The Hundred Caves of Kulaman

I like saying “the hundred caves of Kulaman.” It sounds like “the hundred islands of Pangasinan.” I hope the former phrase will be as well known as the latter.

I first heard about the three-figure caves of Kulaman Plateau in a promotional video on Sultan Kudarat Province, which I featured in a previous post. At first I thought the number was an exaggeration. A hundred caves in just one town. Are you kidding me? But when I googled more about caves and read about karst topography, I learned that Kulaman indeed might be more holey than I knew. Beneath the mostly slash-and-burned land could be a maze of tunnels formed for thousands of years by acidic water eating into limestone.

Karst means “an irregular limestone region with sinks, underground streams, and caverns.” I have not seen any official-looking website describe Kulaman’s topography as karstic, but an adventurer or so have done so in an online forum. Judging by what I know of Kulaman firsthand, the description may be accurate.

The limestone burial jars that are now in Cebu City were found in the caves in the western part of Kulaman Plateau. A decade or so ago, world-class caves were discovered in the hamlet of Lagbasan, and the site has since drawn considerable attention from the spelunking community. I’ve heard of several more cave sites in the plateau, but I’ve gone to only one of them, a large-mouthed cave in the village of Tacupis.

Me and my mum in the mouth of Tacupis Cave, stretching out the wings of hapless bats

I mentioned the cave in an essay that was published in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. It is quite an accessible cave, only a hundred meters or so from the road. (The road, though, isn’t so accessible.) It is even likely that a settlement appeared in the area because of the cave. From the cave’s mouth, about ten feet high and twenty feet wide, gushes forth a steady stream, which didn’t dry up even during the worst days of El Niño in the late nineties.

The cave is beside the farmland my mother and her siblings own, and I went inside it with about twenty relatives when I was six or seven. I found the cave beautiful, but not really breathtaking or awesome. The soil near the mouth was muddy, but the sand deeper inside was smooth. The water was cold and fresh. The stalactites were huge (to me, then). And hundreds of bats flapped noisily around. They were closely knit animals, because they huddled together in the ceiling, forming dark circles here and there.

Me on my uncle’s shoulders, with muddy legs and reaching up a nest of bats

Now a weird thing happened during that spelunking experience. Before we went to the cave site, my aunts and uncles talked about the figure of a naked woman sculpted on the wall of the cave, so I expected to see it. On our way to the cave, two cousins my age rushed ahead of the party. I followed them but wasn’t able to keep up. When I reached the front of the cave, the two boys were already inside, but still near the mouth.

My cousins could not keep aflame their mitsa, an improvised lamp made from a rum bottle with a piece of cloth as a wicker and kerosene as fuel. Nobody brought flashlights because my uncles and aunts believed engkantos (fairies) living in the cave would make modern gadgets malfunction and we could be trapped inside. When the other boys lit up the mitsa one more time, I saw the cave glow in green light, and I saw the sculpture on the wall. The woman had long hair and was naked.

The flame of the lamp petered out again. The next time it was lit, reddish light bathed the cave and the woman on the wall.

The others arrived and we all went inside. I didn’t enjoy much the adventure. I was trembling all the time because everything—the air, the water, the soil—was cold. I was also scared because a bat might bite me in the neck and the whimsical engkantos might decide not to let us out of the cave.

Fortunately, the engkantos didn’t feel like playing tricks on us that time. We got out of the cave alive, unharmed, no one of us missing, and with live bats as souvenirs. (I brought a couple of bats to my grandmother’s house in the next village, where my family spent the next night. I left the teeny-weeny stinky creatures hanging on a bamboo stick in the kitchen. When I woke up in the morning, they were gone.)

I didn’t tell anyone about the woman on the wall, thinking everyone else had seen it. More than ten years later, when I was already seventeen or eighteen, a cousin and I happened to talk about the cave. He lived on the family farmland, so he was quite familiar with the cave. When I mentioned the sculpture, he told me I could have not seen it because some treasure hunters had torn it down a few years before my visit. I insisted I really saw a woman and told my cousin about the green and red light. He insisted that there was no longer a woman there. I let the topic go and wondered, even up to this day, what I really saw.

Hmmm. The mystical cave of Tacupis? More on caves next week.