ALLEGIANCE seems always reduced to choice. My affection for Dumaguete is not so much a matter of choice but of incidence and accident.
Although my father’s fears aborted my high school dream of studying Literature at Silliman University, I still found myself in Dumaguete, either on job-related trips to nearby Siquijor, Bacolod or certain towns of Negros Oriental, or on personal pursuits where I explored the city by foot.
Whatever the objective, the trips always ended on afternotes of pleasure, which are conducive for remembrance and affection.
Secondly, residing in Cebu, I consider Dumaguete as falling within the sweep of “just across,” as easy to spot, squinting from the shores of Santander in the southern tip of Cebu, as to cross by pumpboat or fastcraft from the port of Liloan in Santander.
In the 1990s, the land trip from Cebu to Dumaguete was punishing. The poor roads, the dust, the unreliable buses and the mad dash for a seat on the ferry or the bus turned many into unwilling converts of the overnight passage by slow boat and later, the more costly day trips via fastcraft.
Happily, things are much saner these days. For less than P200, an air-conditioned bus, no longer creaking and endangered but tuned-up and efficient, will take the traveler from the South Bus Terminal in Cebu City to Liloan, Santander within three hours.
This route also throws in a scenic run past arguably the best vistas in the province: the green corridor of Perrelos’ century-old trees, the pretty plaza of Sibonga with its flowering cherry blossoms, Boljoon’s breathtaking Eli curve and its grand approach to the heritage landmark, the Nuestra Señora del Patrocinio Church, the bright splotches of bougainvillea rioting along Oslob’s undulating ribbon of a road.
Unaltered for nearly 20 years, the duration of my travels through these parts, is Liloan’s pristine waters. Despite hosting two ports, several residences and resorts, the water is still pure and clear, allowing anyone with even poor eyesight to watch the dense schools of fish darting and hovering above a bed of fine sand. That they don’t seem to be afraid of humans is a credit to the people of Liloan.
Not to neglect the bladder, use the restroom at these points: at the South Bus Terminal (secure a seat first, inform the driver so they will wait for you, and flush by “bubo (pouring a pail of water)” as the toilets don’t flush); midway in the trip (somewhere in Argao or Dalaguete, still inform the driver, and still flush by “bubo”); and at Liloan (the fastcraft port CRs have flowing water; those at the port serving the pumpboats are best used without looking down the hole).
If you’re traveling with children or a lot of baggage and cannot rush to the queue, you might miss your seat in the departing fastcraft. If you don’t want to wait an hour for the next trip, walk for five minutes along the coastal households to reach the pumpboats, which depart 30 minutes earlier than the next fastcraft. Ticket and terminal fee total less than P50; the Coast Guard regulates the loading of passengers.
By pumpboat, it’s about 15 minutes across the sea. The jitney in Sibulan will take you to the common unloading site of PNB in the heart of Dumaguete for P11; a tricycle will take you to any destination within the city for P8 per passenger. The entire land trip from Cebu City to Dumaguete is from four to five hours: departing at past six in the morning, we were in Dumaguete before lunch.
A faster alternative is by plane or land trip via private vehicle. One can leave one’s vehicle for a fee at a Liloan carpark or ferry this across on a roll on-roll off barge (RoRo). The cost of the last option is about ten times more the land trip by bus.
While having its advantages, private travel is the poorer without chance encounters of piquant personalities and out-of-body experiences with public restrooms.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
Showing posts with label Rural travel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Rural travel. Show all posts
Saturday, April 23, 2011
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Suroy-suroy
THE FLY that walked like an underwater trapeze artist in my “utan Bisaya” transformed lunch into a spectacle in the south of Cebu, but I am getting ahead of my story.
When my mother sent us off on an errand late last week, we welcomed the break.
After the view outside the bus window exchanged walls jaded with campaign hangover for open spaces, I realized how toxic the city had become for weeks, even months.
The hubby thrives on long drives. I am enamored with sleepy towns.
But it must be a hard and fast rule that the sleepier the town, the more tumultuous the local hates and loves.
Politics had not yet released from its grip the towns we passed but there were signs of life, ordinary and uneventful and timeless, resuming.
When the mid-morning sun became too fierce and penetrated the tinted windows of the bus to blaze on the shiny hairless pate emerging from the seat before me, the passenger pulled close the shades.
The panorama I was savoring was drastically reduced to a sliver.
