Sunday, August 29, 2010

Falling in Love with the Philippines: Day 2




Monday, the second day in the Philippines, was about  as near a perfect day as there can be in this world. That day, we decided to hit Pagsangan Falls. It was a three hour bus ride to get there, and and then another fifteen minutes or so on tricycle. The bus ride was incredible, because it was like a getting little snapshots of the island as we sped through it. Everything from ramshackle shanties of rotting cloth and rusting tin that people lived in, to georgous mountain vistas and fields of rice and banana plantations stretching up into those mountains. Palm trees, curling streams, and towering mountains were everywhere. I was amazed at the poverty of the people living in the midst of such a stunning wealth of beauty. People stared up at me from the streets as I looked out the bus window. That’s something that was both flattering and really disconcerting; I get stared at everywhere there. By everyone. Openly, and unabashedly. I guess I am nothing like them.  At least on the outside. At least in our backgrounds and language and lives and stories. But somehow we're the same. Our smiles mean the same thing.

There was one town that we passed, where there was a group of women sitting at an old picnic table outside, next to their drying laundry strung from lines in the trees. One of them saw me through the window of the bus, and started whispering to another, pointing towards me. Pretty soon, the whole group was casting furtive looks in my direciton. I grinned and waved at them, and they suddenly all burst into smiles and started waving wildly at me. In that moment I felt so connected to them, though I knew nothing about them, not even a name.

Finally, we arrived at Santa Cruz, and took a tricycle to an old hotel that ran the boating service up to Pagsanjan Falls. The river was wide and beautiful, and all along it were small huts and homes, simple, bare dwellings for the fishing folk who made the river their home. We got in a canoe, and, paddled by two Filipinos who knew those waters natively and intimately, we started upriver. The fishermen stopped and watched us, unmoving, as we paddled past, probably quite used to the little wood canoes moving up and down the river. As we moved upriver, and started fighting against the rapids, the two boatmen became like little frogmen, jumping to and fro—out of the boat and back in, a leap over the bow of the boat to the other side, bouncing their bare feet in and out of the water, and pushing off rocks, guiding us perfectly up the stream, against the current, and avoiding the hundreds of rocky traps in our path. It was incredible! We would have capsized and wrapped that boat around a rock fifty times if we had been the ones guiding it.

The view was stunning as we started heading into the canyon. Stretching up on both sides was jungle and rocky cliffs—banana trees, plams, and thousands of other kinds of tropical vegetation. We could hear chattering monkeys, but they stayed out of sight. Apparently they only come out in the morning. I had never seen that kind of beauty before. The vines hanging down were dripping with water; the whole jungle was heaving with water that came down in streams and rivulets, along the trees and down the rock. The first fall we came to was tall and beautiful, and flowed well. This is the rainy season, and the river is high and the falls are strong. Sometimes during this season, they cannot take people past this first set of falls because the river becomes too flooded and dangerous. The day we went was, coincidentally, the first day of the season that the water had been low enough to take people all the way to the main falls.

Pagsanjan Falls is huge and heavy. It is not terribly high, at least visibly. The rock hides much of it. But it comes down as a mighty torrent of water, and shakes the river, creating huge waves the rock out from the place where the falls hits the surface of the river. Behind the waterfall is a black cavern called Devil’s Gate. When we got to the falls, we got out of our canoe and transferred onto a bamboo raft, paddled by more shirtless Filipinos. We headed straight into the waterfall. They say that the falls pounding on your body as you are directly beneath it is the best full-body massage you can get in all of the Philippines. We didn’t get to actually find out, because the falls were so heavy that going directly beneath them would have snapped our bones. We rode under off to the side, still getting a decently heavy downpour over us, but missing the real strength. Once inside the cave, they stopped the raft, and we looked out at the falls from the other side.

Jon and I took the guide’s invitation to swim with him, and jumped off the raft into the water inside the cavern. It was a great swim, an amazing ride, and as we pulled the raft back out and headed to the bank, I looked back and saw a perfect rainbow falling over the falls and into the water.

The ride back was fun, as we shot with the current over the 14 sets of rapids along the river. The sun was getting low, and kids were out along the river, washing clothes with rocks or pulling in the day’s haul of fish. We even saw some Cebu feeding along the river, obviously tamed by the folk who lived in the huts there. As we pulled past the rapids, the sun started getting low, and the river smooth out to glass that we glided along, seemingly effortlessly.


After a quick shower at the boat rental shop, we hopped the bus back to Paranaque, where we gave most of our coconut pie and twenty pesos or so to a few small, starving children, and hopped a jeepney back to Happy Coconuts, the look of a little girl’s stunned, joyful face, and her words, “Oh, thank you!” completely egraven in my eyes and ears. 

1 comment: