The World-Class White Cave of Sultan Kudarat

Hidden in the mountains of South Central Mindanao, more than 900 meters above sea level, is a cave that is perhaps the most beautiful in the country and no doubt one of the most beautiful in the world. The cave, located in the village of Kuden in Senator Ninoy Aquino town, Sultan Kudarat province, was discovered just the previous decade, so it has been known only to the locals and to a handful of spelunkers, travel bloggers, and tourists. Though the underground paradise has been given the name “Lagbasan Cave,” after the Dulangan Manobo term for “bypass,” a more fitting name would be “White Cave,” for the cavern is swathed from the floor to the ceiling with immaculate white and cream-colored stone formations.

White Cave so far has been found to have at least three chambers, but for conservation reasons, only one is open to tourists. The chamber, though, offers more than enough. It is at least 40 meters wide, 50 meters high, and 250 meters long, and more than 80 percent of it is covered with stalactites, stalagmites, and other speleothems. The first ones to greet you are columns, many of which are taller than an average human being. Formed millimeter by millimeter over thousands of years, they look like corals piled on top of one another and then coated with milk. But don’t think that you’ve seen the best feature of the cave. The view gets more and more awe-inspiring as you walk further.

The floor of the cave is not even. It is composed of tiny hills filled with stone formations of various shapes and sizes, each one a beauty, like a garden of wild flowers left to grow freely. The tourist guide will lead you through a maze of flowstones, gypsum flowers, stalagmites, and columns, and to reiterate, these rocks and clusters of rocks are white or off-white. In some spots, you have to hold on to ropes to pull yourself up a slope or across a small crevice. The landscape is dreamlike, but some of the rocks, or their parts, uncannily resemble familiar objects, such as dog’s teeth, transparent straws, a large piggy bank, and a figurine of Cupid. At the end of the chamber is a flat area the size of a basketball court, and on one side of it is a mass of rock that looks like a huge multi-layered throne. On the opposite side is a long deep trench draped with stalactites.

An expert from the National Speleological Society of the United States, consulted by the Department of Tourism, explored White Cave in 2008 and called it world-class. He also said that some of the stone formations in the cave are so unusual that they do not fit existing classifications. But despite the seemingly hyperbolic yet accurate descriptions of the tourist spot, it has remained largely a secret. This is due to the remoteness of its location. From Isulan, the capital town of Sultan Kudarat, SNA is two to three hours away by jeepney, van, or skylab (public utility motorcycle). To get to Kuden from the capital village of SNA, you may hire a skylab or use your own vehicle. The trip takes fifteen to twenty minutes only. However, from the center of Kuden to its hamlet of Siokong, where White Cave is located, you have to travel again for two hours, and from the center of Siokong to the cave, you have to climb on foot a forested slope for forty minutes. You might wonder if seeing the cave is worth the effort. Among those who have been there, the answer is a resounding yes.

If you’re planning your next getaway, SNA might just be the perfect place for you. It’s destined to be the Sagada of Mindanao. Like the well-known backpacking destination in Luzon, SNA is mountainous and home to indigenous people—not Igorots, however, but Dulangan Manobos, one of the least documented lumads—though majority of the local population now is Ilonggos, Ilocanos, and Cebuanos who migrated to the area half a century ago. Similar to Sagada’s hanging coffins, SNA has limestone burial jars, estimated to be 1,500 years old, but these jars have not been preserved or curated in the town, and most of them have been taken away. (They are on display now at the Museum of the Filipino People in Luneta, the Ayalas-owned museums in Makati and Davao, the university museums in Cebu and Dumaguete, and in some private galleries.) Furthermore, White Cave is just one of the dozens of caves that SNA has, and coffee is flowing in the town. SNA produces about 25 percent of coffee in Sultan Kudarat, and Sultan Kudarat, the number 1 coffee-producing province in the Philippines, produces about 25 percent of coffee in the country.

To get to White Cave, you must coordinate with the local government of Kuden, for the village keeps the key—literally. To protect the cave from reckless adventurers and souvenir hunters, the local government installed at the narrow entrance a small door made of steel bars. The village also collects an entrance fee of P170 per head and imposes a minimum requirement of 10 tourists per visit. Solo backpackers or small groups are welcome, but you must pay the minimum fee. And to make sure you don’t get lost in Sultan Kudarat province, tell the people, especially the drivers, that you’re going to Kulaman, not Senator Ninoy Aquino or SNA. Though the town has been using its official name for almost thirty years, people in the province still use the name of the capital village even when referring to the whole town. In many local campaign materials, Kulaman is touted as a land of “a hundred caves with a thousand thrills.” That’s a fitting description. To experience the thousand thrills, though, you don’t have to visit all the one hundred caves or so. One cave, the White Cave of Kuden, is enough. More than enough.