Yet my luck held out because that narrow view served like a camera’s eyepiece, sharpening details I would otherwise have ignored or missed.
So, while taking a curve in Carcar that’s a chokepoint for traffic because of a nearby mall, I espied a roadside shop. The trade of the owner had something to do with glass and aluminum, the latter being a material I have an intense apathy to.
Arranged on a window sill were three or four miniature buses. There was a crude handmade look to the forms. Dangling from a peg was a skewed hand-lettered sign advertising toys for sale.
Our bus flashed by. The view of bright paint and miniature details resembling the real buses plying the southern trail so electrified my mind’s eye, it felt as if I were a kid gazing up at the toy buses, silently willing my parents to buy one and make it mine.
Whose were the hands that made these toys? What compels those hands to craft toys when cheap imports and noisy gadgets flood the market and minds of kids? Who found deliverance in aluminum?
A side trip to Simala introduced us to the business side of pilgrimages.
In a roadside bakery, we looked for bread that was either hot or did not host a game of soccer for bluegreen-bellied flies. The siopao seemed like a tasty candidate.
Anticipating the steaming white mounds with their sweet asado, we were surprised when the bakery attendant suddenly stabbed each siopao with the tip of a catsup dispenser. She then handed over our siopaos, looking unharmed except for a red dot.
When I next glanced at my husband, he gave me a ghastly red grin. Mine outTwilighted his. Given the crowds flocking this formerly sleepy side road, now the intersection leading to a local shrine, the bakery must have created the catsup injections to cut on cost and waste.
This hands-free enjoyment also benefits diners competing with flies divebombing anything made of flour and butter.
Some flies, though, beat the competition by going amphibious.
For late lunch, we stopped by a roadside place that had the local equivalent of an extremely rare three-star Michelin rating: there were enough customers to reassure that the food was safe for humans but not too many diners to keep us waiting, drinking the dust and fumes of passing traffic.
Fried food is comfort food for anyone born in this country. When you’re on the road, though, fried food is often displayed in a cage where the sociable flies are playing a hard game of pingpong or he-said-she-said.
So we opted to order dishes ladled from the covered cauldrons. While I was about to take a first sip, I saw a fly dive into our soup. It made no sound at all, making me presume the fellow had been practicing quite a bit.
When my husband asked me why I was smelling the soup, I told him I was following Hairy Houdini traipse along the leafy green stems. In the clear broth, the confident fellow crawled over a submerged leaf, from end to end, before disappearing under.
I looked around, surprised by the absence of applause. Everyone was eating. I picked up my fork and spoon. Death by drowning in a sleepy town reminded me of my own mortality but at least I wasn’t eating vegetables for a last meal.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 16, 2010 “Matamata”
When my mother sent us off on an errand late last week, we welcomed the break.
After the view outside the bus window exchanged walls jaded with campaign hangover for open spaces, I realized how toxic the city had become for weeks, even months.
The hubby thrives on long drives. I am enamored with sleepy towns.
But it must be a hard and fast rule that the sleepier the town, the more tumultuous the local hates and loves.
Politics had not yet released from its grip the towns we passed but there were signs of life, ordinary and uneventful and timeless, resuming.
When the mid-morning sun became too fierce and penetrated the tinted windows of the bus to blaze on the shiny hairless pate emerging from the seat before me, the passenger pulled close the shades.
The panorama I was savoring was drastically reduced to a sliver.
Yet my luck held out because that narrow view served like a camera’s eyepiece, sharpening details I would otherwise have ignored or missed.
So, while taking a curve in Carcar that’s a chokepoint for traffic because of a nearby mall, I espied a roadside shop. The trade of the owner had something to do with glass and aluminum, the latter being a material I have an intense apathy to.
Arranged on a window sill were three or four miniature buses. There was a crude handmade look to the forms. Dangling from a peg was a skewed hand-lettered sign advertising toys for sale.
Our bus flashed by. The view of bright paint and miniature details resembling the real buses plying the southern trail so electrified my mind’s eye, it felt as if I were a kid gazing up at the toy buses, silently willing my parents to buy one and make it mine.
Whose were the hands that made these toys? What compels those hands to craft toys when cheap imports and noisy gadgets flood the market and minds of kids? Who found deliverance in aluminum?
A side trip to Simala introduced us to the business side of pilgrimages.
In a roadside bakery, we looked for bread that was either hot or did not host a game of soccer for bluegreen-bellied flies. The siopao seemed like a tasty candidate.
