of the series to it.”

The Probinsya series is far from over. What have you learned so far?

“From the beginning, I knew this would be a long-term project, with the release schedule alone expected to span around two years. Even after just the first few episodes, what continues to amaze me is the sheer scale and diversity of the Philippines. Every province reminds me that there’s still so much left to learn, and that realization has been one of the most rewarding parts of the journey.”

What do you hope people learn or get from this series you’re pursuing?

“More than anything, I hope both Filipinos and people around the world who are curious about the Philippines come away with a deeper appreciation for this country. The Philippines is incredibly vast and diverse, but I think that reality is often overlooked. If this series encourages more people to explore beyond the familiar and see just how extraordinary the country really is, then I feel like I’ve accomplished what I set out to do.”