Celebration: An Anthology to Commemorate the 50th Anniversary of the Silliman University National Writers Workshop Sands and Coral, 2011-2013
Silliman University, 2013
The truth of the matter is, I was most curious to visit Puerto Princesa, because this is the hometown of my first boyfriend, my, ehem, college sweetheart. Thirty years have since passed those days, and sixteen since I last saw him. So I finally went to Puerto Princesa proper today, and when I got off the van, guess who the first person I saw was.
Him.
It was ... an awkward reunion. But I think this officially closes a chapter in my life, hehehe. The universe has a sense of humor.
Just hazily documenting my first day in Puerto Princesa today. I flew in very early, after spending a very short night in Manila in transit to Palawan. Did not get to see much of the city proper of Puerto Princesa because I was soon whisked away by the service van provided for by UNACOM, all the way to Daluyon Beach and Mountain Resort in Sabang. I thought it would be a short ride, but to my groggy surprise, it took almost two hours to get to our destination — 75 kilometers away from the center of the city — and I thought we were in another town altogether. But nooo, I would later learn Sabang is still very much a part of the city.
I'm here for UNESCO duties, to be one of the resource speakers for Pamati: Let the River Rest, a cultural festival honoring the closure of the Puerto Princesa Underground River for three days, with film director Dante Nico Garcia as lead coordinator. [The Underground River is one of the UNESCO-designated natural heritage sites in the Philippines.]
When I arrived this morning, however, I was practically a zombie from lack of sleep and the general tiredness of travel, that I purposely missed the morning session, and staggered to my assigned room, where I immediately took to bed and knocked out for five hours. Later in the day, I attended parts of the afternoon session, and tried my best to finish my presentation due tomorrow morning, but residual sleep also took over. I finally joined the screening of a documentary titled Fragile Frontier while having dinner with the rest of the participants. The film is about the impact of Typhoon Odette on Palawan, directed by Jessie Cereno and produced by the UNESCO National Commission for the Philippines [UNACOM]. [It is narrated by Silliman author and cultural worker Jane Timbancaya-Urbanek.]
I will always find travel to be essential in my work in culture. When you are surrounded by like-minded people of other places who share your passion, and finding them doing their thing in surprising ways you never thought possible, it’s a charge that rejuvenates the often flagging spirit. I’m privileged to be able to do this, and now I’m here in Puerto Princesa. I needed this injection of inspiration after the relentless barrage of June.
I missed my connecting flight from Iloilo City to Dumaguete via Manila, and rebooking, in this energy crisis, would have cost an arm and two legs. This was bound to happen. I’ve traveled considerably all of my life, both domestic and international, and I have always been on time for every flight, with time to spare—but for some reason, this time around, I misread the “flight time” on my itinerary as “boarding time.” I casually arrived at the counter of Cebu Pacific at the Iloilo Airport, ready to come home to Dumaguete, only to be told that boarding time happened 45 minutes ago, and they had already closed the plane door. There was no chance I was getting on board. What do I do know? I asked the check-in girl, who was in no rush to be empathetic. Buy another ticket for Manila, she said, for a flight scheduled later in the afternoon, and then manage my Manila to Dumaguete flight by rebooking. The thing is, I couldn’t do that, because it wasn’t I who bought my ticket. And again, all these would cost an arm and two legs.
So I opted to do the land trip home, via ferry from Iloilo City to Bacolod, and then the mind-bending six-hour bus trip to Dumaguete. It wasn’t the most comfortable way of getting home, but it certainly was the cheaper option. A part of me was also curiously pragmatic: at least, this way, I’d know the land and sea route from Negros if I wanted to visit Iloilo City again.
I Bonamine’d through the rough seas, and the Oceanjet took about an hour and thirty minutes to cross Guimaras Strait, docking in Bacolod. I immediately flagged down a taxi to take me to South Bus Terminal, in order to catch the next available aircon bus bound for Dumaguete. This part of this trip would take more than six hours, and I wanted to be as comfortable as possible. I toyed with the idea of hiring a car or a van, but the leasing company was asking for seven thousand total for the entire trip—which I understand in the parlance of an energy crisis, but much too much for me to even consider as a viable alternative. In my GC with friends, Ernest told me, “The Ceres bus is comfortable naman.” That gave some comfort. Plus I’ve always loved Ceres buses. As a Negrense, I grew up riding it.
I was lucky to get a good seat in the bus. My body, reeling from the subterfuges of sudden travel changes, was too wired up to even be bothered by the fact that two Pentecostal preachers came one after another to offer visions of fire and brimstone if there was no salvation for us, and then handing out envelopes for charity. I ignored both of them so very thoroughly. I needed sleep, not a promise of flimsy salvation. After almost an hour of marinating in the confines of that bus terminal, we finally felt the movement of the bus moving quickly along half-deserted highways. The energy crisis has a silver lining: no traffic as usual.
I would go back and forth between waking and sleeping while the bus plowed its way down south of the western side of Negros. It was mostly nighttime, and there was only darkness staring at me from my window—so sleep was preferable. I was growing hungry though. I had only eaten one ensaymada while in the pier in Iloilo.
All told, the sea and land route would take about nine hours of my life, but at a thousand pesos in total fares, this was preferable than forking over almost twenty thousand pesos. [P20,000!!!] In that sense, the hassle was not quite a hassle, to be honest. And something else entirely different didn’t make me mind everything at all.
The reason was this: I am endlessly fascinated by the mealtime stopover in Mabinay—always in Mabinay—the halfway point in the mountains between the two Negros capitals. When I go to Bacolod, this happens around lunchtime or maybe in the early afternoon. That night, however, it occurred around half-past 9 PM—and I was already thinking there was to be no such stop and I was already very hungry and I’d eaten all the butterscotch squares that Leny Ledesma, our Iloilo host, had given me. I calculated there were two more hours before arrival in Dumaguete, and my hunger could wait.
