The Wide-Mouthed Guano Cave

My relatives and their neighbors had been telling me that the mouth of the Guano Cave was really huge. “You could park ten trucks in it,” one of them said. I took their statements with a grain of salt. Having seen the White Cave of Kuden village in the town of Senator Ninoy Aquino, I couldn’t be easily impressed with any other cave in terms of size or grandeur.

When I got to Guano Cave, I realized that my relatives and their neighbors were right. The adjective huge is indeed not enough to describe the entrance of the cave. You have to pair it with at least one bad adverbs, such as amazingly or incredibly. To be mathematical, my estimate is that it is at least thirty meters wide and thirty meters high at its narrowest point. It’s difficult to pinpoint where the entrance starts because the cave is at the foot of a hill and the entire face of the hill is bald, rocky, and gradually sloping inward. I realized that Guano Cave is a beauty on its own and should not be compared with the White Cave.

My nephews and their friends strike a pose at the mouth of Guano Cave.

From where they are, they still have to walk down for at least

twenty meters to enter the cave.

I think one of the contributing factor to the enormity of the Guano Cave is its stream. It flows into the cave instead of out of it. When I visited the cave, though, the stream no longer entered the cave. It must have become stagnant in a certain spot or diverted into a sinkhole. I knew about the stream because my nephews told me they had seen it during their previous visit. Its dried-up course was also discernible. Furthermore, the stream was visible on our way down to the cave.

To reach the cave from the road, we had to walk down a steep hill for fifteen to twenty minutes. The walk down was a breeze. The walk up took much longer and tested the limits of my legs and lungs.

Another distinctive feature of the cave is its gray and tiny stalactites.

Guano refers to bird or bat excrement used as a fertilizer. Maybe there used to be a considerable amount of guano in the cave, and it is why the cave and the hamlet where it is located is named after the substance. When I went there, though, the floor of the cave is rather clean of droppings, though there was a good number of swifts flying around. One of my companions even found a hatchling. Its body was already fully covered with black feathers, but it could only fly for two meters or so. We made the wee bird perch on our fingers and had our photos taken. For a moment I was tempted to take the bird home, but after thinking about what taking care of it entailed, I let my companion return the bird to the tiny ledge on the wall where he had found it.

My estimate is that at least three hundred people visited the cave on the day that I went there. It was Good Friday, and many people made visiting the cave some sort of pilgrimage even though there’s nothing religious there.

Aside from its incredibly huge mouth, what I find interesting in Guano Cave is its roof near the mouth. The surface is gray, and the stalactites were tiny, wrinkled, and bunched up. In the inner chambers, though, the surface and stone formations look like the interior of most other caves. Check out the short video I made. I’m a little frustrated because none of my photos and video clips could do justice to the grandeur of the Guano Cave, especially its mouth. You have to see it for yourself. And I say this without any reservation. It is one of my favorite now, and if I have to give a friend a tour of Kulaman Plateau, the cave will surely be in my list of destinations.