Anticipating the steaming white mounds with their sweet asado, we were surprised when the bakery attendant suddenly stabbed each siopao with the tip of a catsup dispenser. She then handed over our siopaos, looking unharmed except for a red dot.
When I next glanced at my husband, he gave me a ghastly red grin. Mine outTwilighted his. Given the crowds flocking this formerly sleepy side road, now the intersection leading to a local shrine, the bakery must have created the catsup injections to cut on cost and waste.
This hands-free enjoyment also benefits diners competing with flies divebombing anything made of flour and butter.
Some flies, though, beat the competition by going amphibious.
For late lunch, we stopped by a roadside place that had the local equivalent of an extremely rare three-star Michelin rating: there were enough customers to reassure that the food was safe for humans but not too many diners to keep us waiting, drinking the dust and fumes of passing traffic.
Fried food is comfort food for anyone born in this country. When you’re on the road, though, fried food is often displayed in a cage where the sociable flies are playing a hard game of pingpong or he-said-she-said.
So we opted to order dishes ladled from the covered cauldrons. While I was about to take a first sip, I saw a fly dive into our soup. It made no sound at all, making me presume the fellow had been practicing quite a bit.
When my husband asked me why I was smelling the soup, I told him I was following Hairy Houdini traipse along the leafy green stems. In the clear broth, the confident fellow crawled over a submerged leaf, from end to end, before disappearing under.
I looked around, surprised by the absence of applause. Everyone was eating. I picked up my fork and spoon. Death by drowning in a sleepy town reminded me of my own mortality but at least I wasn’t eating vegetables for a last meal.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131)
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu’s May 16, 2010 “Matamata”
Tuesday, January 05, 2010
Marking place
WAITING for a “habal-habal” to ride to the uplands a day after the start of the year is like waiting for lost love: the best, if it ever existed, happened in the past.
The motorcycles for hire that usually whiz up and down these mountain roads like iridescent dragonflies on a nectar binge are predictably scarce on Jan. 2.
Do the drivers refrain from their roadside wait because people usually make it home before the year ends?
Or do travellers take their cue from a near shave in the past, deciding not to entrust their luck on a driver with a hangover?
The discrepancy between the mad rush for home as the old year waned and the desultory trickle trailing after the ushering of the next year makes it always easy to answer the two questions everyone seems to ask at this time:
Where was I when the year came to an end?
Where was I when the year began?
If one stays in place, the answer can be easily found at the end of a countdown: the 60 seconds it takes to separate one set of 360 or so days from the subsequent one.
Tradition also dictates making a racket to drive away ill fortune, eating special dishes to sweeten the start, coming together with other families to continue a shared history, filling to the brim every household container to drive away want, collecting at least 13 round-shaped fruits to summon wealth, hearing mass in thanksgiving and as promise.
My partner and I like to take our chance, loitering in a near empty rural market, waiting for a “habal-habal” driver who might or might not show up.
This year, the season’s blues went on overdrive by sending sheets of rain through the open windows of the bus, distressing several infants with demonstrably powerful lungs and a box of chickens who were, against the trend, returning to the uplands with their heads still connected to their necks.
This year, we left our boys in the city, to their virtual worlds.
“Virtual” sounds so much like “viral,” my choice for the word of the year, if not for this generation.
The contagious spreading of communication among portals, chiefly through the Internet, hooks us to a pastime of keeping lists.
Anticipating the holidays, we list the presents and intentions we can’t afford to forget.
Wrapping up the year that was, we list the best, or the worst, that distinguishes this from the rest of the increasingly featureless past.
While the city around us exploded into a frenzy of counting on the eve of Jan. 1, I followed the lists sprouting on every TV channel, in websites that prided in following every shimmy of popular taste.
Newsmakers were so populous as to be common. One or two resurrected the original meaning and intent of the word when he or she was set up as the person defining the year, for better or worse.
But due to differing news judgments, one can actually form an informal club whose membership ticket could be to hold a “Person of the Year” title.
Many portals pushed on us other choices, masquerading as “The Year’s Losers and Winners.” Can a person be made or unmade by a single event? Apparently, yes.
What about second chances? What about changes made after a list is made and spread?
That’s cause for another list. It’s viral, thanks to the social networks defining what we talk about, what we remember.
The bus that took us away from the city and its hook-ups parked beside a roadside stopover.