But there was a stop, finally! Somewhere in the mountain darkness, the Ceres ground to a halt and I heard the bus driver say, “Manihapon ta!”
I bolted out of my seat to exit and line up at this well-lit carinderia whose existence seems to primarily depend on regular bus loads of hungry people coming its way. It had about fifteen tables for the taking, most of them already occupied. Somehow I remembered the protocol of ordering: at the counter, I pointed at my choices of viands—a plate of two pieces of fried chicken and a plate of bihon—then to another table where the plates of rice were, and I got one serving—then to the refrigerator at the side to grab a sakto Sprite. Having gotten a table shared with another hungry passenger—a girl—I proceeded to eat, and after a while, someone came over to check what I’d gotten, and issued a bill written on a small, green Post-It note: P170.
I was happy and full. “But was it delicious?” someone asked me on Facebook when I recounted all of these in a short post. My answer: my hunger told me it was delicious.
I don’t know why I look forward to these mealtime stopovers on my Ceres trips, because there’s no such thing as taking your pleasurable time to eat, since you have to finish your meal before the conductor and the bus driver finish theirs. It’s also a very simple meal, not even hot—but it does feel to me like some culinary version of an oasis in the desert.
It’s sustenance in the middle of a very long trip.
It’s also a chance to awaken your sleepy legs.
And it’s a moment to reflect, while eating, on the realization that you’re almost home [or near your destination], which is a kind of excitement all its own.
I knew, coming to Iloilo for the celebration of National Filipino Food Month, that I will be eating a lot. Before coming here, I conditioned myself that whenever I’d be offered something to eat here, it was my duty to say, yes. So yeah, I’ve been having a feast thus far, which is just Iloilo CIty being true to its designation as a UNESCO Creative City of Gastronomy.
But you know what I love so far? The baye-baye ice cream at the Happy Endings ice cream shop near Molo Plaza, which our guides took us to tonight on a spur of the moment, a detour that made my day. Remember the grumpy food critic Anton Ego in the Pixar film Ratatouille when he takes a bite of the titular dish, and gets transported to fond memories of childhood? The exact same thing happened to me. I took one teaspoon of the ice cream, and I was a child again in Bayawan, eating baye-baye.
It has been more than two weeks since we arrived from Frankfurt. The lingering feeling that I still have is the camaraderie—the bonding, the shared experience, the fact that we were genuinely there for each other and for the country. I met writers, publishers, and creatives I wouldn't otherwise have met, even here in the Philippines. Having extended breakfasts together for ten straight days can do that to you.
Alas, carefully laid plans had changed. I was no longer Baguio-bound after I touched down in Manila from Frankfurt, after attending the Frankfurter Buchmesse. The itinerary had been clear: no rest in the capital after arrival in NAIA, straight on to a bus station in Pasay to take me to the mountains for a book event—my first ever in the City of Pines in more than 15 years.
But, as life often reminds me, certainty is a fragile illusion. The event was canceled at the last minute, leaving me stranded in Manila for three days before my scheduled flight back home to Dumaguete. I could not change the booking, since it was the National Book Development Board who did that for me as part of my grant as a delegate to the Frankfurter Buchmesse. I was also left scrambling to find a hotel, which proved to be a futile exercise: nothing decent within my budget could be had in the days I was set to be in Manila. I was, of course, also disappointed over the fact that my dream of a return to Baguio was suddenly for naught—for I always felt like that city lived inside a poem, and I had been craving its air after the gray, efficient cold of Europe. I also missed writer friends who lived there, and I was eager to see them once more.
But I had also learned, with time and years, that derailment is not always a disaster. Sometimes, it can be the beginning of something else.
When I arrived in Manila on Tuesday, near midnight, “home” was a word that felt more like a placeholder than a destination. I got out of NAIA past midnight, bleary-eyed and body aching after the long anxietry-ridden wait at the luggage carousel. I had thanked the heavens that I had not yet booked a hotel in Baguio. Friends from high school came to the rescue, offering me their place in Bonifacio Global City. I remember standing under the shower, washing away the travel fatigue, feeling grateful to be grounded even in an unplanned stopover. There was some comfort in the unplanned, a quiet relief that the universe, despite its odd sense of humor, still managed to catch me when things fell apart. Plus: did I even think about what I would do lugging my heavy luggage around to Baguio?
So what do I do in this unexpected layover of four days?
The next day unfolded like a gentle surprise. I had been an Anvil Publishing author since 2012, with two books to my name that they have published—Heartbreak and Magic in 2012 and Don’t Tell Anyone in 2017—yet this was the first time I had ever stepped into their offices in Mandaluyong. Finally, I could put faces to the names that had lived for years in my inbox: managing editor R. Jordan P. Santos, marketing maven Page Jose, and senior editor Arianne Velasquez. Page, Arianne, and I had already spent a week together in Frankfurt—“bonded by trauma,” as we liked to joke—and now, back in Manila, we found comfort in the familiarity of shared exhaustion and laughter.
That evening, upon the invitation of Anvil publisher Xandra Ramos, I joined the Anvil team for a special screening of Jerold Tarog’s Quezon at the Metropolitan Theater. Jericho Rosales, with whom I exchanged some pleasantries and shook hands with, played the titular president, and I was struck by the film’s almost farcical tone—fitting, I thought, for a story about the roots of Philippine patronage politics. “We really had no choice to have the kind of government we have,” I told the interviewer who asked us about our reactions after the screening. “From the very beginning, we were already wading in the mud.” Afterward, our publisher treated all us to a late-night dinner at The Aristocrat, joined by fellow Anvil authors Yvette Tan and Danton Remoto. The conversations ran deep into the night—about Frankfurt, about writing, about life. It was one of those rare, luminous evenings when fatigue dissolved into fellowship, and I remembered why I chose this life of words in the first place.
