Land of the Igorot

We had left base camp in the mountains at sunrise and when we finally reached  Baler, I caught an afternoon bus headed towards the Cordillera (kor-dil-yaer-ah) Mountains. I planned to take the only overnight bus from San Jose to Lagawe. I waited around 3 hours in San Jose and spent part of it talking with the first Igorot man I'd met. Igorot (ee-goh-roht) is the umbrella term for the hundreds or thousands of indigenous cultures that live in the Cordilleras. His beautiful and smart 5-year-old daughter was running circles around us on the side of the road as we had a great discussion about his culture and lifestyle and interesting religious combination (he's an Anglican pastor with a deep Pagan history). He left the Cordilleras to visit his daughter studying in Baler. Apparently, there are tons of Cacanindins in Aurora Province, especially in the towns I had just left. It seems that Cacanindins started in Aringay, La Union and migrated to populate the lowlands surrounding the southern part of the Cordillera range. Feeling like a hitchhiker in a bad spot, I decided to move to a different, safer junction to make sure I didn't miss my bus.

When it finally came, I tried to sleep, but I guess there weren't enough passengers to go the whole way, so there were several transfers to other buses that were waiting for us. The bus that was supposed to go all the way to Lagawe instead stopped at a junction between the major north-south road and a smaller road up into the mountains. I sat on the bench trying to rest for 5 hours to wait for the morning bus. I arrived in Lagawe around 3:30am, waited for the connecting bus to my final destination, Kiangan, and though I didn't move, somehow I missed it. So I hopped in a tricycle and made my way up to the small town of Kiangan just as the sun was rising. I started the 13km trek out from Aurora National Park and 24 hours' sleepless travel later, I had arrived. There was a public plaza/covered basketball court right in the center of town, so I curled up in the bleachers and slept for an hour waiting for the rest of town to wake up.

Rice terraces like a topography map

I met Piotric Rozwalka (from Poland) in Baguio two weeks before, and he was looking for a hiking buddy to do some bigger hikes and share guide fees. Thrilled, we made our plans to meet and start where I was in Kiangan. When the Municipal Hall/Tourist office opened, I went inside only to find that the main contact, Ma'am Lala, was gone for the day. It was a scheduled brown out so rather than waste a day trying to find paperwork to do, she gathered all of the homestay owners and tour guides in the area to do a tour of major tourist sites so that information for their guests would be fresh in their minds. So I tried to find where this group of people was touring around. I tracked them down to their reported first stop, the Surrender Site of General Yamashita and WWII Memorial up the hill. Turns out they weren't there. So I went to visit the Ifugao Museum on the same lot as the memorial. Beautiful artifacts, sculptures, clothes, tools, and photos from the Igorot of the Ifugao region of the Cordilleras were on display. My grandfather had collected some impressive pieces himself over the years, some of which I had seen in the past.


Tired but energized by the cool breeze and warm sun, I continued to track down Ma'am Lala. She had just passed through the office I visited earlier, and moved on to some unknown place. I gathered what information I could about local hikes and places to stay the night, told my informants I would be napping in the plaza, and went to do just that. One hour later, Ma'am Lala gently wakes me by tapping my shoulder, and invites me on this day long visit of all the local sites with most of the people who cater to visitors to Kiangan. I piled into the jeep with these goofy and amazing people and was counting my lucky coins. People usually pay P500 for a day with one guide, and here I got to see everything with all of them for free with a free lunch. We visited all of the places the Lonely Planet guide had recommended, except for a particular waterfall they had visited in the morning. The WWII memorabilia, stories, and photos were pretty cool, but most everything else was kind of disappointing.

I spent half of my time talking with the local Peace Corps volunteer named Daniel, and the other half talking with Jacqueline, a veteran guide. I have built a few opinions from afar about the Peace Corps. Through research looking for work after graduation as well as a book-sized paper on the international aid business, I was generally critical about the Peace Corps. But I reserved judgment and let Daniel talk. I learned about the work, personal motivations and life goals, and overall cultural understanding and experience after 1.5 years in the Philippines for him and for the entire network of Peace Corps volunteers in the Cordilleras. The fact that Daniel didn't even know how to say "Salamat" (thank you) illustrates the depth of experience and effectiveness of the work done by the Peace Corps in this region. I wasn't impressed.

Jacqueline and I

Jacqueline, however, was very impressive. So kind and open and welcoming, she simply cared that I was happy, that I learned and had a good experience. Even money didn't really matter. Piotr arrived in the afternoon and was too engrossed in chess (he's really good) to join on our groups afternoon forays. So when we were done, Jacqueline and I met him in the plaza. I was gonna warn Piotr that the next day I planned to shave my head. Instead, the beautiful curly, Polish mop top he had when we met was gone. He beat me to the razor.