Glancing at a bus parked across the highway, heading to where we came from, I saw a woman bury her face in the stomach of an infant she was holding aloft. The child, about a hundred pounds or so lighter and minus a head full of hair, could have been the woman’s twin. Did the woman see where she came from? Did the child see where it was going?
After the usual interval, our fellow passengers returned to their seats.
The bus across rolled forward as we moved on. Someone could very well imagine a looking-glass mirror, from which we sprang, twin reflections headed for opposing ends: they to theirs and we to our yearly appointment with the “habal-habal” that may or may not come to a deserted market a day after the world was again renewed.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu's Jan. 3, 2010 issue of "Matamata"
The motorcycles for hire that usually whiz up and down these mountain roads like iridescent dragonflies on a nectar binge are predictably scarce on Jan. 2.
Do the drivers refrain from their roadside wait because people usually make it home before the year ends?
Or do travellers take their cue from a near shave in the past, deciding not to entrust their luck on a driver with a hangover?
The discrepancy between the mad rush for home as the old year waned and the desultory trickle trailing after the ushering of the next year makes it always easy to answer the two questions everyone seems to ask at this time:
Where was I when the year came to an end?
Where was I when the year began?
If one stays in place, the answer can be easily found at the end of a countdown: the 60 seconds it takes to separate one set of 360 or so days from the subsequent one.
Tradition also dictates making a racket to drive away ill fortune, eating special dishes to sweeten the start, coming together with other families to continue a shared history, filling to the brim every household container to drive away want, collecting at least 13 round-shaped fruits to summon wealth, hearing mass in thanksgiving and as promise.
My partner and I like to take our chance, loitering in a near empty rural market, waiting for a “habal-habal” driver who might or might not show up.
This year, the season’s blues went on overdrive by sending sheets of rain through the open windows of the bus, distressing several infants with demonstrably powerful lungs and a box of chickens who were, against the trend, returning to the uplands with their heads still connected to their necks.
This year, we left our boys in the city, to their virtual worlds.
“Virtual” sounds so much like “viral,” my choice for the word of the year, if not for this generation.
The contagious spreading of communication among portals, chiefly through the Internet, hooks us to a pastime of keeping lists.
Anticipating the holidays, we list the presents and intentions we can’t afford to forget.
Wrapping up the year that was, we list the best, or the worst, that distinguishes this from the rest of the increasingly featureless past.
While the city around us exploded into a frenzy of counting on the eve of Jan. 1, I followed the lists sprouting on every TV channel, in websites that prided in following every shimmy of popular taste.
Newsmakers were so populous as to be common. One or two resurrected the original meaning and intent of the word when he or she was set up as the person defining the year, for better or worse.
But due to differing news judgments, one can actually form an informal club whose membership ticket could be to hold a “Person of the Year” title.
Many portals pushed on us other choices, masquerading as “The Year’s Losers and Winners.” Can a person be made or unmade by a single event? Apparently, yes.
What about second chances? What about changes made after a list is made and spread?
That’s cause for another list. It’s viral, thanks to the social networks defining what we talk about, what we remember.
The bus that took us away from the city and its hook-ups parked beside a roadside stopover.
Glancing at a bus parked across the highway, heading to where we came from, I saw a woman bury her face in the stomach of an infant she was holding aloft. The child, about a hundred pounds or so lighter and minus a head full of hair, could have been the woman’s twin. Did the woman see where she came from? Did the child see where it was going?
After the usual interval, our fellow passengers returned to their seats.
The bus across rolled forward as we moved on. Someone could very well imagine a looking-glass mirror, from which we sprang, twin reflections headed for opposing ends: they to theirs and we to our yearly appointment with the “habal-habal” that may or may not come to a deserted market a day after the world was again renewed.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* First published in Sun.Star Cebu's Jan. 3, 2010 issue of "Matamata"
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Food trip
THE FIRST thing you leave behind when you travel to the country is your fraternity of adjectives.
When you step off the bus into a town that gazes back at you with the stolid gaze of unseeing, you can’t reach out for the customary comforts: “exotic” does not describe the scenery, only the public toilet no one has tried to flush for years; “hospitable” suits the mosquitoes that hum around you just as the market’s only vendor shuts her stall just a little after twilight to cook dinner at home.
But Ernest Hemingway questioned the use of adjectives in life. Who am I to argue with a man who traveled hard and wrote lean?
I bring baon instead.