The following day, October 23, should have found me already in Baguio, talking to readers in a book event, but instead I was in Quezon City, meeting with Vibal Publishing’s managing editor, Gelo Lopez, to discuss a book project that had been nearly a year in the making. The meeting brimmed with creative energy, filled with the kind of spirited exchange that made the long delays and rewrites worth it. Had the Baguio event not been canceled, I would have missed this moment of quiet progress—a reminder that detours could be productive, too.
I spent my last day in Manila mostly indoors, catching up on work and correspondence, the city humming faintly beyond the windows of my borrowed apartment. Looking back, I realized that the entire episode—the canceled trip, the scramble for lodging, the chance reunions—had unfolded like an orchestrated accident, each piece falling into place as if by divine mischief.
This year itself had been relentless—a wild pendulum of highs and lows, a roller coaster I could neither predict nor pause. But as I turned fifty last August, I have found myself embracing these unpredictable turns with something like grace. I wanted to be more fearless, more grateful, less anxious about the things beyond control. Serendipity, I realized, often arrived disguised as inconvenience.
What seemed at first like a disruption became an alignment: a canceled bus ride turned into reconnections with friends; a missed mountain event became a reunion with my publishers; an unexpected pause opened space for new beginnings. Perhaps that was the quiet lesson of the week—that the world had its own way of rearranging our plans toward small, necessary miracles. In the end, what I thought was lost time became found time, and the story I had meant to tell in Baguio began to write itself, instead, in Manila.
Last full day in Manila, and after being out to do some chores, I’m staying in to dive back to work after all those days in Frankfurt. I’m lucky to have this temporary home in BGC, owned by very good friends from high school, who answered my distress call after unsuccessfully trying to book a hotel in Manila for this lengthy [three days!] unexpected stay. I do think the whole thing proved to be serendipitous. All’s well that ends well.
I’m not sure if this happens to everyone, but every time I am about to leave Dumaguete for an extended trip to somewhere else, my anxiety goes off like a fire alarm in a gigantic bonfire. Be it via a ferry, or a bus, or a plane. [But strangely not cars. I think this is because cars imply a simple day-trip—and hence an eventual return to Dumaguete without the trappings of travel.]
When I am about to leave Dumaguete, I feel my entire existence go on molasses mode—and there is a high percentage of my psyche going bonkers: it absolutely cannot fathom, cannot stomach, cannot execute the idea of leaving. I don’t try to analyze why: it is just a gut feeling that demands to be tolerated. You don’t want to leave, it taunts me. Why are you leaving?
I don’t really listen to it. It’s just a nagging voice at the back of my head, soft but cruel. Besides, I know most of my trips somewhere else are always essential and cannot be postponed, and I know that nagging voice will eventually fade once I really get on the business of traveling. But it is loudest as a trumpet announcing the Rapture while I am on transit to the airport, to the port, to the bus terminal.
Once, about a decade ago, I was invited to attend an important literary event in Manila, and the organizers were spending everything for me, including a hotel and plane ticket. So I packed my bags, and got ready to go. My anxiety cartwheeled as usual. When I got to the airport, I found out that the organizers made a huge mistake in booking my flight: my ticket indicated that I was to leave Manila for Dumaguete instead of vice versa, and I never really bothered checking because I assumed the organizers were good at this stuff.
So I couldn’t leave Dumaguete.
And you know what I felt right after realizing that? A huge sense of relief. True, I pretended to be disappointed and said so to the organizers over the phone—but in all honesty, I happily went back to my apartment, unpacked everything, and felt mightily spared from having to travel all the way to Manila. It was a relief—but it was not a proud moment. This memory has haunted me ever since.
And yet this is also true: the moment my bus speeds out of the city limit, the moment my boat starts churning the waters and leaves the port, the moment my plane hops from taxiing down the runway to actually flying in the sky—I feel all that anxiety leave my body like a mass of hot, heavy air. I’d find myself heaving a sigh of relief, of finding contentment that somehow I found myself out of the enchanted clutches of Dumaguete.
What’s going on?
I call this “enchantment,” because it feels like that. Like some voodoo of place that keeps me tied to Dumaguete like a clutch. And Dumaguete, being Dumaguete, plays this spell so well it almost feels sinister. Everyone who comes here—even the ones just stopping by on a backpacker’s whim or the ones arriving on academic assignments—find themselves tethered in ways they cannot explain. “There is something about Dumaguete,” they say, and it is not a marketing tagline; it is testimony. A poet once told me he had come here for a three-day visit and ended up staying for thirty years. A painter I know swore he would only last a semester teaching at Silliman, but the semester multiplied into decades, and now he is retired here, almost proudly unable to leave. This is the city’s enchantment: it lures you in with its easy pace, its acacia-lined boulevards, its sea that turns gold at sunset, and it whispers—why go elsewhere when everything you’ve been longing for is here?
The irony, of course, is that the very same enchantment is also what makes leaving so difficult. Dumaguete is both paradise and prison, but only because it is so good at being paradise. You leave reluctantly, and when you do, you spend much of your time away plotting a return, as if absence were a kind of punishment. I’ve seen this play out countless times: students who study abroad always circle back, retirees find their way home, even tourists become residents. It’s not Manila they pine for, nor Cebu, nor Davao. It’s this small coastal city that seems to live rent-free in everyone’s heart.
And so when I feel that crippling anxiety before leaving, I know it is not mere neurosis. It is the spell of Dumaguete tightening its grip, reminding me that departure is a betrayal, even a temporary one. But once I’m out there, on the road, in the air, at sea, the spell breaks. I begin to see myself again, stripped of the comfort Dumaguete provides, and in that distance, I also begin to appreciate it more.
