A JOURNAL: Sagada 1978 -Part 1

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
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