Northern Luzon

"Spirituality to me is water. Religions are like Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, wine, beer, or whatever." -- Carlos Santana


The past week I've been trying unsuccessfully to dodge typhoons in the mountains and terraced rice fields of Northern Luzon. I'm officially waterlogged and ready for some evening coconuts on the beach.

After my flight to the Batanes Islands was cancelled last week, I decided to take my friend Pam up on her offer to visit the mountains. Pam is a truly amazing individual that I met a few months ago when she came to Japan.

She is a graphic designer from San Diego who volunteered with the Peace Corps and is now teaching Environmental Education to high school students here in the Philippines.

We took a bus from Manila to Baguio on the 60th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bomb. We missed the moment of silence, but ironically the in-bus movie was Pearl Harbor . I dunno.

Baguio was an interesting city. Pam took me to a vegetarian restaurant called Oh My, Gulay, which was one of the most bizarre places I've ever eaten. The restaurant is also an artist event space somehow connected with a Filipino filmmaker named Kidlat Tahimik.

Inside the restaurant was the bow of what I assumed to be an old pirate ship with dinning tables on the deck, reconstructed houses; each featuring it's own room for customers to dine, various plants and trees, a few fish ponds, and lots of amazing artwork on the walls.

After eating dinner, while walking back to the hotel, Pam pointed out that the sidewalks were covered in mosaics by the same artists that run the restaurant. Really incredible.

The next day, we took a death defying bus ride from Bagiuo to Besao. The narrow, single lane road, which was paved in some areas and nothing but dirt and rock in other places, wove around the mountains with more twists and turns than an Andy Goldsworthy sculpture. We swerved around corners, other vehicles, and landslides with nothing to keep us from falling over the sharp edge but the drivers unbelievable skill.

In Besao, there were lots of infrastructure problems, but little else. No places to eat, no stores, no taxis, no roads... nothing. Just lots of luscious green mountains, a few ram shackle houses made of galvanised metal sheets, a school, city hall, and a 9pm curfew!

My hat's off to Pam for working in this small, rural community of subsistence farmers, and I wish her the best of luck as she helps the school build a restroom for it's students next week.

I hung out in Besao and listened to Pam's opinions of Filipino people and culture and how they don't work on normal time schedules. To pass the nights we watched a couple really interesting movies called Riding Giants & What the Bleep Do We Know? After a day and a half I hiked in the rain to the next town of Sagada.

Sagada was more tourist friendly with a various rest houses and restaurants. I stayed with another Peace Corps volunteer named Corey.


Corey with a chicken

Corey was a super solid individual that seemed to have McGyver skills for building things. I can't remember what his Peace Corps project was, but he was doing something about making rice husks into charcoal blocks for the locals businesses.

As soon as I arrived in Sagada, Corey recommended I go check out the large cave that draws lots of tourists. I walked up to the Sagada City Hall and booked a private tour with a guide in less than 5min.

The enormous cave was about a 15min walk from the city hall. I have never been in something so large and so absolutely dark. I'm talking BatCave big!

After the entry, the decent into the cave became tricky because there were no stairs and all the rocks were covered in slippery algae. Not to mention the chirping sounds of bats hiding in the shadows above.

Once my lantern guide and I got down into the depths of the cave and passed fossilized seashells, he told me to take off my shoes to go wading through an underground pool. I was shocked to find that we were so deep in the dark that algae can't grow and the rocks became much easier to walk on.

We eventually came to a kind of cross roads where the guide told me I could take a short cut or get very wet by crawling through a small hole in the rock. I was feeling adventurous, so I took the wet way and immediately regretted it when the guide bumped the lantern on the wall of the cave and broke the mantle causing it to go out.

I sat in pitch black night not able to see my own hand in front of my face while the guide tried to re-light the lantern using his sense of feel.

Out of the cave and feeling relieved to be back in the land of light, I returned to meet Corey for a bite to eat.

He took me to a local rest house where we ate Adobo chicken, and soon got invited to drink Tanduay Rum with a a group of three Germans and a Belgian. Next we were joined by a group of eight Aussie steak-head surfers who'd been making a beer pyramid on the table next to us with all their empty San Miguel cans.

The next addition to our cosmopolitan drinking circle was two more Belgians who'd recently finished working for an NGO accompanied by seven Dutch female archaeologists. Quiet the crew, if I do say so myself. We shut the place down and were asked to leave at midnight.

The following day there was an electrical black out all after noon, possible caused by the monsoon rains that continued to fall, which limited the days activities.

In the mid morning, Corey and I were joined by another Peace Corps volunteer named Teresa. She was a super smart MIT graduate with the maturity level of a 16 year old. Super genki, but flighty.

The three of us went out to eat lunch, drank Coke in a bottle, had coffee and cake, and tried to wait out the black out and rain.

As the power came back around 5pm, we were joined by more volunteers. Nancy, who worked in the Mountain Province capitol, Bontoc and Pam who hiked from Besao through the rain to join us for another volunteer named Dan's birthday party.

The party was supposed to be a Pinikpikan party. That means they take a live chicken, beat it with a stick to tenderize the wings, smack it on the head to finally kill it, blow torch it to burn off all the feathers, hack it up in lots of pieces, and finally stew it in boiling water.

Dan's Filipino host family was a group of born-again Christians, so they protested this as a pagan ritual. Alternatively, the chicken was spared the beating, and just lit on fire, cut up, and stewed.

The party itself was odd in that everyone sat silently in a circle around the living room until the food was served. After eating, everyone rapidly left to go sing Videoke, the Filipino knockoff of Japan's karaoke.

The following day Pam, Nancy, and I hoped in a jeepney to go to Bontoc, the provincial capitol. I originally planned to head to Banue to see the famed terraced rice fields, but the rain was still coming down so I opted for a long bus ride back to Manila.

While waiting for my bus to depart, I toured the Bontoc city museum and saw photos of Filipino head-hunters from the turn of the century. One provocative photo showed a hunter holding up another person's face as a trophy. Bizarre.

The bus ride from Bontoc to Manila was uneventful except the for frigid temperatures in the bus. Evidentially, the drivers can't control the air-conditioning inside these buses, so it cranks on HIGH the entire trip. All the local passengers were suited up in parkas and pull overs in the middle of August to guard against the cold.

By the time I got to Manila, I was half frozen and met by more torrential rains.