That’s the other side of enchantment: it works even in absence. The city haunts you when you’re gone. The taste of tempura at the boulevard stalls. The echo of laughter in a silong filled with guitars. The salt of the wind carried inland by habagat breezes. Dumaguete travels with you even when you leave it, which is why perhaps the relief I feel after departure is not the relief of escape, but the comfort of knowing that the city will not leave me, even if I leave it.
Maybe the lesson is this: Dumaguete holds you in a paradox. You can’t bear to leave, but when you finally do, you realize you never really left. Its enchantment is not geographic. It is spiritual, psychological, emotional. It is the sense that this is the place that knows you best, and you will always belong to it, no matter how far you go.
I don’t really know what to expect. All I know is, I’ve prepared as much as I can, I’m packed, my travel papers are in place, and I’m just going with the flow. I know things won’t really come into focus for me until I’m on that plane.
Got back to the hotel very late last night after the Palancas, and didn't bother getting any sleep because I had an early flight. Which meant that as soon as I got back home to Dumaguete, I went straight to bed to grab sleep till late afternoon, waking only to do my 4 PM class. Then I grabbed a foot massage because my feet were aching from the Manila trip, then I attended a birthday dinner for Renz's Aunt Mitzie. And now it's 9 PM. There's a whole mountain of to-do's to tackle! I'm on it.
I needed this theatre break, away from all things Dumaguete for the weekend, with a thousand thanks to my high school friends Eugene Kho and Niña Christine Miraflor-Kho [and Lance!] who made this happen. I love Hamilton, but I was never a die hard fan of the material unlike most of my friends, until now. Found myself blown away by the magnificence of Act II, and teared up many times at various points of the concluding scenes. The duel, Burr's "I'm the villain of your story now" confession, the rousing legacy final number. The play's really a different thing when you see it live on stage.
9:00 AM |
The Ultimate Holy Week O.B.T. Around Negros Island
The term “O.B.T.”—for “one big tuyok”—was probably first used by Dumaguete resident Raffy Teves in 1982. It caught on, and decades later, we’re still using this term for the now “traditional” habit of going around Dumaguete in a car or motorcycle for several cycles before heading home. It started when quiet Dumaguete, once a city of 𝑡𝑎𝑟𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑙𝑙𝑎𝑠 or horse-drawn carriages, started having a considerable number of cars on its narrow roads. According to Jacqueline Veloso-Antonio, “There was nothing to do, so we would be hanging out at our homes, on rotation each week, for tapok. Then, if we ran out of things to do, Raffy would say, ‘O.B.T. ‘ta!’ and we’d all get on our rides and do a big tuyok of Dumaguete, which included all the cemeteries in town!”
Renz and do this, too, all the time. And so do many of our friends.
But back in 2018, in time for Holy Week, I did the ultimate O.B.T. with my friends Xandro “Chucky” Dael and Felix Dela Peña Mosqueda III: to go around Negros Island at the top of Holy Thursday, and return to Dumaguete at the end of Easter Sunday. Our haphazard aim was to see if we could do it, and also to see the various sites in our island that we’d heard so much about but never got to see, because life was always busy. I also decided to do, on a lark, a bit of heritage documentation: I wanted to photograph every single Jose Rizal statue in all the towns and cities we passed by, and to photograph every parish church.
You need four things to be able to go around Negros Island in four days:
First, have an absolute and heedless denial in impossibility. This is essential. An impromptu O.B.T. around an island as huge as Negros will have most people say, “No, thank you.” We said yes instead.
Second, have a company of a few friends to share the madness with. Chuck and I have always shared a love for traveling—we used to do staycations a lot—although we differ greatly in our estimation of what constituted great accommodations: I love the rustic charms of nipa hut resorts, and he loves them chic and modern. Nonetheless, I love going on daytrips with him—something we actually hadn’t done ever since the pandemic happened. But in 2018, we just decided out of the blue to take this O.B.T. trip. It was completely decided on a whim when we were chatting on Facebook one night right around the beginning of Holy Week, and I think I said something like, “My dream is to do an O.B.T. of Negros Island.” And he replied: “Let’s do it this Thursday.” And that was that.
Problem was, I don’t drive—so it was left to Chucky to do all of the driving around Negros Island, 206 kilometers of nautical highway in total. [The poor guy developed a wrist problem right after.] Also, I’m such a bad companion on the road: I always fall asleep the moment the car I’m in speeds on a highway. Good thing we had Felix to accompany us. He provided the laughs, especially when I slept, and he was there to break whatever indecisiveness the two primary instigators of the trip landed ourselves into. [In the meantime, I charted our trip, determined our stops, decided on the tourist spots to visit, and booked all the hotels.]
Third, have a car that’s stocked up with gasoline and chichirya for the road. This is a must.
Fourth, have a good map to track where you might stay for every stop for the night. Since we only had four full days to do a complete trip, I determined that we needed to do three nightly stops. I decided that our first stop should be in Negros Oriental—and that should be Canlaon City, right at the border of the two provinces, and which would provide us with our only excursion to the interiors of the island, and at least see Kanlaon Volcano and pay homage to the gods from the vantage point of what is said to be the oldest balete tree in all of the island. We earlier determined not to visit the interior towns for lack of time, hence no stops in Pamplona, Mabinay, Don Salvador Benedicto, La Castellana, Moises Padilla, and Isabela.
