Where Bad Catholics Go

In this predominantly Catholic country, most people spend the Holy Week taking part in church activities or at least taking some rest at home or in a serene resort. The bad ones, though, grab the opportunity to meet and gamble, and one of their destinations is a dreary hamlet somewhere in Masiag village, Bagumbayan town.

I was there on Good Friday with the gamblers, so you may judge my moral character. My sin, though, is not as grave as the others’ because I didn’t bet. I just watched the horse-fighting event. It was my first time to watch such an event, though I had plenty of opportunities to do so before. For one reason or another, I would not grab the opportunity.



I had expected a horse fight to be similar to a cockfight, where the opponents would be at each other’s throat almost without rest. To my surprise, the horses spent more time sniffing each other than biting or kicking. I learned from someone, though, that intense fighting do happen but usually between “rated” or high-caliber horses only. The three fights I witnessed were just arranged that day. The owners brought their horses to the venue and spent the whole morning negotiating with one another. The fights took place in the afternoon. One of the three fights was just a “test fight” because the owners failed to find enough supporters to finance the wager.

If you noticed in the video above, there’s a gray horse tied at the center of the arena. It’s a female horse. Male horses will only fight if there’s a female around. To agitate the horses, each of the males are first brought near the female. The owner would let his horse try to copulate with the female, but the owner would cut the courting short. When this has been done to both horses, they are released. They will then fight. They are actually fighting over the female, not to prove to each other who is stronger or who should own the territory. If the males just keep on sniffing each other or standing with the female between them, one of the organizers would hit the female with a stick or loosen its rope so that it would move around and the males would be after her and against each other.

If you listen to the video, you can hear people, including kids, yelling and cheering, demanding more action, more gore, while you don’t hear anything from me. I’m simply not thrilled at the sight of two horses trying to kill each other at the orchestration of human beings. I don’t even watch boxing or mixed martial arts on TV; they’re not sports for me. I went to watch the horse-fighting event just out of curiosity, and now I know that it’s one curiosity that should have not been satisfied. I guess I’m not that bad a Catholic at all.

One of the defeated horses. Its left eye, not seen in the photo, is also bloody. While the owner was tying the horse to a tree, his wife approached him and said, “See, I told you not to agree to the fight. The opponent is much bigger!”

Five Fingers Cave in Guano

Sitio Guano in Barangay Masiag, Municipality of Bagumbayan, is locally known for its wide-mouthed cave. It’s not the only pride of the place, though. It has another cave, lesser known but equally interesting. It’s called Five Fingers. From the center of the hamlet, you must go down the hill on the north to reach Guano Cave and you must go down the hill on the west to reach Five Fingers.

Below are some of the photos I took of Five Fingers. I wish I had taken better photos and some videos. I failed to because I was already so tired when we got to the cave. We had gone up the Toro-toro the previous day, and we had gone to Guano Cave the previous few hours. Besides, I had not yet decided whether to write about the experience for this blog. I just wanted to enjoy the sights, or more accurately, to survive the walk.

At the mouth of the cave. To get here, you must walk down a steep hill for about twenty minutes.

Five Fingers took its name from the stone formation at the mouth of the cave. The big rocks jutting down from the roof look like human fingers.

The cave is a series of narrow passages and spacious chambers. The first narrow passage is particularly challenging, scary even. You have to twist your body sideways to go through it. On the way back, the best thing to do is to pass through it feet first.

Looks like ice cream, tastes like, well, stone.

Squid tentacles, corroded iron bars, or stalactites?

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.

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.