The Peace Correspondent (29 page)

A bus pushing through the human traffic jam blares Yankee Doodle Dandy on its horn. All morning, the dancing, shouting, eating, drinking groups wind through the streets, meet and mill around the jammed square.

A sooty fire-eater spews black smoke and flames into the sky in front of the cathedral: a motorcyclist splutters by with Santo Nino riding high on his side car; a chubby, straggly haired American girl waves a huge Confederate flag as she circles the square. Young girls from the local hospital bounce by in T-shirts promising, “Marry me and you will get free nursing forever.”

As the sound level increases, so do the beer prices. Yesterday, a small San Miguel was three pesos. Today it is three-fifty. Street kids follow us around as if we were Pied Pipers of Hamelin, waiting for our empties. In the heat, we drain the beer quickly
to be rid of the urchins, who squabble in the dust for our castoff bottles.

A radio announcer plucks us from the chaos to do a live interview on the local station. The soundproofing of the ground floor studio off the square almost muffles the hypnotic drumbeats outside.

Before we start, our interviewer sends out for quarts of icy San Miguel beer and a plate of dinuguan (pork innards stewed in fresh pig's blood and chili). Matt grabs a squiggly, lumpy bit and drops it down his throat. The Vu dials on his Sony quiver at his appreciative lip smacking.

After a short introduction in Tagalog, the announcer switches to English. “We are honored today to have with us two journalists who have come all the way from Canada to cover the Ati-Atihan Festival.”

He turns suddenly somber. “Now gentlemen, what do you think of these foreign peoples, not Canadians of course, but these foreign peoples who come from Europe and America and Australia, who come here wearing just shorts and shabby clothing and taking part in Ati-Atihan?”

“I'll take this one,” Matt says, dipping his pan de sal (bun) into the sticky, reddish-black sauce. “Yes, well, I think this is a wonderful example of international harmony and brotherhood, people of all nations getting together to enjoy this fine festival.”

“No, no, that's not what I mean,” the Filipino says, his eyes flicking over the microphones. “But these people who come here to live on the beaches and don't work or anything.”

“Ah, yes, great show of Filipino hospitality, that,” Matt says, reaching for a fresh quart of San Mig. “Very friendly people here.”

The little interviewer turns desperate, almost pleading. “But these hippies …”

“Oh them,” Matt says, finally catching on and, licking the last red drops from his fingers, launches into his anti-hippie tirade.

Outside, the square has quietened down for the lunch time,
the bands have disappeared to restaurants or parks. One barrio group sprawls out under the blazing sun in the cathedral yard, surrounded by red and yellow bits of costume. We can still hear drumbeats from nearby streets.

Our search for a motorcycle taxi to take us back to the hotel for a siesta is interrupted by a high-pitched voice. “Yoo-hoo, boys, come over here.” It is the young civil servant we met in Manila airport, now changed from his crisp, formal barong shirt and pressed trousers.

Batting mascara-caked eyes and pursing rosebud red lips he coos, “Come and join me for lunch at my friend's house. He is a newspaper publisher who would like to meet you.” And fluttering a long silk scarf behind him, he leads us down the street.

The house is a cool, high-ceilinged sanctuary from the burning street, a typical Filipino household with women cooking in the kitchen, men drinking rum and beer in the living room, and children underfoot everywhere. One of the daughters, a typical long-haired Filipino beauty in her 20s, sits with the men, privileged because with her American university degree she has a good government job.

She explains to Matt's ever-ready Sony the origins of the festival. One complex legend involves the arrival of Bornean chieftans here hundreds of years ago. They bought land from the Atis and during a feast to celebrate the transaction, smeared themselves with soot to look like the natives.

A beaming matriarch comes to the door to announce that lunch is served, then swats children away from the groaning table so the guests can have first go at the fried chicken, salad, huge chili prawns, lumpia (spring rolls stuffed with shrimp, pork, chicken and tender heart of young coconut), tropical fruit and lechon, fat, suckling pig roasted deep honey-brown with a crispy skin.

Dipping a slab of pork into the liver sauce, Matt juggles with his microphone and pursues his investigation into the festival's origins. Where do the Christian elements, the Santo Ninos, come from?

“Spanish missionaries introduced the Holy Child Jesus and his feast day to the negritos many years ago,” the young woman explains, delicately nibbling at a peppery prawn. Each year the Atis came down from hills to celebrate the Christian festival in their own pagan way, sacrificing pigs and singing and dancing in the streets.

The idea became popular with the Filipinos, who started covering their faces with soot to resemble the Atis. While once Ati-Atihan was celebrated during harvest, now the week's festivities culminate on the second Sunday after Three Kings, the Spanish day of the Feast of the Holy Child Jesus.

While Matt is interviewing, and eating, I strike up a conversation with one of the matrons. She promotes one of her nieces as a good prospect for marriage.

“She is almost a virgin,” she boasts.

After seconds on the buko pie, made from young coconut, we plunge once more into the maelstrom of color and noise in the streets. The festival has reached a fever pitch, the streets choked with jiggling, bouncing, writhing bodies, like ants in an overturned hill.

Matt, in his CBC correspondents' uniform of brief white shorts, belly bulging through blue tank top, cowboy-style neck scarf, European tinted glasses, monitoring earphones, large microphone and tape recorder dangling from his shoulder, plunges into the milling mass.

Always working, he attempts to interview a craggy old man in net stockings, brief dress and sun umbrella. “Now my dear, how are you enjoying the festival so far?” But the background noise is too much, the needles on his Vu meter bounce madly to the drum beats.

