A JOURNAL: N'GOL

A JOURNAL

THIS BLOG IS AN ONLINE JOURNAL OF MY EXPERIENCES PAST AND PRESENT IN THE FORM OF WORDS, MUSIC, PHOTOS AND ART

January 09, 2009

Sagada 1978 -Part 1

Sagada, 1978

He’s going to kill me, I thought.

The man threw me a cold hard stare.

“What are you doing here?” he asked me.

“I came to visit the falls,” I said, my voice slightly quaking.

“You’re not here to see the falls. You’re here to spy on us!”

I looked back at him in alarm. I felt the blood drain from my face.

The man seemed to have just arisen from a bad sleep. He was pale, thin and unkempt. He had a pockmarked face. There were scars on his arms. He had bad teeth.

He was in the middle of a group of Igorots. Some of the natives were standing while others sat on their haunches. They looked at me curiously. I must have stumbled into some kind of a meeting.

I leaned mightily on my walking stick. It snapped under my weight. I muttered an apology.

An elderly Igorot man gave me a sympathetic look but said nothing.

“You have to sacrifice a chicken to the gods of the falls,” Scarface barked at me again.

I had no idea what he was talking about.

I was aware though that in the past month an Austrian backpacker went missing in these mountains outside Sagada, in Igorot Province. He went off one evening to have a special dinner, reportedly featuring dog on the menu. He was never seen or heard from again. Police searched for him. His brother flew in from Austria to join the search, made a fervent appeal for his recovery. It was all to no avail. The man simply disappeared.

Please God, let me not be next.

A small brown dog shuffled by. It stopped briefly to regard me with sad, rheumy eyes. Wrapped around its neck was a wooden contraption that looked like the cage of a tennis racket. What it was for, I did not know.

That I was here being confronted on the yard of an Igorot hut – the sort that had a pen for pigs and chicken on the ground floor and sleeping and living quarters on the raised second floor – by a wild-eyed man surrounded by Igorots was the unforeseen consequence of a decision I made to journey to the newly-discovered vacation spot of Sagada high up in Cordillera Mountains.

I had read about the beauty of Sagada in newspapers and caught glimpses of it when a hotshot director used it as a setting for a hip, coming-of-age movie. Evidently foreign backpackers, not Filipino tourists, discovered this heavenly spot.

Reports were that the rice terraces in Sagada were prettier and more spectacular than those of Banaue. Add to that karst rock formations, hanging mummies, limestone caves and its remote location and you have all the ingredients of a place where the sights spelled “exotic” even to a Filipino. I had to visit Sagada. I was vaguely aware of the missing Austrian, but that did not deter me from going. I was a Filipino. I was confident that nothing would happen to me.

On the long Holy Week weekend of 1978, I packed a duffel bag and boarded a bus for Baguio City. The trip from Manila to Baguio City took four hours. I was able to get a room at a motel for the night. Very early the next morning, I boarded another bus for Sagada, three hours distant from Baguio. This is the only economical way to get to Sagada. The bus rolls to Sagada via vegetable farms, mountain passes, single-lane roads, and army checkpoints (there were communist rebels in the area, though they didn’t bother the riding public. Rockslides and detours were not uncommon.

Benguet pines sprang from the rocky hillsides. An agreeable scent pervaded the air. Waterfalls tumbled down rocky precipices. Large portions of the mountains were bare of trees, the result of unabated logging.

For a large portion of the journey, the bus followed a highway that ran beside the turbulent Chico River. The road was paved only in part; most of it was gravel and sand. Our aged bus broke down once. A comfortable ride it was not, but the scenery was breathtaking.

It was 1:00 in the afternoon when the bus chugged into Sagada. A German backpacker who I met in a roadside stop had suggested that I seek lodging at St. Joseph’s, a hostel run by Anglican nuns. The bus stopped right by its gates. The hostel was a two-storey American-style wooden clapboard affair. My room was small, serviceable and cheap (10 pesos). When I looked out the window, I saw a panorama of pine-clad mountains and curious rock formations, white and jagged like dragon teeth. The scene was so alien to me that I could swear I was in a country other than the Philippines.

In a way I was in a different country. Everything about Sagada was different. The houses were not the breezy nipa huts of the sweltering plains. They had steep thatched cogonal roofs matted thickly for insulation against rain and cold. The Igorot spoke a language that might as well have been Greek to lowland Filipinos. Here an independent ancestor-worshipping culture had arisen and flourished for centuries. They had their own particular architecture, customs, literature, gods and deities. Later, most of the people converted, not to Catholicism, but to the Anglican faith. In fact, Sagada’s prettiest building was an English-style church complete with an English garden. A noble fir tree grew up beside it. Needless to say pine trees and their sweet smell was everywhere. Christianity, the Anglican variety, laid its mantle on the populace, but the Igorot cultural underpinnings lay strong and unmissable.

The most telling features of the Sagada landscape were its karst formations. These are limestone rock that extreme weathering and erosion have transformed into organic- looking structures resembling pinnacles, bleached vertebrae and ruined castles. Their stark whiteness contrasted dramatically with the dark-green of the pines. Limestone being calcified sea creatures meant that Sagada, which is thousands of feet above sea level, was once underwater and therefore incredibly old. The whole area was honeycombed with caves, some of which the ancient Igorots put to good use by using them as repositories of their dead.

Herein lay another reason to visit Sagada, it's so-called “hanging” coffins. The ancient Igorots did not bury their dead. They mummified them and hung them on ledges on hillsides or inside caves. Burial of this sort continued till early this century with the American missionaries and officials put a stop to it. Curiously, although the coffins were oftentimes exposed to the elements, the lime in the caves served to control or arrest the decay of bodies in them, thus effectively embalming them.

http://www.visitsagada.com/

Posted by manniep at January 09, 2009 12:58:00pm
No Comments Post a Comment Permanent Link Subscribe To Blog

November 04, 2008

N'GOL

There is an island in Vanuatu called Pentecost.

