LAND BEFORE TIME

(FROM A WEEKEND NOTE, THE EDITOR'S LETTER IN STYLE WEEKEND, MANILA BULLETIN'S WEEKEND SPECIAL, EVERY FRIDAY, 18 APRIL 2008)

If Manila and other so called “key cities” in the world were anything like Batanes, global warming would have existed only in the realm of disaster movies, except that if we were all in Batanes, even in the capital Basco, the movie would have been some futuristic concept as well.

BLURB
In Sabtang, they only have lambat in their doorway, to keep out the chickens. —Telesforo Castillejos, governor of Batanes

We spent a week in Basco in March and it was a weeklong communion with nature, which was more than enough to keep our itinerary full. The only semblance of modern life was the van we took to go around a rolling terrain, mostly hilly on one side and on the other a wide expanse of blue, where sea meets sky and surely stretches all the way to Taiwan.

At Shanedel’s Inn and Café, a B&B in Basco, there used to be a living room with a big TV and a few racks of DVDs, but we had neither the time nor the inclination to check it out this time. Why imagine faraway celluloid worlds when you are right there, a tiny speck in a universe of primordial wind and water, closer to the skies, quiet save for the howling of nature’s forces. One of our companions did not even turn on her airconditioning unit, although, shutting her windows on the picture-perfect view of the Basco harbor from her room at Shanedel’s, she also completely sought the warmth of blankets. After all, even in March, when Manila and the rest of the Philippines began to intensify their collective assault on the environment, sending up twice, thrice, four times as much CO2 into the atmosphere from an arsenal of Carriers and Conduras in response to the scorching summer heat, Batanes was still bitingly cold, especially on the hilltops, such as in Racuh a Payaman or what they call Marlboro Country.

The opposite, however, is true in the company of the people of Batanes, whose generosity and hospitality can thaw the Ice Queen. On a visit to the municipal hall, we met Telesforo Castillejos, governor of Batanes, who could have been—and is—your friend, your father, your uncle, your friendly neighbor, rather than the highest official in this northernmost province of 10 pristine, bucolic islands, of which only three—Batan, Itbayat, and Sabtang—are so far accessible to lazy tourists like me. Reacting to our observation that his provincemates, more than hospitable, were genuinely nice and trusting people, keeping their homes unguarded, doorless even, open to the strangest of strangers, the governor said, “We are like that, all of us Filipinos, but many of you have changed and we are still the same.”

Have we, indeed, changed or have the crooks in our midst changed us? Is it only a matter of time before the Ivatans change as well, now that more and more of us city dwellers are being lured into their otherworldliness? The governor had more than reassured us, as he took us practically to a picnic at Batanes Resort with a buffet of their traditional dishes, including their yellow rice, called supas, colored with turmeric and drizzled with pork bits. “Nature is what we have to offer and so all the changes will have to revolve around that,” he said. “Why build casinos in a beautiful place like this? We can have our casinos elsewhere.”

So maybe, until the powers-that-be decide to ram casinos down the throats of Gov. Castillejos and his people in pursuit of the Taiwanese dollar, money will continue to be as unimportant as it is now in a place like Batanes, where there is hardly any reason to part with your travel money. You can’t even spend it on snacks or merienda, which is not part of the Ivatan culture, their three square meals a day being too heavy to leave any room for in-betweens. Even the stores catering to tourists with a penchant for pasalubong are few and far between and often smaller in scale than the average neighborhood sari-sari store in Metro Manila.

As the governor explained to us, in Batanes, no one gets hungry. Everything you need to survive is in a patch of land that is yours, often in the backyard, which provides your rice, your vegetables, your chickens, your pigs, and your cows. Everything else is in the waters that surround the islands, which provides the coconut crab, the occasional lobster, and the seasonal flying fish, migrating from elsewhere in the Pacific Ocean or the South China Sea.

Now if we could live that kind of life in Manila and other key cities in the world, Al Gore would have had no opportunity to earn a Nobel Peace Prize, but then who can afford a backyard, let alone a beachfront, in places like Manila or New York or Paris or Hong Kong?

A
post me at aapatawaran@yahoo.com.