In Canlaon, we stayed at Mountain Citi Hostel, and enjoyed our first O.B.T. night going around the mountain city at dusk, looking for cheap food, and pondering about the first day of madness we just went through. Our first leg from Dumaguete to Canlaon was probably our most familiar trip, because we’d been through these cities and towns before—but doing it during Holy Thursday added a different flavor to the trip. When we stopped by Tanjay, we managed to catch a glimpse at the Semana Sanata kasikas in this most Catholic of Oriental Negrense cities. It was interesting. The Oriental towns going north also increasingly became rustic, and because I was documenting all the parish churches, it was jarring for me to take note that they became more garish the more up north we went, save for Tayasan’s. Also, we couldn’t find the poblacion of Vallehermoso, so we skipped that. [Truth: I have never seen the población of Vallehermoso.]
On our second leg, we started by going from Canlaon City to San Carlos City—a city I love—and then we were on a route that was no longer familiar to us. We were now in the Occidental side of Negros, although all the towns until Manapla—which includes Calatrava, Toboso, Escalante City, Sagay City, and Cadiz City—were all Cebuano-speaking. But suddenly in Manapla, while we were looking for the Gaston heritage house where Peque Gallaga filmed Oro Plata Mata, we started hearing more Hiligaynon, just like a switch being turned on. [Also in Manapla, we chanced upon the Chapel of the Cartwheels—something we did not plan to visit at all, but glad we did. It was near the Gaston house anyway.]
It was also around here that I really began to feel the grand sugar heritage of my island. Sure, I’ve seen sugar haciendas in Bais and Tanjay, and in Sta. Catalina and Pamplona—but the sugar fields of Northern Negros are something else altogether—a vastness of sugar fields that essentially serve as time machines. In Victorias City, we decided to visit St. Joseph the Worker Chapel, commonly known as the Church of the Angry Christ, which is located inside the Victorias Milling Company—just to see the famous mural done by Filipino-American modernist painter Alfonso Ossorio in 1950. Also in Victorias City, we witnessed the biggest Santo Entierro procession we have ever seen in our whole lives, and we made this strange distinction: Oriental towns and cities seemed to go into somber mode during Holy Week, while Occidental towns and cities were practically using the high holy days as a chance to, well, party. There was such a festive atmosphere the moment we entered Victorias, and which carried us all the way through our trip to the southern Occidental towns. Another observation we made: Occidental towns and cities really do flaunt their wealth—you could see it in the ornate [and preserved] architecture and other infrastructures, even in the smallest of towns. The whole thing brought a certain honesty in the Occidental Negrense boast, “Sa amon ya, ang kwarta ginapala, ginapiko.” It’s true.
This second leg would end in Silay City, where I chose the German Unson heritage house, now a thriving bread-and-breakfast, to be our second stop for the night. I thought that there was just no other way to stay in Silay—a city famous for its heritage houses from the heyday of the sugarcane decades—except be in an actual heritage house. We did our requisite tour of all the sugar houses in Silay—which, lucky for us, were all open on a Holy Friday. But all of us had been to Silay before and had done this heritage tour, so we soon opted to loiter around town looking for a place to eat—and even though the city was festive and full of people, we could not find a single restaurant that was open. We ended up buying diyes chicken off the streets, and spent the evening under the shadow of the grand San Diego Pro-Cathedral.
We began our third leg by leaving for Bacolod mid-morning. We didn’t really intend to stay and explore Bacolod, because we’d all been here before—but we took time to take a photo of the San Sebastian Cathedral, and a photo of the Jose Rizal statue along Araneta Avenue. We knew the road to Sipalay, our third stop, would be long—the longest leg ever in our O.B.T.—so we immediately went our way, although we decided to bypass the sea route after Bacolod to do a quick interior look at Murcia and Bago City, where we promptly got lost on our way to find an exit to Pulupandan. We laughed nervously when we finally found our bearings, knowing we lost an hour or so going round and round the interiors, and then it was smooth-sailing to Kabankalan. From there, we were finally in the heel of our boot-shaped island, the southern tropical wilderness of Ilog and Cauayan—which was absolutely beautiful for its density of foliage. It was nearing nighttime when we reached Cauayan, and then suddenly we were in the middle of a heavy downpour. We weren’t even near our destination yet! We braved on in the uncomfortable darkness that suddenly was everywhere, the highway blurry in the rain. Finally, after a few apprehensive hours, we did reach Sipalay.
What Chuck and Felix did not know however is that I booked us accommodations, not in Sipalay itself, but in Sugar Beach—a cove which was only accessible via a pump boat the resort was sending us. In the increasing darkness of evening, around 8 PM, while the rain was petering out but was still quite strong, we finally boarded the pump boat on rough seas, with rainwater and seawater drenching all of us. It was in this condition—fun for me, but horrifying to Chuck and Felix—that we finally reached Driftwood Village Resort, a place I’d stayed in from a few years back when I spent an entire Holy Week vacation with my brother Edwin. The rain was no longer as harsh when we settled in for the night, and we spent dinnertime in the company of hippies and expats. By Easter Sunday morning, the sun was out in full force—and Chuck and Felix finally found out why Sugar Beach is called exactly that: the fineness of the sand and the gloriousness of the view were all worth last night’s heavy rain. It was beautiful.
By noon, we were preparing to go on our final leg—the homestretch to Dumaguete after a brief stopover in Bayawan, Chuck’s hometown and mine, to visit family and friends. It was already late in the afternoon when we started on that final stretch—but not without a final decision: “Do we go through Pamplona, or through Siaton?” I opted for Siaton, knowing I could catch more photos of churches and Rizal statues that way.
We arrived in Dumaguete near dusk, stopping for a bit at M.L. Quezon Park to behold our Jose Rizal statue and our Cathedral of St. Catherine of Alexandria, just within a stone’s throw of each other. We were finally home—and our O.B.T. was a grand success I don’t think the three of us could surpass again.