Translated into Filipino terms, brown-bagging is an honored tradition of not just bringing one’s lunch to work. A trip to the countryside, a day in the beach, the quest to find the precinct to cast one’s vote, recuperation in the hospital—the Filipino’s life is replete with situations that require a long wait, the Deity’s disposal, and standby food ready to be brought out of a bag.
My generation was hardwired from birth to anticipate food scarcity, avoid diarrhea and cut down on “eating out” costs by cooking at home and packing provisions in plastic (recyclable, not “disposable”) containers, pots and pans or the suddenly stylish banana leaves.
When my 89-year-old grandmother recently replaced the car she took to travel up north or go round south, she examined models with one crucial consideration: is there space to hold a cooler?
Men are quick to roll their eyes at female fussiness. They are the first, though, to pop the tab of a cola drink chilled since 4 a.m. and after a road trip has logged a dizzying number of digits on the odometer. When you are in the middle of nowhere, staring at roadside softdrink bottles glowing with the extra-terrestrial pink or nuke orange of gasoline, female compulsiveness can emit excellent, even life-saving, vibes.
Provincial tours have changed much. Now, anyone can sign up for a group tour, step out into nowhere, and be met by festive bands, gyrating root crops and tables groaning with local “specialties” that would not be shy on a cosmopolitan grocery shelf.
Alas, my lack of fortune relegates me to the bus-riding, adjective-swapping masses. And after years of brown-bagging, I have to concede to my husband’s wisdom: being open to the unexpected is a lot easier than lugging along a kitchen, with a collapsible table or two.
Human optimism, though, has thresholds of elasticity. Walking into the Alegria highway market, hours after the weekly tabo packed up, there was only a single stall still open. The store owner was playing with her grandchild, already in pajamas.
All that stared back at our rampaging appetites were a few forlorn pieces of humba. I resigned myself to death from cardiac attack, which is at least quick.
But after our friend Ronie asked hopefully about other choices, Luciana “Nanay” Gomez Borda volunteered that she still had a fish head left in the fridge. An hour later, the 60-year-old barangay councilor, volunteer fish warden and cave guide who had risen at 3 a.m. to prepare for the tabo crowd invited us to sit down for spicy stew, crunchy vegetables and stories that drifted and lingered in the darkened, quiet market.
Long after the fish head was sucked dry and tales wound up at their origin, Nanay thanked us for the stories although, in truth, we groped for words when she said guests did not pay for dinner.
Much as I revere Hemingway, adjectives have some use during travel. Use “exotic” for places that open to strangers; “hospitable” for sustenance that goes beyond the momentary.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 17, 2008 issue
When you step off the bus into a town that gazes back at you with the stolid gaze of unseeing, you can’t reach out for the customary comforts: “exotic” does not describe the scenery, only the public toilet no one has tried to flush for years; “hospitable” suits the mosquitoes that hum around you just as the market’s only vendor shuts her stall just a little after twilight to cook dinner at home.
But Ernest Hemingway questioned the use of adjectives in life. Who am I to argue with a man who traveled hard and wrote lean?
I bring baon instead.
Translated into Filipino terms, brown-bagging is an honored tradition of not just bringing one’s lunch to work. A trip to the countryside, a day in the beach, the quest to find the precinct to cast one’s vote, recuperation in the hospital—the Filipino’s life is replete with situations that require a long wait, the Deity’s disposal, and standby food ready to be brought out of a bag.
My generation was hardwired from birth to anticipate food scarcity, avoid diarrhea and cut down on “eating out” costs by cooking at home and packing provisions in plastic (recyclable, not “disposable”) containers, pots and pans or the suddenly stylish banana leaves.
When my 89-year-old grandmother recently replaced the car she took to travel up north or go round south, she examined models with one crucial consideration: is there space to hold a cooler?
Men are quick to roll their eyes at female fussiness. They are the first, though, to pop the tab of a cola drink chilled since 4 a.m. and after a road trip has logged a dizzying number of digits on the odometer. When you are in the middle of nowhere, staring at roadside softdrink bottles glowing with the extra-terrestrial pink or nuke orange of gasoline, female compulsiveness can emit excellent, even life-saving, vibes.
Provincial tours have changed much. Now, anyone can sign up for a group tour, step out into nowhere, and be met by festive bands, gyrating root crops and tables groaning with local “specialties” that would not be shy on a cosmopolitan grocery shelf.
Alas, my lack of fortune relegates me to the bus-riding, adjective-swapping masses. And after years of brown-bagging, I have to concede to my husband’s wisdom: being open to the unexpected is a lot easier than lugging along a kitchen, with a collapsible table or two.
