March Updates

Instead of putting postscripts and addenda to posts, I decided to gather all of them in a single entry. Hence, this post. I also had something like this for February, and this might be a monthly feature of this blog. With this system, I will be able later on to keep track of my changes to this blog, my corrections to posts, and the like.

In my March 4 post, specifically in the fifth paragraph, I created a link to one of my essays that appeared in the Philippine Daily Inquirer. After the piece was published, I found out that the villages I mentioned toward the end are not really named after geographical features. Valley in Dulangan Manobo is lepak, cave is takub, and stream is wayeg. Kulaman takes its name from a Manobo ruler, while I have yet to research why Tacupis and Basag are so called. I wrote that essay while I was away from Kulaman and had no reliable source. My bad.

In January 27, as I was typing my posts for this month, a swift darted inside the house and flew in circles for nearly ten minutes. When the bird came in, I stopped typing, lay still, and watched it. It was black but had a gray underside. It flapped its wing in a dizzying speed, and I promptly learned that how appropriate its name was. I thought of closing the door so that the swift would be trapped inside the house, but my better self prevailed. The bird was probably looking for a nesting place. It kept on touching the wooden ceiling with its beak, producing a dull thud each time. Once it rested on the ceiling upside down, but only for less than a second. I had been observing the bird for more maybe more than two minutes when I thought of checking the time in my laptop. It was 11: 36 a.m. The tiny guest continued flying until 11: 40, often whizzing past my face as close as less than ten inches. It then flew out of the house and came back in an instant. It stayed for two minutes more before deciding our house was not a good replacement for a cave. Maybe it also realized that I might be greedy and I would take its saliva-coated nest and sell it. I was left on the couch a little lightheaded and suffering from a mild stiff neck. My point for writing this is, you only get to have such a simple wonderful experience here in a plateau.

Rafael Tianero, Manobo Advocate

After quoting him generously in previous posts, I guess I owe Fr. Rafael Tianero a blog entry dedicated solely to him. He is one of the notable advocates of the Dulangan Manobo, which I have featured and will feature in this blog.

Tianero is a priest of the Oblates Mary Immaculate, which has a main office in Cotabato City. As a seminarian, he studied philosophy at Notre Dame University. Right after his ordination, in 1989, Tianero was assigned to work with the Dulangan Manobo. His experience with them led him to earn a master’s degree in anthropology at Ateneo de Manila University. His thesis was later published by Notre Dame University Press with the title Violence and Christianization in Manoboland.

Karl Gaspar, another notable advocate of indigenous peoples, has this to say about Tianero and his book: “Because of the ethnographic study conducted by Fr. Raffy . . . the Dulangan Manobo are no longer an invisible indigenous people . . . The Dulangan Manobo considered him not just a friend but a kinsman. It is from this privileged position as an insider that Fr. Raffy constructs the texts that reach out to us, so that we too could share his passion to be in solidarity with them.”

Tinalon Cave Resort

Words flow out of my mind faster when I write personal essays, so to keep the momentum, I’ll continue writing about my experiences in Kulaman Plateau and take some breather from summarizing or quoting academic texts. As a follow-up to my posts on the hundred caves of Kulaman, I’ll feature today the one that is in the village of Tinalon.

Along with Lagbasan Cave, Tinalon Cave Resort is the tourist spot in Kulaman that has a strong presence in the online world. I see pictures of the resort in Facebook, and I’ve been planning for some time now to go back there and take a wide-angled photo for my Facebook cover. For now, though, let me just narrate my experience there two years ago. People I know say nothing much has changed since, so my descriptions may still be accurate.

Photo from here. No copyright infringement intended.

I wasn’t able to go inside the cave. The mouth was small and you had to squeeze through to get inside. Not enticing. The cave anyway, was not really the main attraction there. Most locals went there to swim. The resort had two swimming pools, one for children and another for adults. The best thing about the place was the water, coming from the stream flowing out of the cave and carried to the pools by large black pipes.

The water, however, was too cold for me. I had just got back to Kulaman then, after staying most of the time away from home for more than ten years. I had been used to the hellish temperatures of Isulan, Koronadal, and Cebu, and Kulaman felt like the North Pole to me. It didn’t help that it was drizzling when my companions and I went to Tinalon. I dove into the water, paddled like a dog, and sat on the edge of the pool shirtless and shivering. I didn’t so much as dip my fingers into the water again. Now that I’m used to the temperature of Kulaman, though, I’ll probably enjoy the water in Tinalon Resort.

As to the cave, some relatives who had been inside told me that it wasn’t much different from other caves. If you came to Kulaman for spelunking, it’s better to head straight to Lagbasan Cave.

The swimming pools in Tinalon were rather crudely made. The floor wasn’t tiled and was thick with moss, making it slippery and a little dangerous. Cottages for an overnight stay were available. It was a good place for a honeymoon. For the whole day you could swim, go inside the cave, swim again, and go inside the smaller cave (wink). If you’re the type who likes swimming in a chlorinated pool with artificial waves, Tinalon Resort is not for you. But if you’re a nature-loving backpacker, Tinalon’s simple beauty will charm you. 

Lagbasan Cave

The previous post, I wrote about the mystical cave of Tacupis, whose beauty was marred by human activities. Fortunately, the same thing might not happen to the well-preserved Lagbasan Cave.

I don’t know when exactly the cave was discovered, probably not more than ten years ago. It is touted to be world-class and was the main site of a Mindanao-wide spelunking summit a few years ago.

I’m dying to visit the cave myself, but because I have other priorities now, I will have to give you secondhand information again. My excuse is that this is a research blog, not a personal adventure or travel blog. So I’m afraid all I can do is recount the story of my cousin who had been inside the cave and give you related links to online forums and other blogs.

As to the links, however, it looks like there are only a few that are worth your time. When I googled “Lagbasan Cave,” most of the results led me to search engine–optimized blog posts that contained useless crap. The following sites, though, have some nice photos and helpful info:

• Mindanao Magazine
• Balita.ph
• Mountaineering Blog

I have a feeling that, unlike most things, the huge gypsum flowers look more magical when seen in the actual site than in photo. Going inside Lagbasan Cave should be in my bucket list.

A cousin of mine and her friends went inside the cave sometime last year. She said the cave was about two hours away by motorcycle from Kulaman proper. The entrance fee was P250 per head, but her group haggled with the tour guide (which I suggest you don’t; help boost the tourism income of the local government). Only one chamber was open to the public, and a special permission was needed to see the other chambers. The cave’s mouth was small. My cousin and her friends had to crawl through the opening one at a time. But all the difficulties, especially the torturous motorcycle ride on muddy road and the long walk through dense thickets, were worth it, she said.

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.