So, which churches were the prettiest and grandest? Silay’s, hands down, architecture-wise. Art-wise, the Church of St. Joseph the Worker in Victorias, but Manapla’s Church of the Cartwheels is fantastic for its idiosyncracies. But in terms of traditional feel, Bacong, Dumaguete, Bacolod, Pontevedra, and Valladolid were the tops—although Valladolid’s has terrible interiors. The churches in the south side of Oriental are older and more beautiful, but in the north side, especially after Bais, not so much, except for Tayasan and Amlan, the latter which somehow managed to preserve the old architecture. In terms of lovable strangeness, I love the parish churches of Cadiz, Bais, and Amlan. The saddest were the churches in San Jose, Toboso, Basay, and Ayungon. And the most disappointing is probably Tanjay. For an old parish, its church is unbelievably garish.
As for the Rizal statue documentation, that’s another story.
It’s sometimes curious to consider the mementos we keep of the places we’ve lived in. It has been 22 years since Tokyo, and when I think of that time I find myself willing me to even believe that was true, once upon a time, and not just a vividly remembered dream. I have other keepsakes—three full albums of photos and collages, a kaleidoscope I bought in Kyoto, a sake bottle. I still wear my haori yukata when I feel like it. And that’s it, and they feel increasingly removed from time, mementos of mementos.
And I finally did it! I'm back in Dumaguete. Four days, three major stops, 35 towns and cities, 763 kilometers, and twenty-four total hours of driving later, I've officially accomplished one major item in my bucket list: a #NegrosIslandOBT. Thanks to my fantastic companions, Xandro Dael a.k.a. Driver, and Felix Dela Peña Mosqueda III a.k.a. Caterer.
Everything starts with a whim, a small measure of guts, and the mindset of just heading out into the unknown. To appropriate the quote from the cross-country hiker in the documentary In Pursuit of Silence, "We can come up with reasons for doing anything, but only in doing it can we really understand it. [Our] intuition was that it was a good thing to do, that [doing this was] important to do in many ways and should be explored, not explained.
We ended our first leg in the mountains of Canlaon, and our second leg in the heritage city of Silay via San Carlos and Cadiz. This time we were headed to white sandy beaches down south, in Sipalay. After Bacolod, we got lost for an hour in the interiors of Bago, looking for their Rizal statue [which we never found], because Google Maps, which we have christened Magta [as in "magtanong"], was leading us all over the place, going nowhere. We found our bearings again in Valladolid, which meant we skipped Pulupandan. After Kabankalan, going through the vast expanse of Ilog and Cauayan, it began to rain hard, and by the time we reached the outskirts of Sipalay, it was dark and rainy, although thank God there was no wind. We crossed the sea from Poblacion Beach to Sugar Beach, thirty minutes away, under the intense night sky, drenched to our skin because of sea and rain, staring into the dark with the hum of motorboat and the mild rocking of waves for company, our beacon the far off pinpricks of light that would prove to be our home for the night. It has been an adventure.
#NegrosIslandOBT
I decided to document all the Rizal monuments in Negros Island during this OBT trip. Starting in Dumaguete, going north and counter-clockwise, we've stopped in every town and city along the nautical highway [we omitted the ones inland] and took photos of the Rizal statue there. We discovered that most statues followed a template, although the execution of each one is apparently directly proportional to the wealth of the town or city. Some however are quite dramatic, like the Rizal statue in Cadiz City where the national hero is depicted in the instance of death, with Inang Bayan holding him in the manner of a Pieta. Some towns however -- like Bindoy, Canlaon, Calatrava, and Toboso -- don't seem to have Rizal statues, or have forgotten where they are. I asked one person in Toboso why they don't have a statue, and her answer was: "Kay purdoy man mi." In Escalante, their Rizal monument is located in Baranggay Rizal, 15 kilometers away from the city proper -- an instance of us looking for a needle in a haystack. We're still in Silay right now, on the way to Sipalay next.
I have just finished off the last bite of some impossibly sweet chocolate cheesecake from Calea. It is 2 AM on a Friday, the robust sugary rush is keeping me awake by design, and I find myself staring into the early morning darkness outside my hotel room window at Circle Inn along Lopez Jaena Street in Bacolod.
I am thinking about the long hours ahead I will have to spend on the road back home to Dumaguete aboard the ubiquitous yellow bus that has come to stand in for Negros travel, and as usual I am ambivalent about the very act of travel—it’s starting stances anyway.
There is no wish to pack, to be honest, no wish to start moving, in anticipation of travel.
In fact, I should have been home already. But somehow, on a whim, while I was lolling about in another hotel bed, in Avenue Suites Hotel along Lacson Street, at the same exact early morning time the day before, I had convinced myself I needed to stay one more day in Bacolod. And after finding out my Avenue Suites room was no longer available, I quickly booked myself another hotel online, marveling at the ease of how these things go these days, and marveling even more at my impulsiveness to stay.
This is not my first time in Bacolod. I had come here for the first time years and years before, on a field trip during college I could remember only in bits and pieces. There were two other times I visited, but always on a rush of some business or other—and once with a boyfriend whose father died the very day we arrived in Bacolod for a vacation, and so we had to rush home the very next day for the funeral.
So Bacolod has always remained a blur—made familiar and distinct only in the films of Peque Gallaga, in the short stories and essays of Rosario Cruz Lucero, in the novels of Vicente Garcia Groyon. When I arrived via Ceres last Monday morning, I swore to myself I’d play the role of the tourist to the hilt, when I can. It was time to get to know this city of smiles, this side of Negros island.
I had a simple Bacolod bucket list.
I swore to eat inasal in Aida’s at the manokan.
I swore to walk the length of Lacson Street—because the only way to get to know a city, at least in the blushing stages of acquaintance, is to walk along its main artery. Google Map tells me the route is long, but I told myself that if I was able to walk the length of Broadway from Times Square to the World Trade Center one long autumn afternoon in New York, I could do Bacolod’s Lacson Street.