Human optimism, though, has thresholds of elasticity. Walking into the Alegria highway market, hours after the weekly tabo packed up, there was only a single stall still open. The store owner was playing with her grandchild, already in pajamas.
All that stared back at our rampaging appetites were a few forlorn pieces of humba. I resigned myself to death from cardiac attack, which is at least quick.
But after our friend Ronie asked hopefully about other choices, Luciana “Nanay” Gomez Borda volunteered that she still had a fish head left in the fridge. An hour later, the 60-year-old barangay councilor, volunteer fish warden and cave guide who had risen at 3 a.m. to prepare for the tabo crowd invited us to sit down for spicy stew, crunchy vegetables and stories that drifted and lingered in the darkened, quiet market.
Long after the fish head was sucked dry and tales wound up at their origin, Nanay thanked us for the stories although, in truth, we groped for words when she said guests did not pay for dinner.
Much as I revere Hemingway, adjectives have some use during travel. Use “exotic” for places that open to strangers; “hospitable” for sustenance that goes beyond the momentary.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s Aug. 17, 2008 issue
Saturday, August 02, 2008
Other side of the mountain
SHORT cuts rarely work.
When the hubby and I took an approximately 40-kilometer detour from the town of Alcoy in the southeast to Alegria in the southwest, we were trying to shave off travel time and expense. A route via Carcar or Oslob would take thrice as long, and make us late for an early afternoon appointment in Alegria.
We left the timeworn but picturesque convent near the Poblacion of Alcoy a few minutes before noon. We coasted down the slopes of Montpeller, a short distance away from the Alegria town center, before 1:30 p.m.
The trip would have been shorter had the way not been so distracting.
In the '80s, a four-wheel drive, motorbike, horse or a sturdy pair of legs brought us close enough to brush the "ceiling" in the south.
But though we could see as far as we wanted to while standing at the summit of sitio Libo in Barangay Lepanto or Barangay Nug-as in Alcoy, we were stalled then from taking an unbroken east-west sojourn across the mountains for lack of roads.
It was rumored that there was more than one trail used by those pushing the illicit trade of marijuana on both sides of the southern range. But we sought nothing more exciting than the nip of mountain air and the mystique of fogs that descend from nowhere. So the "other side of the mountain," a title of a popular romance in my youth, became a fitting name for this elusive connection.
But a recent call to the town of Alcoy and a visit to their website, alcoy.gov.ph, verified that Nug-as and Lepanto were now connected by a combination of asphalted and cemented strips. The family sedan made it up effortlessly, though we wished we had a new muffler to tone down the sounds of our intrusion after a huge bird, flame-crested and with dark plumage, swooped right across our path before crashing into the trees.
Years ago, I envied vegetable traders and mobile disco crews because their work brought them to these remote, unspoilt places. It did not yet sink in to wonder about the cost of intrusions.
The creation of a road is always hailed from the standpoint of travel, trade, progress. Yet this innocuous strip is hardly as black or as white as it seems. A road marks off the poor, who cannot afford habal-habal fare and balance their laundry, tools or purchases on their heads as they head for the footpaths.
A road also exposes the uplanders. Many will take off valuable slippers or shoes to make a rare visit to town, donning back the footwear only when the church or town hall is near.
As in the '80s, when the scarcity of water drove residents to harvest banana sap for drinking and washing, the slopes leading to Nug-as still show few signs of habitation: no roadside resting place, only five habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) ferrying passengers. The Alegria side is a stark contrast, with its modest traffic of traders and weekend commuters.
Mutely testifying to leadership and community, the Nug-as-Lepanto road reveals the other side of the mountain. We drove past a government team finishing the asphalting of an all-weather portion near the center of Lepanto. Descending to Alegria, we carefully negotiated road portions that already required extensive repair. Perhaps the barangays had to dig or maintain canals to divert water runoff. Or the layer of asphalt could be thicker so this would not flake off, specially in water-logged areas.
We broke off for lunch and drank in the silence under the pine trees of Libo. I can believe that the wind in Lepanto can blow anyone across Tañon Strait or over that vault of clouds.
The roads made by people, though, are rarely the short cuts they seem to be.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
When the hubby and I took an approximately 40-kilometer detour from the town of Alcoy in the southeast to Alegria in the southwest, we were trying to shave off travel time and expense. A route via Carcar or Oslob would take thrice as long, and make us late for an early afternoon appointment in Alegria.