(Blogger’s note: The photos above are owned by the tourism office of the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino. I wrote this piece for the travel website of a major television network, but I decided not to submit at the last minute. I don’t like the way the editor is handling contributions. The section of the site that I wanted to be part of is something like citizen journalism. I noticed, however, that the editor uses her own byline and then just mentions the source in the article. She must have reasons. Maybe the contributions are badly written and she has to do a lot of revisions. All the same, I believe that there is no enough justification to deprive contributors of due recognition. The website does not pay them after all, and it is part of the job of an editor to polish accepted submissions.)

A Glimpse of White Cave

No, this is not a gooey baby alien. This very hard rock

is a chunk of a speleothem from the White Cave of Kulaman. 

I visited the provincial museum last week to see the limestone burial jar that I had heard was on display there. To my surprise, the jar was not the only item in the museum that came from Kulaman Plateau. The bare collection also included a chunk of speleothem from the White Cave in Sitio Siokong, Barangay Kuden.

When the staff pointed the smooth white rock to me and said it was from a cave in the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, I was appalled. Tourists aren't supposed to touch the stone formations in the cave, much less take a chunk and bring it home. But since the deed has been done, I guess there's no point going ballistic over it. I just hope that (1) the rock was taken out of the cave for the sole purpose of displaying it in the museum, (2) no other rock has been taken out of the cave, (3) a similar thing will not happen in the future.

I noticed that the piece of speleothem looked different when shone upon by sunlight. It was slightly translucent. Inside the cave, where only flashlights and similar devices could be used, the stalactites, stalagmites, and other limestone formations looked solid. Artificial light seemed to bounce off the smooth surface.

The provincial museum, which also serves

as the local tourism office, is at the back

of the capitol, about 30 meters away.

The Undiscovered Burial Jars (Part 2 of 2)

I missed my weekly deadline again. Though this post is dated July 15, Monday, I'm actually writing this on July 21, Sunday. Thanks to Blogger's scheduling feature; I can pre-schedule, and post-schedule, my posts. But I want to be honest with you, very few constant readers of this blog, and confess that I sometimes neglect my responsibility as a writer. (Yes, I believe I have a responsibility, though some might say this is "just a blog.")

For the past few weeks, I've been having trouble managing my time. To tell you more about my personal life, I've been given more responsibility at work (okay, enough with the humility: I've been promoted) and I enrolled in a master's degree this June here in Cebu. I believe, though, that I have learned to adjust my schedule to accommodate the new challenges, so I might be able to update this blog as promised for the rest of the year.

Now let's proceed to what I should really be talking about—the limestone burial jars left in Kulaman Plateau. As I revealed in the previous post, I found out last summer that not all the jars had been taken away from my hometown. But the ones that were still there had not been properly preserved. I found a burial jar for a baby at the barangay hall of Kuden, left lying in a corner and sometimes used as a trash bin. The barangay chairman said there were more jars at a cave that was still within the territory of the village but two hours away by motorcycle. The jars there, though, the chairman added, had been shattered to pieces.

It so happened that I was in Kuden to visit the White Cave, which had been generating tourism buzz, and the cave where the burial jars were was near the White Cave. I asked the tourist guide if he could let me see the jars cave, and he said yes. Unfortunately, I underestimated the toil from the trip. Going to the White Cave was exhausting, to say the least, so I begged off and told the guide I would just come back some other time to see the jars.

I was sure, though, that the jars were still there because we came across a sample on our way to the White Cave. It was just a cover, but having seen a number of limestone jars, I could tell that it was authentic. Judging by the way it looked, I believe it had been in that spot for several years only. The thin layer of dirt and moss all over it indicated that it had not been exposed to the elements for long.

A cover of a burial jar lying near the footpath to the White Cave.

It must have been taken from a cave several years ago,

perhaps to be sold, but for some reason, the transaction fell through.

 
The cover was lying near the footpath that my companions and I were treading. The reason for its being there was that some people had tried to carry it from the cave to the populated district of the village, probably to be sold. The barangay chairman of Kuden had told me and my companions earlier that a trading had really occurred in the not-so-distant past. He said the indigenous people in the area took some jars from a cave to prospectors who came from the lowlands. However, the buyers allegedly took the jars without paying the natives, so in their anger, the natives went back to the cave and smashed the remaining jars in pieces.

