The Twenty Caves of Sultan Kudarat

Based on official records, the province of Sultan Kudarat boasts of twenty caves that tourists can explore. Ten, or half of those caves, are found of course in the municipality of Senator Ninoy Aquino, often promoted as “the town with a hundred caves.” Three of the twenty caves are in the municipality of Bagumbayan, one in Kalamansig, two in Lebak, one in Isulan, and three in Columbio. Only the four caves in Isulan and Columbio are not located in or very near Kulaman Plateau.

The twenty caves are not all that the province has. They are simply the ones that are accessible to or frequented by tourists. There cannot be twenty caves only in the whole province because Senator Ninoy Aquino alone has dozens. The municipality can possibly live up to its seemingly hyperbolic epithet if all its natural tunnels are examined and listed. It’s also impossible that there are only one cave in Kalamansig and two caves in Lebak. Most of the land area of the two “coastal towns” has the same topography as Senator Ninoy Aquino. The area probably has dozens of caves too. The caves have not been discovered yet because the area is sparsely populated and controlled by a private logging company.

For now, tourists who want to go spelunking in Kalamansig only have the Pangaun Caves to visit. Note, though, that the name is in plural form. The caves, located in Barangay Sabanal, may have several mouths and have chambers that branch off in several directions, not just a single straight tunnel. (I haven’t been there, and I’m sorry that I’m not sure of my information.) In Lebak, tourists may explore a cave in Salangsang and a cave in Kalamongog that are named after the villages where they are located. Salangsang is where the burial jars that are now in Silliman University were excavated, so the cave there is historic aside from attractive.

The ten caves in Senator Ninoy Aquino are the following: Midpanga Cave in Nati, Tinalon Cave in Tinalon, Bugso Cave and Tudog Cave in Bugso, Saklay Cave in Malegdeg, and Kiabuan Cave, Lagbasan Cave, Bitogon (also called Casi) Cave, Batasan Cave, and Kalupingon Cave in Kuden. Lagbasan Cave is what I call White Cave in this blog, and the burial jars that are now at the University of San Carlos were taken from a cave in Kuden, though the sacred cave is probably not one of the touristy caves in the list.

Bagumbayan has Pitot Cave in Sto. Niño, Guano Cave in Masiag, and Maetas Cave in Titulok. I’ve explored Guano Cave last summer. Isulan has Kamanga Cave in Laguilayan. Though I heard that the hamlet of Kamanga is in the mountainous part of Isulan, it is populated by Maguindanawons and not by Dulangan Manobos, so I’m not counting the area as part of Kulaman Plateau.

The only part of Kulaman Plateau that has no cave for tourists is Palimbang. Again, this is not an indication that there is no cave at all in the municipality. Palimbang, in fact, may have as many caves as Senator Ninoy Aquino has. It’s just that its mountainous part is barely accessible. Most of the villages of Palimbang, a small fraction of the total land area, are located at the coast.

As mentioned earlier, most of the twenty caves in the list are in or very near Kulaman Plateau. Only the three caves in Columbio are quite far: Datalblao Cave in Datalblao, Panes Cave in Lasak, and Bombed Cave in Lasak and Eday. The existence of caves there, however, is not surprising if you’re aware that Columbio is “the other” mountain town of Sultan Kudarat, the one being Senator Ninoy Aquino.

I wish to explore all the caves above that are in Kulaman Plateau and share the trip with you in this blog—in words and photos. It’s a shame that I’ve only been to two out of the sixteen caves. If I get a few thousand bucks to spare in the future, I will go cave hopping—and burial jar hunting. From the experience, surely, I’ll be able to create more than a hundred posts.

(Photo: A stitched image of the mouth of Guano Cave, in Masiag village, Bagumbayan town)

A Cave in a School

Going into the cave inside Senator Ninoy Aquino National High School

requires some contortion skills.

As stated so many times in this blog, Kulaman Plateau has a hundred caves. You can find them in the usual places as well as in the unexpected ones. So perhaps it is not surprising that there’s a small cave inside the campus of Senator Ninoy Aquino National High School, right in the center of the town.

When I dropped by the school on October 20, I grabbed the chance of course to take a look at the cave. I asked a teacher to ask some students to guide me. It was examination day that time, and many students were loitering inside the campus in between exams, so the teacher asked a group of girls to accompany me. I swear that I didn’t lead the girls astray, away from attaining proper education. The cave is just about thirty meters from the nearest classroom and the ground where flag ceremonies are conducted every morning.

The passage inside was covered to prevent students from exploring–and

disappearing into–the cave

The mouth of the cave is very small, just a little more than a meter high and about half a meter wide. The ground in front of the cave’s mouth dips a little, and everyone except me was afraid to walk past the elevated portion. I asked my brother—who was with me, by the way—to stand in front of the cave’s mouth so that I could take a photo of the mouth with a person. I wanted the photo to show the size of the hole compared to a person. My brother refused. I asked the girls. They refused too. Some curious boys by this time had joined us. I asked them. They refused. They were all afraid of snakes or evil spirits that might be lurking behind the crevice. I had no choice in the end but to give the camera to my brother and stand in front of the cave myself.

I stuck my head into the hole and took photos of what was inside. It was a small cave indeed, as people had told me. You couldn’t stand straight inside it. The chamber near the entrance must be connected to bigger chambers, for the cave and half of the campus stood on top of a hill, which might be hollow under. I couldn’t verify this because the passage was sealed with clumps of soil, uprooted weeds, and a large plastic bin. It might have been done on purpose to prevent students from exploring the cave. But if all the students of the school were like the ones who accompanied me, the administration had nothing to worry about. We stayed in the premises of the cave for less than ten minutes.

Limestone juts out of the campus ground. Water might have eroded

through time the stone underneath and formed caves.

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.

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.

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.

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.