Fireflies

By the river, next to the tree with roots that looked like an old man’s beard.

That was there her playmates said she should wait so she could see the fireflies. They were there last night, and the other night too, flying creatures that glowed and flickered like a thousand tiny bulbs. They are really fairies from the netherworld, one of the little boys said, encantadas protecting the forests. But do not worry, he reassured, they show themselves to good little children. The girl listened to all of them, mouth agape,  wishing that she could live forever in this magical place of her balmy summers instead of the gray city to which she would return when school begins.

And then what happens when the fireflies touch you?

Mag-wish kamo. You make a wish. Each firefly, one wish.

And so on the last night of her vacation,  she went by the river, next to the tree with roots that looked like an old man’s beard, and sat down to wait. She was eager to see the fireflies and have them cart her whispered wish on their back. But only after a few minutes, a lightning ripped through the pitch black sky, disturbing the darkness with its violence. Then a roll of thunder. We must go back, the little boy who went with her hissed. If we get caught by the rain, we will get a spanking.

She gave the river one last doleful look before turning back, walking away, going home, growing up.

Twenty years later, she was taking her vacation on an island of white sand and undisturbed marine life. An island that looks, on the map, like a gnarled elbow jutting out. She was reading the brochure given at the reception desk of the tiny inn they stayed at. “Firefly tour”, it said. Pay P500.00 for a boat trip to a mangrove area and see fireflies hover over your boat. The girl grabbed her boyfriend’s hand and announced that she wanted to go. So off they went.

They were already in the mangrove area but all they could see was a froth of darkness and some indecipherable flickering. It was low tide, the boat man rued, so the boat cannot go any closer. We would have to stay here, he said.

“But there is nothing to see from here!” the girl protested.

“I’m sorry,” he shrugged.

And because no one would be able to understand her sadness, she lay down on her boyfriend’s lap and fell asleep, one hand clutching his hand, and the other, lightly grazing her womb, where all her wishes – from firefly wishes to wishing well wishes to touch-the-color-blue-when-you-see-a-train wishes - are centered.

I Hate You

“i hate how you know which parts of me hurt, i hate how you can make it all feel better.

i hate how you can, just by being you, make me feel good about just being me.

i hate how you make me feel that i can have anything i put my mind to, and yet make me feel that all i have right now is all i really need….”

(originally a comment I posted in response Claudette’s blog entry here sometime October 2008, which was in turn inspired by the hit movie of the immortal Heath.)

Happy Valentine’s Day! Happy Valentine’s Day, everyone. Let’s all be baduy today in the name of bonggang bonggang pag-ibig.

Do It Yourself Caramoan

“For times not made for talking/ but listening to the waves; the music of the divine spheres/the dividend that pays.”  Dick Richardson.

Hellbent on discovering what the Survivor buzz was all about and wanting to discover it before the deluge of tourists and development aggression wreak its havoc, Clang and Jonas and I scheduled our very first out-of-town trip together to be in the remote islands of Caramoan. We had initially toyed with the idea of availing of one of those tour packages to Caramoan but self-confidence and an unwillingness to spend more than what was absolutely necessary convinced us to just make a go at it. 

In the spirit of backpacker solidarity, here is a step-by-step guide to Caramoan

Upon getting off the airport, find a way to get to Sabang port. There are airconditioned cars that can drive you to Sabang Port for P1,000.oo – P1,500.00. This is probably the quickest way to get there. What we did, however, was hop onto a tricycle to get to the terminal in Naga. At the terminal in Naga, get a van with a sign that says “Sabang” (P90.00 per person.) The trip is a two-hour pleasant ride through a typical Filipino countryside. At the Sabang Pier, get on the boat bound for Guijalo. A boat left just a few minutes before we arrived and we were told we had to wait for two hours. Do not expect a modern port with convenient amenities. Our two-hour waiting time was spent having lunch in a rundown carinderia, with stray dogs waiting hungrily at our feet for morsels on our plate and posters of scantily-clad women taped on the wooden walls. When the boat finally came and we were walking towards it, we saw burly muscled men walking in our direction and offering to carry us on their backs. It turns out that that was the only way to get to the boat without getting wet. Thanking the heavens for my last-minute decision to leave my laptop, I clambered rather clumsily on the shoulders of my beefy bangkero of choice.  The boat ride will cost you P120.00 and is another two hours long. Upon reaching Guijalo port, a row of tricycle drivers will be waiting to pick you up.  A tricycle ride costing P100 (for the whole tricycle) will get you to Centro, or the town center, where the lodging houses may be found. 