Pentecost Island’s beaches are made, not of powdery white sand, but of smooth pebbles. The beaches are clean and free of litter. The water is crystal clear and unpolluted. It is heavily forested. Centuries-old banyan trees provide generous shade along the shoreline. There is no motel here, none at least that are immediately noticeable. The beach is communal property and therefore accessible to all. There is no electricity on the island, save what a portable generator can provide. I did not see any televison aerial or Internet cafe. It is as primitive a place as one can wish to visit on holiday.

Among the young men of this island their exists a ritual that inspired the creation in the West of that extreme sport, bungee jumping. It involves jumping off a platform while one’s feet are secured by a vine. Unlike in bungee jumping, though, this ritual poses the real risk of injury or even death.

This ritual is called N’GOL.

On top of a hill, in a clearing just outside of the main village, the men construct a high scaffold of wood and vines. On this scaffold they place a platform (or two or three), each progressively higher than the other. The earth immediately below the platform is raked to make it softer and less compact. Young men climb up to the platform, tie their legs with vines and jump down into the ground headfirst. The idea is to bounce off the earth, the shoulder just glancing off the ground. The act of touching the earth fertilizes it for the planting of crops, like yam. If the young man survives the fall, he is hailed as a hero. If he doesn’t, then c’est la vie.

Principally held to celebrate the yam harvest, n’gol has its roots in a local piece of folklore, ironically involving, not a man, but a woman.

The story goes like this:

There was once a wife who was trying to escape from her maltreating husband. In desperation, she climbed up a tree. The man yelled for her to come down or face a beating. She refused and secretly tied a vine around her ankle. When her husband climbed up after her, she threw herself from the tree. Her husband jumped after her reflexively. Because she had tied the vine round her ankles, the woman survived. The husband who did not, broke his neck and died.

Only men engage in this ritual-sport. Reportedly they started practicing it to show the women they cannot be easily tricked the way the unfortunate husband was.

Although the natives hold n’gol to celebrate the yam harvest, now, they do it for the tourists as well, irrespective of the occasion, most especially when there is a cruise ship out on the bay. There is no mass tourism in this island, so one can hardly claim that it is in danger of being spoiled. The arrival of the cruise ship has changed the dynamics of this island and like it or not, the process of making n’gol less a native ritual than a tourist attraction is already well underway.

In any case, there is no denying the bravery of the jumpers. The only ones who I think come close to matching (or even surpassing) their machismo are the divers of La Quebrada in Acapulco. As to which is more dangerous – jumping off a high cliff into the sea or off a platform into the earth, is a matter of argument. I’d say falling into the sea seems a more bearable prospect, because you can float, than falling on to the ground, because you can’t.

So here I was, just come into the island onboard the P&O ship M/V Pacific Star, making my way to the ceremonial ground outside the small hamlet by the bay.
It had just rained, so the path was muddy. The mainly Australian tourists and ship’s crew alike followed an unpaved road lined on either side by the usual tropical greenery – coconut trees, breadfruit, the prodigal pink-flowered vine cadena de amor. The place of n’gol was a grassy meadow fronted by a hillside on top of which a wooden tower had been constructed. It loomed like a pagan palisade. As a piece of monumental organic sculpture, it wouldn’t have been out of place in a great park or the garden of an art museum.

On the meadow were stumps of coconut trees laid out as seats for the onlookers. This place also served as a part-time grazing area for native buffalo, so one had to be careful where put one’s feet down. Many locals and tourists already lined up the hillside leading to the tower. A wire fence kept onlookers from crowding the tower itself. On a small clearing right beside the structure, bare-breasted women dressed in palm frond skirts danced to chants and ululations that seemed to spring from the very earth itself. They were a Greek chorus, Vanuatu-style, abetting, counter-pointing and accompanying the exploits of the n’gol warrior. I felt a deep sense of being thrust back to a primitive time when nature, and only nature, dictated the rhythms of life.

The Australian tourists, nature children in their own way, lapped all this up with glee. Some of them had their faces painted with white stripes.They took the nudity in stride. I doubt if American tourists would have been as accepting.

Each time a g-stringed man prepared to jump off a platform, the women sang and danced themselves to a frenzy. The would-be jumper would pose and preen, encouraging cheers from the crowd with the wave of his hands. This was his stage, and he made the most of it.

Just before a particular jump, the dancers would fall quiet. When a man made his jump successfully, they roused themselves to another bout of dancing and ululation. The jumping went on for an hour or so. The early jumpers usually jumped from the lower platform whereas the later ones leaped from the higher one.

I went up the hill to observe the activities first hand. The first thing I noticed was that the posts of the tower were secured by stout vines to large trees. The second thing I could not help pay attention to the was the tormenting bunch of insects that whirled above my head and face. Couple that with the warm and humid weather and you have the full flavor of a truly sweaty and buggy tropical adventure!

There were several sessions of n’gol throughout the morning and early afternoon.
I attended the late-morning jumps and spent most of the afternoon swimming in Pentecost Island’s warm, clear waters.

I have not been back to this piece of heaven in the South Pacific, but I can still recall with particular vividness the chants of the bare-breasted women, the thud of men plunging into the earth from 40 feet up and the warm embrace of the truly crystalline waters of Pentecost bay.

There is no place like it on earth, and I hope it remains that way.

Posted by manniep at November 04, 2008 1:45:49am
No Comments Post a Comment Permanent Link Subscribe To Blog

Posts

Links

My Profile

Syndication

This blog is available through RSS.

Add to My Yahoo!

Add to My MSN

Helpful Links