I swore to have a photo of me taken at The Ruins in Talisay, to be able to finally jump into the bandwagon of Facebook-posting the very experience.
(I thought about visiting the Angry Christ mural at Victorias—but that felt like a stretch of effort I could not afford to do.)
I came, of course, for an official function: the National Committee on Cinema of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts were holding our annual out-of-town meeting in Bacolod, timing it perfectly to coincide with the first edition of the Sine Negrense: The Negros Island Film Festival, which was being produced by the Negros Museum, with funding from the Film Development Council of the Philippines. The members of the NCC were to serve as resource speakers for various fora on film, and as jury members to select the winners of its two competitive exhibitions.
The days since November 17 were hectic and packed, and did not allow much room for the touristic idyll I had planned. But it was a great time to keep in touch with friends in the arts such as Sine Negrense festival director Adrian Torres, cultural worker Rudy Reveche, and film producer Ria Limjap; make new ones like filmmaker Ben Scharlin and the Negros Museum’s indefatigable Tanya Lopez, and rub elbows with film luminaries like Peque.
And rub elbows as well, and be inspired by, the young filmmakers from all over Negros—both Occidental and Oriental—who now constitute what Peque called the “fourth wave” of Negrosanon filmmaking: from the first generation of Eddie Romero and Cesar Amigo, to the second generation of Peque Gallaga, to the third generation of Erik Matti, Jay Abello, and Richard Somes, to this new one that seems to have risen organically, coming to form as a loose cinematic movement on its own, as Peque himself admitted it during the closing night of the film festival: “We had nothing to do with you, you came to filmmaking on your own volition, and I am amazed and happy.”
“Happy and amazed” very much spells the reception we gave these films from Bacolod, Dumaguete, Silay, and elsewhere. In the end, what took the top prizes were Belle Kay Loyola’s Dalit in the open competition, and Carlo Navarrete’s Singgit sang Nalisdan in the inter-collegiate competition. Dumaguete’s two entries, Val Amiel Vestil’s Adobo and Paul Benzi Florendo’s Hawud, garnered several nominations, with Hawud winning for Best Musical Score.
Still, we—film archivist Teddy Co, film educators Jag Garcia, Patrick Campos, Art Tibaldo, and Rosanni Sarile, film critic Tito Valiente, and film director Baby Ruth Villarama—managed to cram in some tourist time, including the aforementioned inasal at Aida’s on our first night in town. And after the whirlwind of lecturing, judging, and meeting, we hopped on a van to Talisay for The Ruins, and then Silay for the heritage houses. It was a long and happy Wednesday afternoon of fun and laughter, and of food. Glorious, glorious food.
That’s two out of three of my Bacolod intentions down.
When I finally decided to stay one more day, I spent Thursday morning relaxing, noontime transferring to another hotel, afternoon visiting the new government center along the Circumferential Road at Brgy. Villamonte, just because—I actually wanted to walk there from my hotel thinking it was an easy walk, until the hotel security guard strongly advised me to take a taxi, and he was right!—and early evening looking at art over at Gallery Orange at the Mandalagan part of Lacson Street. There, I met Toto Tarrosa, who was glad to know Aida’s inasal was very much a part of my Bacolod bucket list.
Afterwards, there I was: at that part of Lacson—the long stretch ahead towards the provincial capitol an invitation. “If I walk as far as Calea, will that be enough to complete my bucket list?” I asked myself.
I decided it was enough. Passing by Robinsons Place, I did a long detour by watching the new Murder on the Orient Express, and then, when that was over, I continued down Lacson until I finally saw the bright lights of Bacolod’s esteemed cake shop.
Which is how I ended up with that slice of cheesecake I began this article with. It’s 4 AM as I write this, and I’ve finally decided I’m going to take the 9:30 AM Ceres home.
12:37 PM |
The Places We Leave Behind Live On Without Us
There is almost nothing left of my childhood in Bayawan. The lot of that corner building, all concrete and hollowed out, used to be the house I grew up in. That lot with the trees and the little shed used to be where my Aunt Fannie’s house once stood. That NOVO store used to be the imposing El Oriente, the cinema where I saw my first movie in.
The cliches abound: everything has indeed become smaller. Only a muscular memory of things remain. For example, there is no getting lost in the maze of Bayawan’s little streets -- I find that a kind of compass remains deep within, and so while the corners and byways now look utterly unfamiliar, a quiet instinct takes over, gently telling me, “Turn this way, turn that way.”
Must I be sad that so much has changed? But what do we expect of places we leave behind really? Do we expect them to remain static in time, museums to our memories, embalmed and preserved and waiting for eternity for our inconstant returns where we can expect to embrace the comfortable unchanging of things, even as we leave, even as we change, even as we turn adult with all its attendant regrets? I don’t begrudge my childhood “erased” in Bayawan. Places have to live on without you. One has to learn the irrevocable truth that the past is a different life, a different country. You were a footnote in one chapter of this place’s story, and you had long since gone.
On the way home to Dumaguete from Cebu last December 30, we found our van in a standstill on the port of Lilo-an in Santander town, in a long line of cars waiting to board the barge during the New Year crush. While waiting, we found ourselves listening to a bunch of singers doing the "daygon," a traditional Christmas song in Cebuano that's rarely performed these days. Leo Mamicpic decided to catch them on video. Here's that video, where the violinist (!!!) starts with some riff off an old tune from the American south, segueing soon to more traditional fare. As a child I used to find these songs bizarre and old-fashioned. Now that I know how fast we are discarding our old traditions and heritage, they have become something to treasure and marvel at -- and one to definitely record and archive when you can.