We left the timeworn but picturesque convent near the Poblacion of Alcoy a few minutes before noon. We coasted down the slopes of Montpeller, a short distance away from the Alegria town center, before 1:30 p.m.
The trip would have been shorter had the way not been so distracting.
In the '80s, a four-wheel drive, motorbike, horse or a sturdy pair of legs brought us close enough to brush the "ceiling" in the south.
But though we could see as far as we wanted to while standing at the summit of sitio Libo in Barangay Lepanto or Barangay Nug-as in Alcoy, we were stalled then from taking an unbroken east-west sojourn across the mountains for lack of roads.
It was rumored that there was more than one trail used by those pushing the illicit trade of marijuana on both sides of the southern range. But we sought nothing more exciting than the nip of mountain air and the mystique of fogs that descend from nowhere. So the "other side of the mountain," a title of a popular romance in my youth, became a fitting name for this elusive connection.
But a recent call to the town of Alcoy and a visit to their website, alcoy.gov.ph, verified that Nug-as and Lepanto were now connected by a combination of asphalted and cemented strips. The family sedan made it up effortlessly, though we wished we had a new muffler to tone down the sounds of our intrusion after a huge bird, flame-crested and with dark plumage, swooped right across our path before crashing into the trees.
Years ago, I envied vegetable traders and mobile disco crews because their work brought them to these remote, unspoilt places. It did not yet sink in to wonder about the cost of intrusions.
The creation of a road is always hailed from the standpoint of travel, trade, progress. Yet this innocuous strip is hardly as black or as white as it seems. A road marks off the poor, who cannot afford habal-habal fare and balance their laundry, tools or purchases on their heads as they head for the footpaths.
A road also exposes the uplanders. Many will take off valuable slippers or shoes to make a rare visit to town, donning back the footwear only when the church or town hall is near.
As in the '80s, when the scarcity of water drove residents to harvest banana sap for drinking and washing, the slopes leading to Nug-as still show few signs of habitation: no roadside resting place, only five habal-habal (motorcycle-for-hire) ferrying passengers. The Alegria side is a stark contrast, with its modest traffic of traders and weekend commuters.
Mutely testifying to leadership and community, the Nug-as-Lepanto road reveals the other side of the mountain. We drove past a government team finishing the asphalting of an all-weather portion near the center of Lepanto. Descending to Alegria, we carefully negotiated road portions that already required extensive repair. Perhaps the barangays had to dig or maintain canals to divert water runoff. Or the layer of asphalt could be thicker so this would not flake off, specially in water-logged areas.
We broke off for lunch and drank in the silence under the pine trees of Libo. I can believe that the wind in Lepanto can blow anyone across Tañon Strait or over that vault of clouds.
The roads made by people, though, are rarely the short cuts they seem to be.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayettetabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Searches
NOT all searches are created equal.
This was my unvoiced thought when I lost my way again.
Finding a parking lot among high-rises should be elementary. I failed that effortlessly. After circling blocks in this uptown park, my husband might have guessed that I was going counterclockwise so he asked me to stay put and end his agony.
Why are some searches hell and others, a breeze? Physically finding my bearings is a strain, not always to me unfortunately.
While waiting for an appointment in a multinational company, I could not find my way from the toilet back to the visitor’s lounge. Freezing before one too many centrally locked doors that did not have my retina pattern in their code, I finally saw the ratty tote I left on the familiar sofa reflected on the cold granite walls of a corridor.
I was just in time. Building security were about to arrest the industrial spy skulking in the corridors and reading invisible instructions on the walls.
For another assignment, our team had to look for a home in an exclusive mountaintop subdivision. I copied the map in the guard house but could not later make sense of the scribbled arrows. We found the house because of our photographer’s presence of mind: Allan took a shot of the map with his digital camera.
Fortunately for my newsroom employers, my skewered internal compass is least active when I’m tracking down information. Seized by an anxiety attack over spelling, preposition or idiom, I google away the panic or do a Boolean.
Online searches are nearly idiot-proof. Just typing “and,” “not” and “or” with a subject starts a search, which matches me to references containing the keyword, a related phrase, relevant concept or similar documents.
What else can be more perfect than this virtual wandering, where even misspellings yield what the techies call a fuzzy search?
Another place where I don’t need a search party to come after me is around dictionaries.