There are a handful of lodging houses in Caramoan town proper. Rex Guest Lodge is the most popular of the lot, and is the lodge of choice of the tour packages. I think a room there costs P1,400.00. The most high-end there is Casa Roa, costing around P1,550.00 per room for 2 people.  The cheapest is Villa Juliana, costing only P600.00 a night, good for three. I suppose you can guess where we stayed.

It was an unpretentious, cheerful place with an amiable owner named Roger.  If you don’t mind a spartan room with no hot water, then Villa Juliana is the place for you. The room fixtures were quite tacky and the beddings were rather threadbare, but well, at P200 per person night, we really can’t complain. Make advance reservations through 09177633167.

We arrived around 2pm so there was still time for us to do some island-hopping. Our tricycle driver, Kuya Jay, seemed friendly and honest enough so he volunteered to be our tour guide and find a boat for us at Guijalo Port (everyone knows each other in Caramoan, and he had a vast network of relatives and friends). The boatman charged us P800.00 for rent of the whole boat for the whole afternoon. We went to maybe three nearby islands. It was an uneventful boat ride because the seas were calm that day.

We visited one of the islands where Survivor had shot some scenes. Kuya Jay pointed out the “table” that the Survivor France cast had made. The names of the beaches elude me right now, all I can remember is how clear the water is and how haunting the rock formations appear. In one of the beaches, we spent most of our time throwing starfishes strewn to the shore back to the water.

We finished quite early, maybe before 7 pm, so we were back in town in time for dinner. Dinner for our first night was a carinderia affair in a small eatery called Lutong Bahay. Don’t expect fancy meals here. We had grilled pork chop and some fish, plus plenty of free soup. We were quite disappointed at the prices, though. A small dish costs around P50.00,  close to the prices of the carinderias in Manila.

The next day was the highlight of our trip for it was our full-day island hopping tour.  Kuya Jay told us that the tour packages usually prepare packed lunch for the tour group joiners and suggested that we buy cooked food from Lutong Bahay to bring with us to the islands. Unhappy about the idea of eating cold and tired-looking pork chop, we suggested passing by the market and buying some fresh fish to grill in the islands. Kuya Jay agreed, and accompanied us during our whole day trip for P600.00 including the 45-minute tricycle ride back and forth from the docking area. We paid P1,500.00 for a whole day’s use of banca with driver. The docking area of the banca is at a place called Paniman.  Brace yourself for a harrowing ride, that tricycle could double as an abortion clinic when it passes through some really bad dirt roads (still doesn’t come close though to our death-defying truck ride in Agusan del Sur when we visited a remote farmland). After what seemed like an eternity of getting our knees knocked against cold metal, we arrive at our destination.

Let me say right off that the boat ride was my scariest boat ride EVER in my entire life. The agrarian reform areas I work with are often in places that can be reached by land travel so I haven’t done much banca travelling in my life. We were the only bancas in sight (the others tourists were probably normal people deterred by what appeared to be a brewing storm) and our tiny banca seemed so flimsy compared to the vastness of the ocean. The waves were around five to six feet tall  and looked like they could tear our boat into pieces. Each big wave and sudden drop made us scream and hold the side of the banca for dear life. It did not help any that our driver said that banca turn-overs were a common occurence in those parts.

It was all worth it, however, when we got to the island I fell in love with: Matukad Island.

We were brought to the other beaches, like Tinago, Hunungan and Sabitang Laya, plus we saw construction underway at Gota beach, but asked to be brought again to the pristine white sands of Matukad. This was also where we had our lunch, a simple but delicious meal of grilled seafood. Kuya Jay did our grilling for us using equipment borrowed from relatives at Paniman (the port, where we parked the tricycle) and even shared their freshly-caught tangigue with us.

On the way home, we passed by a small shanty where we chanced upon live crabs inside nets. We bought a couple and had them cooked at Lutong Bahay. Dinner was a splendid spread of crabs, grilled fish (for me, as I had developed an allergy to crustaceans) Red Horse Beer.

The tour package offered to us was around P7,000.00, because we were only a small group of three. The promo price of P4,600.00 can only be availed of if the tour group reaches twenty joiners. We spent around P2,700.00 each, had the boat all to ourselves, had entire islands all to ourselves and instead of eating packed tour group lunches and plated dinners, took all the time we wanted gorging on fresh seafood and roasted tomatoes.