Matt screams in my ear, “This is even louder than the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise where I …” but the rest is lost in the noise from the White Castle Whiskey float.

By dusk on this, the last day of the festival, revelers are marshaled into some chaotic order for the final parade. For hours
frenzied devotees shuffle past, Santo Ninos carried on floats lit with portable generators or gently cradled in the thin arms of poor farmers. A noisy group marches by sponsored by Hilda's Shoes, another with a hand lettered cardboard sign “Hey, Joe.” We've heard the WWll comic book cry for the past days as marchers called us to join their groups.

Three hours later, the last float passes, the revelers slowly head out of town, the din gradually dies. We squeeze into a tricycle taxi to return to the hotel. A few rowdy Atis drinking rum under a street light give a last few beats on their bass drums.

And blessed silence falls on Kalibo, Atlan, Philippines.

“HEY JOE” yell the schoolboys, squealing with delight at the unexpected sight of foreigners riding a modified jeep through their Philippine village. I feel like an extra in a WWII movie.

We are touring Legaspi in southern Luzon Island, an area seldom visited by mainstream tourists despite its scenic and historic attractions. The Philippines, a tropical archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, lacks adequate roads or ferry services. Bus and rail travel are slow, sea travel infrequent and inconvenient, and most flights originate from the Manila hub, forcing travelers between rural cities to return to the capital.

So moving around the country has always been arduous. Then the Blue Horizons tour company flew into the picture with its air safari, a week-long jaunt by private aircraft that opens the southern Philippines to adventurous travelers willing to tolerate some provincial discomforts. So I am island-hopping Luzon and the Visayas islands in an airborne limousine with a congenial band of traveling companions, including a Swiss anthropologist/journalist, roving British lady diplomat, Filipino tour operator and a Canadian expatriate woman on holidays from Hong Kong.

This is traveling, not tourism. From the time the green and white Cessna takes off from Manila until it touches down there again a week later, the only tourists we see are a few rugged backpackers and a hardy coterie of brightly garbed Japanese scuba divers. Besides our private aircraft, we travel aboard jeepneys (the colorful Filipino jeep-turned-bus), bancas (outrigger canoes), speedboats and bicycle rickshaws.

Leaving Manila on a cloudless morning, we fly low over lakes, rivers and a patchwork of farmland, then skirt flat-topped, Fujilike Mt. Iriga and pointed Mayon Volcano, rising out of the green fields. After just over an hours scenic flight, the twin-engine, six-passenger turboprop aircraft deposits us here in southern Luzon. This is normally an all-day, bone-bashing bus ride from Manila that discourages most visitors.

Real adventurers can climb Mayon, a several day expedition involving camping overnight. We merely board a brightly decorated jeepney called “Heart Breaker” to ride through Legaspi, a typical Filipino provincial town, to the tragic Cagsawa historical site. Only the Daraga Church tower jutting above the volcanic ash deposit marks the site of the town buried by Mayon's eruption in 1814. Nothing else in this peaceful setting - a Coca-Cola shack, a few chickens scratching in the grass and a village woman spreading grain to dry on the seldom used road - recalls the town's violent past.

Meals in the rural Philippines prove an unexpected treat. Today's lunch at La Trinidad Hotel is a felicitous Filipino-Chinese hybrid with cool, delicious juice from the lemon-like calamansi fruit, slightly sour but luscious sinigang soup cooked with tamarinds and prawn, chicken with coconut, grilled fish and rice as fluffy as the clouds surrounding Mayon Volcano. And prices in the provinces are right, with San Miguel beers starting from about eight pesos.

“Forty cent beer and 90-degree temperatures. That's paradise,” notes the journalist.

After lunch, we strap ourselves into the Cessna once more and our airborne limo conveys us south of Luzon to the Visayas islands of Samar and Leyte. Circling Southeast Asia's largest bridge, the San Juanico, we set down at Tacloban. The Leyte Park Hotel, Imelda's Folly, was built as a resort in this area of few tourists that was also the former first lady's hometown. Rural Filipino accommodation generally runs the complete range from basic to even more basic. This is one of the better hotels, clean,
with private showers and hot water. Usually.

The Leyte's bar special, MacArthur's Landing, a tasty fruit juice and rum combination, recalls an important historic local event. American General Douglas MacArthur did return to the Philippines, as promised, landing at Red Beach near Tacloban in 1944. A giant, larger-than-lifesize monument of him purposefully striding ashore now marks the spot.

At dawn, a motorized banca transports us across the peaceful bay and up the Basey River, past jungle and mangrove with its distinctive, decaying sweet smell. The riverside life and the villages of faded bamboo houses on stilts, all weathered and sagging with age, is reminiscent of the middle reaches of the Amazon. Riverine folk gather nipa palm in the jungle to weave rooftops, paddle simple dugouts piled high with plastic containers of cooking oil and bags of rice back to their small farms or wait for banca buses at shelters on stilts -- one with a faded and unlikely “Welcome Visitors” sign. A young river urchin sends a different message, gleefully mooning us from shore, encouraged by his waving and shouting cronies.

The Basey River gradually narrows until it squeezes through a canyon of high limestone cliffs worn into eerie shapes -- the Sohoton National Park. Beaching the banca, we hike a path up the bank to a jungle picnic site with concrete tables and chairs. We are the only visitors in the park. The crew lights a charcoal fire, grills pork chops and chicken, and sets out a tasty lunch on a large banana leaf tablecloth.