I could hang around pages where seemingly accidental couplings result in dramatic turnabouts. After a preposition like “to” sidles up beside a word like “correct,” the resulting infinitive implies the opposite of the adjective’s pure repute.
Dictionaries are portable, which make them better than an Internet connection. And more detailed than maps, to boot. Once, a relative’s request to track down a plot of land brought our family to the mountains of
I did not see a cable car that could take us there. This thought remained unvoiced as a more relevant observation would have been William Henry Scott’s chapter on Cebuano terms for farming.
From the dictionaries compiled by Jesuit priest Francisco Alcina and others, Scott made a roll call of the many terms and meanings 16th-century farmers used in staking ownership of the land, clearing it, leaving it fallow, cultivating and harvesting.
No less than 14 verbs were used to detail land-clearing in the 1600s.
Many words have since passed on from common use. Even upland old-timers don’t recognize patkal, the branches cut from a tree to stake claim. Few now distinguish between hadhad (chop down full-grown trees) and goro (slash through bamboo or vines). In this age of tax declarations, land claimants and kaingin, who has use for such distinctions?
Reading Scott and Alcina would have brought us to the exact spot where a morning’s hard scrambling took us, to a world lost beyond the impassable. Perhaps some searches are equal after all.
mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ mayette.tabada.blogspot.com/ 09173226131
* Published in Sun.Star Cebu’s June 3, 2007 issue
Monday, September 25, 2006
Skylab moment
OF THIS, I am sure. The habal-habal proves that the fear of flying is best countered by attempting flight under the worst possible conditions.
Friday night pre-flight jitters: we quickly lost our well-being from supping on native chicken broth when we realized that the multi-cab we were banking on for the trip back to the Poblacion had left and was not coming back.
Three hours away from midnight, six kilometers away from the highway in Alegria, three hours away from our homes in Cebu.
Though we did not want to further upset our hosts, who had presumed that our knapsacks meant we were staying overnight, we had to go back to the city that night. My husband Roy and our friend Reuben had to work the following day. I had to write and email.
But all this baggage fell away when Juan, 6, raised the most important point. “How are we all going to go back riding that?”
Thoughtful silence as boy and three sheepish adults stared at the contraption standing on the asphalted road. Thin moonlight bathed what seemed like a couple of rickety chairs lashed together and balanced on two spindly wheels: the skylab, habal-habal, king of mountain trails, if you can afford P25 in fare and the heartsick certainty that the next steep curve will find you flying, strange birds without wings and even odder expressions.
Like all things Filipino, our chariot had masa written all over it. To afford the fare, you had to be someone who was useless at walking distances measured by a pursed mouth pointed at some point disappearing into infinity.
Most likely, the skylab passenger was an “astronaut,” someone who worked for a monthly salary in the city (binulan, usually a house helper, factory worker or sales clerk).
Only city folks are foolish enough to part with the skylab fare, which can already buy a kilo and a half of milled corn to feed an upland family of eight.
Only the foolhardy will squeeze themselves to fit the “seat,” a space not even Euclidean geometry can postulate for two, let alone four, sometimes seven strangers conjoined in a messy mash of butt and groin, with just a sliver of space for the driver, inevitably slim of waist and hopefully not too drunk or stoned yet.
That is unfair to our driver that night. That he was just all soul and flap of skin made it possible for Reuben and two knapsacks to sit on his lap. Titing assured us he would use the engine brakes throughout the trip so we would wobble less. Such a soul of discretion did not have to mention that he placed Roy and I behind him, on the principle that passengers in the pink of health provided “ballast” and were harder to shake off, like a guilty conscience.
With Juan inserted between us like an afterthought, we took off. Our earsplitting departure refuted that flight is mute, poetic, serene.
For we were all but placid inside. Reuben rode a motorcycle only twice in his life; each time, he took a spill. Being a passenger always made Roy nervous. He had seen too many drivers keep a speeding motorcycle perpendicular to the ground until an obstacle materializing after a curve suspended the argument.
I was nervous for Juan. That alone made him nervous about me. The more the road twisted, the more I squeezed my son, the more he wriggled, the more the skylab wobbled.
If we made it to the highway in one piece, it was all due to our pilot, bless his soul. I can’t shake off the feeling though that Titing, watching our taillights disappear back to the city, must have ruminated how the mountains have no creature more bizarre than the city’s wingless, witless cuckoos.
(mayette.tabada@gmail.com, or 09173226131)
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