Sure, we spent the few minutes before sleeping chasing cockroaches with our slippers and our mornings screaming at the cold water flowing from the rusty faucet. Sure, we had to take public transport through and through, and dealt with everything from an old lady farting inside an enclosed van to a drunken middle-aged man suddenly vomiting inside the jeepney from Sabang back to Naga. Sure, maybe it would’ve been more convenient if the ferry going to Guijalo from Sabang was exclusively for our use and just waiting for us, and we wouldn’t need to sit for three hours in a carinderia with stray dogs at our feet and Marian Rivera posters hovering over us. But well, it was all definitely worth it. Every single death-defying curve of the banca ride, every single incovenience, was all worth it.

And besides, if you throw together three beckies with a taste for adventure,  extreme kakuriputan, annoying self-confidence, and enough chismis fodder for all those loooong waiting times,  it ain’t really too much of a hassle.

p.s. Kuya Jay can be contacted at 09212998866.  If he doesn’t reply to your text, call him. The LCD of his cellphone is broken.

Bonggang Bonggang Dreaming

I was in Binondo on a Saturday night, two days before the Chinese New Year zigzagging my way through a swarm of people, all bent on scrounging for crumbs of good luck in these trying times. An old lady in thin white socks looking to buy chimes to welcome fortune. A cranky middle-aged man finding in a gold-colored frog the answer to floundering profit margins. An imperious matron with haughty eyebrows, hoping that jade mandarin ducks will be all it takes to get her husband back.  A new couple, high on love but down on luck, make promises to each other as ephemeral as the delicate Chinese paper on which they pay the toothless old vendor to write their fortunes for the year of the Ox. The vendors hawk their wares loudly, in an almost indecipherable mix of English, Tagalog and Chinese, hawking everything from tikoy to redemption.

 

I was alone. Gus was stuck in the usual traffic snarl at Morayta. I decided to plod on and walk the entire stretch of Ongpin, entering stores that caught my fancy, stopping by the occasional food stall for a bite of moon cake or a ball of buchi given gratis. There was something intimidating about the rows of feng shui stores and those who entered them. It seemed everyone who came in knew right on what they came in for.  One Nine Phoenixes, two kwei stars and hurry up, a jade talisman – the list was endless.  No one had any time to attend to the Filipino-looking, non-Chinese speaking girl who could not say what she wanted.

 

I saw a feng shui store with not a lot of people inside and hurried to get in. A Chinese couple welcomed me profusely and asked me what I needed. I wasn’t really sure, so I just said I was born in the year of the monkey.

 

“Lucky… lucky… monkey” the man said in broken English.

 

“Really? That’s great!” I was happy. Who doesn’t want to be told he or she was going to be lucky?

 

“Much money…. Much happiness…. Much love…” he cackled, showing me a laminated board with all the chinese signs and their fortunes in the year of the Ox. He then told me that this is a good year for me to visualize all the things I want, because the stars appear to in my favor. Write it down, both of them prodded me.

 

Make your dreams as big as the universe.

 

And so I did.

 

1. A new CARP law for the farmers. With the whole goody-bag of farmer-friendly benefits like indefeasibility of EP-CLOA, permanent prohibition on non-redistributive schemes like stock distribution options, and…. life imprisonment with no chance of parole for perpetrators of agrarian related violence. 
2. More magical trips to hidden parts of the Philippines. I feel no compulsion to hit yet another shopping mall of yet another visa-less country in Southeast Asia via yet another Cebu Pacific promo. I want to stay here, visit our secret crevices, walk down our sandy shorelines, watch the stars amidst a lush confusion of foliage, explore caves and mountains and open spaces.  
3. To have me and my loved ones forever free from the threat of illness – no trips to the hospital, no medicine bottles, no anything hanging like a gray overcast cloud. To know that we can live free and boundless, bear children in wombs that work, take long bus trips to forever, run off to far off places that do not have a municipal health center
4. A house on a small farmlot in the province, far from the rest of the world but within the radius of Smart Bro. Preferably near any body of water.  I am utterly convinced that all I need in life are brewed coffee, google, and the kind of love that corroborates who I am.

But then again, universe, I can always settle for much less. Like a new laptop to replace this old and creaking one.