On a Thursday night, a supposed to be seven in the evening bus trip
became a nine o'clock chance passenger ride. I woke with panic
when I realized I overslept, and so I missed my scheduled trip. Quickly,
after changing clothes, I then picked up my pack and hurried for the
door.
I got in the terminal just in time for the last trip,
paid the insistent cab driver extra and wrestled with a pool of
passengers waiting to board the bus heading to Kalinga. After a few
minutes I found myself settled in a good window seat.
Twelve hours past I
was already in Tabuk, the drop off point to Tinglayan where I'm
going to meet my guide. The only problem was, at 9 o'clock in the
morning the last trip for the day already left.
That was not the
first trip I ventured alone, but in a hot afternoon of sweat and aching
butt, I found myself lying in a rundown hotel room in that unfamiliar
city, asking myself: 'Why am I doing this again?'.
And so you entertain the same thought that every year creeps in, an unidentified sense of feeling, realizing that another year had passed in your life and that nothing major was achieved.
Then you go back to the same question, clueless, you just brush the idea off, sing yourself a birthday song and go to sleep.
The next day, I checked out two hours before the
scheduled trip to Tinglayan. Three hours of scorching but breezy ride on
top of the jeepney had me a pair of burnt arms, a hollow tummy, and
delighted eyes.
The rain started as I set foot in Tinglayan, then
suddenly I was all alone again until an old woman approached me and took
me to a wedding happening nearby. A few more minutes of eating and
drinking, eventually I found my guide.
Donned with his top of red
and blue flower patterns and a dog eared hat, Francis and I started to
trek. It took us roughly three hours to reach Buscalan, a village of
Butbut tribe situated atop the mountain.
At night you enter a trance, a dream where you’re so high, almost touching the sky. The next morning you'll wake up in the company of a good family greeting you with a cup of hot Kalinga coffee.
In the afternoon I would ask
questions, and they would ask me too. And we would share more smiles
than words to what we have come to fathom.
“I came here to get a
tattoo”, I told the guy. “Here, where we’re closer to god.” He managed
to speak in return.
Then we all looked outside, with too little light to
make out their faces, we listened to the beating of the pelting rain.
Anxiety struck me again when I finally ran out of cash. I remember
waving a man on his van, asking him if he could give me a ride until the
next town where I could withdraw some cash.
I don’t know if I was just
desperate enough or was he just completely being nice to a stranger. I
have this figured out when a guy driving a truck accidentally hit his
side mirror, leaving it with few scratches. To his dismay, he laughed
and let it pass.
On
my way to Tinglayan, top loading, I was sitting next to a wailing
poor chicken. Two days later I was handing over my shoes to my guide as a
payment of his kindness.
Spontaneity chases you when you're on the road,
it's like holding a one big canvass which changes color whenever you turn
around the bend.
One moment you are asking a shop owner about some
possible hotels to stay, the next hour you have been bitten by a dog.
I have come across Chachi on my way to
Sagada. It was in the afternoon, I just came from a two-day trip in
Banaue.
I was hungry and looking for something to eat when I saw her
store, it is a hole-in-the-wall pizza parlor that she runs all by
herself somewhere in the midst of everything in Bontoc.
We talked about
how she makes her own crust and the books she have on her store. She was
so nice that I went out of her store with an Ishiguro book clasped in my
armpit.
I continued West, made more friends with the locales, took
my chance in seeing the big falls when no jeepney would go back to town
after one in the afternoon. Went to a burial cave alone during sunset
then woke up early the next morning to start a 3.2km walk of unlit foggy
road to catch the sun rise before hitting Baguio.
For ten days,
I've been away, traveling from one place to the other, barely taking a
bath just to catch the next trip to the next town.
From one
stranger to the next, meeting people I never had any clue I would meet,
failed or successful has it been? I guess it’s just all the same in the
end.
As to why I am doing this? Ask me again next year.
*When going to Buscalan and in need of a tour guide, contact the very kind and accommodating Francis Pa-in at 0915-769-0843.