We were watching an old Gerardo de Leon movie from the 1960s, its beautiful masterly compositions marred forever — like an abundance of celluloid scars — by neglect and unlove. It was enough to make a cineast’s heart bleed. So, immediately following the post-screening dinner, we decided to catch a breather. “To see the town,” we said.
From the university entrance along Congressional Road in Dasmariñas, Cavite, we decided to follow our feet. It was really the best way to get around an unfamiliar place, to take in what we could of the local scene, and to be in the thick of things beyond the usual tourist claptrap. This was Katipunan country, after all. This was the birthplace of Emilio Aguinaldo. This was a place teeming with names straight off history books. That way to Imus. This way to Trece Martires. Further down is Silang.
I’ve only been here once before, but only in the most pedestrian manner, staying briefly with friends before heading off to Tagaytay nearby. This time, there was more opportunity to explore, and Dasmariñas beckoned like an adventure. “Let’s go to SM City,” Hobart said. “Let’s just take the jeepney and ask our way around” — which apparently had always been the modus all his life: I, on the other hand, lived in a fragile bubble that couldn’t see beyond a block away from my hotel room, but I was always willing to follow someone else’s lead in a blind rush to things unknown. SM City sounded like a foreign jungle, and so I said, “Let’s go.”
The traffic officer in the small island of the highway we came to told us we had to take a jeepney bound “this way” — and he indicated the direction with a wave of his hand, although we weren’t sure in the most particular way whether that was north or south or east or west. It was difficult to tell from the usual signs, the sun having long set. It was 7 PM, and we were feeling the thrill of Cavite’s equivalent of rush-hour traffic. We only knew that further down one direction of Congressional Avenue was a turn towards Aguinaldo St., leading to our hotel, the Volets, which sounded more like a robot, or a merry call to action, or a species of rare African flower. A woman in Maranao dress on the sidewalk with us told us we had to take the jeepney bound for Pala-pala and helpfully told us the fare going there (P12) — and on that eventual jeepney ride we took, I breathed in up-close, for the first time since I arrived, the interesting and teeming humanity of Dasmariñas — their looks, their gestures, their smells.
We soon got off some corner because the jeepney driver said so, and found the mall we came for to be a well-lit replica of every other SM we knew. Still, it was meant to be the start for an evening’s flaneuring adventure, and what better way to do that but make a commercial mecca the commencing step? We asked a boy in a red shirt: “What and where is the center of town, and are there bars there?” He said, “Bayan,” and yes, there were a few bars there, but he said we could do well with that where we were already: in this juncture of Dasmariñas where SM met Robinson’s Place.
But, nonetheless, we wanted to go to Bayan — which sounded so lovely to our ears. (“Taga saan ka?” one might ask, and the answer would be: “Taga-Bayan.” We giggled.) The boy told us that it was best to take a jeepney ride to Bayan (P7) from a corner near SM that had an old 7-Eleven. We went on our way, singing a mash-up of all the songs we knew that had “bayan” in its lyrics — from “Bayan Ko” to “Bayan Muna.”
Later that night, in the middle of Bayan — a quaint stretch that immediately felt like home — we would end up drinking beer in a place called Thai, and eating bucayo and calamay from a street vendor near a bridge we couldn’t bring ourselves to cross, and befriending in a jeepney a locquacious local girl named Pearl and her Japanese-Filipino friend named Maria, and watching a bunch of local boys play evening basketball on a court off City Hall, and watching a bevy of pretty twirlers practice a mean routine on a court off the Capital ng Dasmariñas, perhaps in preparation for the upcoming Paru-paro Festival.
The church itself took my breath away. To behold that old church in the evening light felt like a ghostly visit through a piece of history: people staked out a revolution against the Spanish from the confines of its stone walls, we read this from an inscription outside. And people also died there in the hands of the Japanese in the dark days of the Second World War. The front door of the church was an intricate work in wood, its sprawling surface — browned deeply — showcasing a carved narrative, with tableaus of scenes from both the Advent and Lent. And as we trailed our fingers across the impressions of those carved images, a family came: a mother, a father, their two very young children.
They came and strode quickly to the door in the dim light, and began earnestly touching its carved images like a fervent want of a blessing: the mother was touching each panel with such devotion and using those same hands to touch the head and face of her little child now being carried aloft by its father. She did that many times, and finally settled on one image, to which she brought the weight of all her prayers. I thought the scene touching, but also unreal: I had never seen such a personal ritual before, and I envied the mother’s belief in divine providence, whatever it was she was in earnest prayers for.
Was this how it was to get away from the routine of being a stranger in another town? To see things like this?
Only a few minutes later, we heard from across the courtyard the trills of orchestral music — something at once surprising, beautiful, mysterious, intriguing. An orchestra was playing from the open-air second floor of an old building right across the old church. From the porch, a bunch of women were looking out to the evening sky, and then they saw us approach.
“Can we listen to the music?” we asked.
They smiled, and gestured for us to come up the side staircase. Upstairs, filling up the entire floor, the Citizen’s Brigade Band of Dasmariñas — all of them various ages of young, from little tykes working the violin to preteen boys working the trombone and the flute — was rehearsing a piece titled “Ode to Music” under the watchful gaze of a portly, middle-aged maestro bearing his baton with a fatherly forcefulness. Once in a while, he’d tweak a bit, here and there, the playing by some of the instrumentalists. Then they finally came together in the end, reaching for their music to soar towards the Cavite stars.
It was a beautiful thing, that sensation of being embraced by music you only came across by accident of fate.
And in that space, on a balcony, watching both these children play music and the streets of Bayan below throb and flow with traffic of people and cars, I realized how it was to properly visit a place and make it familiar: get lost, get intimate with its rhythms, ask around. A hotel room is not the world.
6:19 PM |
The Universe Has a Sense of Humor