I had no way of verifying the story, so I took it with a grain of salt. Surely, the true story is more complex and less racist than the chairman's version. If it's true, those who took the jars must have not come from the academe. They're probably treasure hunters. Kuden is not one of the locations where formal research on the burial jars have been conducted. Marcelino Maceda of the University of San Carlos in Cebu, in 1960s, studied (and took away) the jars of Menteng, at present a district of Barangay Tinalon, just beside Barangay Kuden. The jars that are now in Silliman University in Negros came from Salangsang, at present a barangay of the municipality of Lebak, a little farther from Kuden.

Although destroyed, the jars in Kuden is in their original location, so they can still be a good subject of an archaeological research. I hope one will be conducted soon, before they disappear at the hands of hungry looters or selfish wealthy collectors.

The Hidden Treasure of Kulaman (Part 2 of 2)

(The first part of this post appeared on May 13, last month.)

Something was telling Santiago not to walk straight ahead into the darkness. He groped at the wall of the cave and treaded on the muddy slope. He climbed down for about thirty meters before his flashlight shone on even ground. He stared back at where he had come from, and was horrified at the sight of a steep cliff a dozen times his height. If he did not keep close to the wall, he would be digging his grave instead of gold. The cave was a fully enclosed cathedral. It did not have a huge doorway in front. The only opening it had was a small window on top of the bell tower.

He continued exploring the cave. In a short while, the beam of light from his flashlight hit something lightly colored. He examined it closely. It was an oddly shaped column that stood taller than he. It looked like a very tall coral, but its surface was smooth and as white as milk. It looked soft and even edible, but when Santiago touched it, his finger curled at the hardness of the stone. It felt much more compact than concrete.

Santiago wondered if he could sell the thing, if it would fetch as high as the price of gold. He thought right away, though, that cutting the oddly shaped column is much more difficult than digging a hole. He walked on—and found hundreds of similar stone formations, competing with one another in size and grandeur and strangeness. Santiago trembled in awe. God seemed to have coated the whole interior of the cave with thick, divine white paint. It was his secret playground. Santiago fell to his knees. At last, he found the treasure he had been looking for. It was not in the form of gold, and it was something he would not want to sell.

Now, eight years since, Santiago visits the cave regularly, taking along with him tourists, spelunkers, and speleologists. The tourists usually whine on the long and torturous trip. Santiago assists them with their needs and just smiles to himself. He witnesses such a situation often. He knows that when the visitors reach the cave, they will utter one pleasant interjection after another and say all the hardship is worth it. He receives a modest commission from the fee that visitors pay the local government. It's just enough to get by, but he's not complaining. He's happy. He's got something more precious than gold, something priceless. In the cave, people tell him they have not seen anything more beautiful.

The Hidden Treasure of Kulaman (Part 1 of 2)

Charito Santiago had spent all his life looking for hidden treasures left by fleeing Japanese soldiers in World War II. With fellow prospectors and wanderers, he had dug many a hole around Kulaman (official name: Senator Ninoy Aquino), a town in Sultan Kudarat situated some 800 meters above sea level. He didn’t know that the Japanese could not have set foot in his hometown. The invaders had occupied major cities and towns, such as Davao and Koronadal, and Kulaman in 1940s was a dense jungle populated only by loosely organized Manobo people.

Santiago had become a senior citizen—his missing teeth had made him look as though he was sucking in his cheeks; his bronze skin had turned gray, like fresh-from-the-sack cement—and the hidden Japanese treasure still remained hidden from him. His family was only able to make both ends meet because he farmed and did some odd jobs when not digging holes. In 2005, with a string of failures behind him and the clock ticking, Santiago had almost given up his dream of finding the elusive treasure, when a Manobo friend of his told him of something that brought vigor to his veins. He felt as though he was young again, and endless possibilities—bottomless wealth!—were waiting for him. Kampo Dapat, a tribal chieftain, told Santiago that he had discovered a “tunnel.”

Like his Ilocano friend Santiago, Datu Dapat was nearing the end of his life. He was younger than Santiago, but he would die much sooner, as Manobo people had shorter life-spans and were more susceptible to diseases than the Christian settlers, who started flocking to Kulaman in search of fertile soil in 1970s.

The tunnel was near the top of a mountain, about 900 meters above sea level, and the mountain was not distinct from the other peaks around it—filled with towering trees and weeds that were taller than human beings. At first what Dapat saw was a mere groove on a wall of rock and not a tunnel. He did not even notice the opening until a bird flew past him and disappeared into it. The hole was large enough for a puny man like Dapat to crawl in, but he did not dare venture in. He had a suspicion that the tunnel would lead him into a lair of pythons, but much more than the huge snakes, he was afraid of a busaw, or evil spirit, that might be inhabiting in the hole.