Traditional Ifugao house in the Nagacadan Rice Terraces

Together, Piotr, Jacqueline, and I rode up the hill to the house of her family, where there was supposed to be a place we could camp and cook for the night. Instead, we slept in the middle of the Nagacadan UNESCO World Heritage rice terraces, in the oldest building in the region, an ancient, well-preserved Ifugao hut. Jacqueline's ancestors used this home, and they have plans to turn it into a sort of museum/homestay, but it was still just collecting dust so Piotr and I stayed for free. There was a place to cook on the side, and inside there were artifacts, photographs, and even the original framed document that UNESCO presented to the people of the Nagacadan valley. We ate a huge dinner and digested by watching dozens of fireflies flicker about the coconut palms and rattan vines under a full moon.

Cooking in the house (my pot)

In the morning we prepared to hike 3 hrs to the waterfalls, but Jacqueline arrived with bad news. She was told via text that the police would not allow visitors up into the local mountains because they were chasing some "holduppers" (armed robbers) through the area as the fled to a neighboring barangay over the ridge. So we walked around the beautiful terraces that morning. I heard a rustle in the grass beside me and came eye-to-eye with a beautiful, large snake. It was yellowish-brown with a black tail, medium thickness and the head of a venomous snake. We watched each other but when Piotr lumbered over to see it, it whipped away into the grasses. Owls, snakes, crows, rats, worms, and cats are the wildlife of rice terraces and fields. Irrigation systems and the walls of the terraces require endless effort to build and maintain. UNESCO values those made of stone because they are easier to date. There are mixed feelings among the people as to the value or damage caused by UNESCO involvement, which led to few benefits and tons of regulations. I shaved my head, we read books, and spent a relaxing day talking and doing nothing.

The next day we got to go to the waterfalls. We started walking up the road and passed a huge boulder with spiritual significance woven into its history. Then we caught a ride on the back of a big work truck all the rest of the way to the falls. The trail to the basin was washed away by a recent landslide, but the headwaters of this 100m-tall falls were beautiful and cool. We hiked back down through the valley, passing by the school, where Jacqueline explained the dizzying, difficult logistics and costs of construction in remote villages.

Eating pomelo with Jaqueline's father

Each locale I have visited has a couple of things growing in abundance that people just give away for free. Here, it was sayote (green vine vegetable and so much of them that they were lying in the roads) and pomelos (P75 each in the Kiangan market). It's a fruit like grapefruit but with 3cm of the soft white pulp between the rind and the flesh. We gave our many thanks and added a little to the guide price, gathered a few extra pomelos and sayotes for the road, and walked back down to Kiangan. We then hitched our way to Lagawe, caught a jeep to famous Banaue, and met with Jacqueline's friend, Lopez.

Big spiritual boulder

Lopez was expecting to be our hiking guide in Batad, but when we explained our ambitions to climb Mt Amuyao the hard way, he decided he would pass the job to another guide in their network named Rambo Polygon. Yes, it's a nickname. We gathered vegetables and started walking to Batad because we missed the last jeep. We arrived 15km and an hour after dark to the junction of the road up to Batad. We stayed at the house of a man living there and working on the roads. They were a beautiful family struggling to survive on only his paycheck because their son was very young and still needed his mother all day.

Landslide

Piotr wants another pomelo

We bid our farewells in the morning, walked 2km up the hill to the saddle, rested at a lookout spot, and then walked down the other side into the small town of Batad. On the way down, I bid a woman good morning in Tagalog, and she was one of the first people here that responded in Tagalog, encouraging me to practice by staying away from her nearly flawless English in favor of the national tongue. I really appreciated it. All throughout our walks, Piotr and I had many discussions about our lives, about international relations, Western culture and corruption, random philosophies we ponder, European history, even differences in education styles between Poland and the United States. As we reached town, we ran into Rambo, our future guide. He arranged to meet us later at a hotel where we decided to leave our things.

Tappia Waterfalls

Guides charge P400-500 to walk visitors across the rice fields to a steep trail down to Tappia Waterfalls. We made our way over on our own just fine, and we carried lunch and pot to reheat by fire at the bottom. The falls and the hike were awesome, and at the bottom, we didn't even need to start a fire because a guide for another group had already started one out of boredom. Piotr and I had so much luck with food in all of our times together. Not once did we eat a cold dinner or lunch in the span of almost two weeks. On the way back, we passed through a different part of Batad village. There was a woman who was weaving clothes and decorations using everything traditional (and mostly for tourists). Piotr bought one for a Christmas gift.



We got back to where we left our things and spied a guitar hanging on the wall. It was tuned up and ready to go so I pulled it down and relished in our luck. Then Poitr gave me a great lesson in chess, talking through possible moves, advantages and disadvantages, basic strategies and such until Rambo walked in an hour after he had planned. He took us to his house where we made dinner, and prepared for bed. Rambo said he'd return soon but we still hadn't even talked prices for our climb, so Piotr and I settled into bed with eyes and ears open for Rambo's return. Not too much later, he came in, and we chatted about the next day. Rambo had a strange way of describing the trip, and some of what he said was slightly inconsistent. Inconsistencies are common when someone's having trouble with English, so I wrote it off. The price was decent especially compared to other guide quotes we'd heard. He warned us of several strange fees to guards at the top, local villages that take care of paths, the communist New People's Army, and so on, so we had a strange idea of what the next day would bring. We slept well and set off in the morning for an adventure.

Leaving Nagacadan for Kiangan