Holy Week in Bagumbayan Town

My companions were laughing at how badass we must have looked, and in my mind I told myself I had no business being with them. As a thirty-year-old, I was supposed to be mature and responsible. I had no business riding a motorcycle in a rocky and sloping road with five other guys. Even if the motorcycle was designed to carry several passengers, it still didn’t have enough space for us. Two among us had to sit on the tank in front of the driver—sideways, one on the other’s lap.

My companions, including the driver, were my younger brother and my nephews. They were aged sixteen to twenty and thus had an excuse to be wild and free and stupid. I had none, except maybe for the fact that I didn’t have much choice. Riding the motorcycle all together was the most efficient way for us to get where we were headed.

It was Good Friday of this year, and we were on our way to Guano—a sitio (hamlet) of Masiag village, Bagumbayan town—to explore the two caves in the area and watch a series of horse fights. We had come from the nearby village of Monteverde, where the previous day, Holy Thursday, we scaled the Toro-toro, one of the most distinctive peaks of Cotabato Cordillera.

The road between Masiag and Monteverde, just like most of the roads in the mountains of Bagumbayan, made for a most inconvenient ride. We were a little lucky because El Niño had been going on for months and the road had been dry. We only had to negotiate protruding rocks. During rainy days, the rocks, exacerbated by mud, could make the road so dangerous that many people traveling in the area for the first time would cry, swear not to come back, or both.

Our cramped arrangement elicited jokes from my nephews about squashed penises and torn asses. The whole thing was a harmless joke for them, while I was thinking that if my nephew who was driving made even just a minor lapse in judgment, or one of us passengers moved when we were not supposed to, it would be such a tragedy for the entire family. My parents would be left childless. Fortunately and unfortunately, I didn’t have to worry about accidents. The mere act of breathing was difficult. Whenever the motorcycle was running downhill or along a stretch of half-buried rocks, our chests would press or bump hard against each other, which made me understand the pre-mortem agony of stampede victims.

The ride was over in just thirty minutes or so, but because mortal danger hanged in the air in every minute of it, it felt as though we would never reach our destination. It was the most dangerous part of my four-day visit to the village of Monteverde, specifically in Sitio Miasong, where my cousin and her family lives. (On our way back from Sitio Guano, two of my nephews rode other motorcycles.) The ride, though, was neither the most challenging nor physically demanding. As mentioned earlier, we climbed a mountain and explored caves (which also involved climbing mountains). We also helped empty a pond to harvest the fish in it, watched a horse-fighting event, and spent idle hours with relatives catching up on one another’s lives. It was an experience worth sharing, I believe, and in the coming days, I will make additional posts on some of those activities.

Photos: (1) It seems to me that there are balete trees everywhere in Sitio Miasong. The tree normally starts as a small plant that clings to and sucks the life out of another tree. (2) The mouth of Guano Cave looks big in this photo, but I tell you, it’s way bigger in person. (3) My brother tries to hide his exhaustion behind a smile. The peak of the Toro-toro looks so near on this spot, but the worst of our trek is yet to come.