No python or busaw could get in Santiago’s way to his last chance at finding a chest filled with gold bars or a gilded statue of Buddha. Armed with a spade and four flashlights, he inched his way through the tunnel. The spade was almost useless. He could barely budge, and he had to crawl like a python. His hand pushed and scooped aside the sticky mud as he moved forward. He could barely breathe, and he could not tell if it was because of excitement of being so close to a treasure or because of decreased amount of oxygen in the air.

About seven meters from the entrance, as Santiago was about to lose his breath, he felt cold air caress his face. He had reached the end of the tunnel. But instead of bumping into a metallic chest inscribed with Japanese characters, he was ushered into an immense space. He pointed his flashlight straight ahead, and the ray of light dispersed in the darkness. Something screeched, and the sound brought disappointment instead of fear in Santiago’s heart. He instantly recognized the sound as that of a bat—just a bat. It meant he had discovered a cave—just a cave, not necessarily a hideaway for stolen treasures.

As Santiago stood up and stared at the nothingness in front of him, he wondered if all his efforts were worth it. The cave was in Siokong, a sitio, or hamlet, of Barangay Kuden. Though Santiago was living in the same village, Siokong was quite far from his home at the center of the village. From the barangay hall, he had traveled by motorcycle on rough road for nearly two hours to reach Datu Dapat’s home in Sitio Siokong. Datu Dapat and he then climbed the mountain on foot for about forty minutes. He wondered if he should continue exploring the cave or if he should go out to the mouth, where Datu Dapat waited for him.

Cave exploration did not excite Santiago much. Kulaman, a plateau with Karstic topography, had more than a hundred caves scattered all over—or under—it, each boasting of its own magnificence. While he could appreciate the beauty of nature, leisure was not Santiago’s priority. He wanted to spend the years left in him searching furiously for the gold that could be measured in karats, not like someone on pension basking at the sight of golden grains at the tip of stalactites that no pawnshop would accept.

Despite the failure that just hit him, Santiago’s spirit had not been dampened enough to make him abandon the quest. He had the indomitable spirit of a treasure hunter. After all, though the tunnel did not lead to the chest of gold, the chest might be buried somewhere inside the cave. He plodded along.

(The second part will be posted next month.)

Five YouTube Videos on Kulaman

I'm back in Cebu, but rest assured that I will maintain this blog. I'll continue posting here at least one write-up per week. For the first week of May, I'm featuring five videos I created recently. They're all about Kulaman Plateau, and they're uploaded on Youtube.

They're the very first videos I've ever created. I wanted to expand a little the reach of this blog, so I decided to capture some scenes in a digital camera, download Windows Movie Maker, and create a Youtube account. The product was five very short videos, each running for just one minute or less. Two of them are merely slideshows of related photos.



The first video shows a raft taking a motorcycle across the Kulaman River. People traveling from the east usually ride the bamboo raft instead of crossing the concrete bridge to save some mileage. The bridge is a few kilometers away, while the part of the river featured in the video is a shortcut. It leads travelers directly to the public market. The fee is P5 for every motorcycle regardless of the number of people riding it. For those who are not riding a motorcycle, the fee is P2 per person.

In the video, you can hear my brother's and my mother's voices. My brother is bantering with the three teenage boys in the raft, his schoolmates. My mother, in Karay-a and at the top of her lungs, is greeting the "driver" of the raft, Tiyoy Tony, a relative of ours. The two nearly naked boys are either sons or grandsons of Tiyoy Tony. The passengers of the raft are on their way to the poblacion, while my companions and I were leaving the place.



The second video was taken at the top of Ilyan Hill, in Barangay Buenaflores. I went up there with my brother (singing off-key) and his classmate (in red jacket) last month. From the peak, we could see at least five barangays. The course of Kulaman River was also a sight to behold. The water winded through the mountains and flattened the earth on both its sides. The snakelike plain the river formed had become a fertile ground for rice paddies.

The next video shows how corn is ground the traditional way. My companions and I were on our way to the White Cave of Kuden when the video was taken. We were resting in a house in Sitio Siokong when I saw the crude yet intricate machine. I asked how it was used, and my two cousins and my mother, all public high school teachers and aspiring Youtube sensations, demonstrated for me.



The last two videos are each a compilation of related photos. One is on the Kulaman limestone burial jars at a museum in Cebu, and the other is on the White Cave of Kuden, also known as Lagbasan Cave. I've featured the jars in this blog quite a number of times, while the White Cave will be a subject of my future posts.

Enjoy the videos. I know they're never going to be phenomenal, but I'm sure they will be helpful to those who want to know more about Kulaman.

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.