Bojo River Trip by Elder Ron, in a verbose ( he says that he was in a "descriptive") mood.
Clear skies, the first in a week, welcomed us as we climbed
into the van with three temple employees and two other mission couples on an
adventure to the Bojo River. Preparation
day, at times, allows us to visit new places in the Philippines and when
Brother Manning, who had served here once before, offered us a chance to go on
an excursion that included snorkeling, we jumped at the chance.
Cebu is a long thin island in the middle of what are called
the Visayan Islands, which collectively are located in the middle of the
Philippines. Along the island’s coast is
some relatively flat land sloping steeply up to inactive volcanic mountains, which
form the island’s spine. We headed south
of Cebu City for about 1.5 hours, transversed the mountains to the west side of
the island, then traveled another hour’s drive to the south just past a small
community named Alinguinsan. Notice, we
did not say how many kilometers since that gives illusions of a quick drive
when in fact, driving speed in the Philippines rarely goes over 30 km per hour
due to heavy traffic and narrow roads.
The first part of our upward climb took place on a road that was
partially washed out and the suspension of the van was sorely tested. By and by the road improved and we drove
faster than 10 km per hour. The road
coming down the west side of the island was of fairly new construction, the
road being concrete – a relative super-highway where we could travel 50 to 60
km per hour, except for the curve in the road every few hundred metres. The view of the mountains is beautiful,
however, with little development off the main road. Mountains here are clothed in jungle from
head to foot, and the mix of coconut palms and a myriad of plants we don’t
recognize is beautiful. An occasional
piece of ground sports a small farm.
Houses along the highway often block the view but the vistas show up
once in a while like teasers along the drive.
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| Dragonfruit plant |
Our first stop was at the bottom of the road before we had
reached much development along the west coast.
To my delight, our stop was an agricultural demonstration farm, operated
by the local barangay (a small jurisdiction in a community or like a small
county in the rural areas). We were
welcomed with cool drinks made of kalamansi and lemon grass, a mild sweet,
citrusy beverage with a hint of the lemon-grass taste. Then we sampled a buffet of sliced saba
(cooking bananas that are boiled in their skins but served without the skins),
a coleslaw made of banana blossom heart, onion and some other things, sticky
rice (a sweet square with carmelized brown sugar on top – great for a low sugar
diet we are on), and a relatively flat oval bread without anything on it, and,
oh yes, local hot chocolate that has little sugar, no milk and a lot of dark
chocolate flavour. Included was a fish
paste as well, with as much salt as fish.
I guess that would kill the taste, but we never found out. But we did go back for seconds of the other
items. Our hostess was gracious and
waited patiently as we dined. She also
shared with us where the CR was, that is the Comfort Room, typically fitted
with a toilet and a couple pails of water nearby with a large dipper to
flush. Still appreciated. And they provided toilet tissue! We always bring our own, because you never
know…
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| Close-up of dragonfruit |
Next
a relatively tall and mid-aged gentleman guided us on a tour of their organic
hog production – one sow, and five pigs about 40 pounds each at this stage. Mary-Rose really enjoyed feeding the pigs
some branches cut off of nearby trees.
The leaves on these branches are eaten by people, as well, as a sort of
spinach. We have seen a lady coming out
of the temple block carrying a load of them that she had cut in the vacant
property here that is awaiting future construction of another chapel. Bedding for the hogs is woodchips which the
hogs incorporate into the ground making the beginning of an organic fertilizer
as they blend it with manure in their walking about. The bedding-manure mix is then put into
large, rectangular boxes about 10-feet long and 3-feet wide – although pigs are
smart, this is done by the work crew.
The workers that transform the bedding into fertilizer are earthworms,
protected from the free-range chickens by a covering of coconut-palm leaves
that also serve as a mulch and shade the ground from the intense sun at this
latitude near the equator. The pig poop
turned-to-earthworm-poop has no particular smell and can be handled and used as
a fertilizer to grow local crops, which included tomatoes, eggplant, dragonfruit,
cucumbers, bananas, mangoes and lemon grass. I don’t recall seeing bananas on this small
one-hectare farm, but there must have been some as the workers use what they
grow in feeding visitors both here and at our next stop, as much as possible.
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Pig-poop-turned-
earthworm-poop |
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| Cute, not-stinky piglets |
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| In his element |
Warning: TMI if you're not interested in botany!
FYI,
when a banana tree (it is not a tree) is spent and has produced its many hands
of bananas (the bunch) on its stem (also called rachis: read about bananas if you are a pure
botanist, at the following URL: http://www.promusa.org/Morphology+of+banana+plant#Stem),
then it sends up new shoots from a corm as the leaves, which form a stem-like trunk, die off. Or simply, like a begonia bulb, the banana
plant sends up new shoots once the top dies off, and just like an onion, the
stem is really a bunch of leaves that grow up together to form the structure
that supports the flower on-top. Any of
the banana shoots can be transplanted to grow a new banana plant.
Meanwhile, back on the farm...
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| Elder and Sister Pace and Steve Villanueva in the garden |
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| Mango trees grow really big! |
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| See if you can find the little round passion fruit. |
As
we exited, we walked under a bamboo trellis covered in a semi-healthy plant-covering
growing about 8 feet above the ground that sported one passion fruit and a
number of miniature cucumbers, each 3 inches long. We were informed these cukes were “wild”
cucumbers. We accepted one as a gift
from our guide who stretched his body from his toes upward to grab one of the
tiny fruits.
Fed, educated and contented, we loaded into our van and
headed onto a new adventure – navigating the west coastal highway. The difference between the west side of Cebu
from the east side is the degree of westernization. Near Cebu on the east, the coastal highway is
filled with large trucks with the various loads of cartage, along with a mix of
relatively new Japanese and Korean and a few Chinese and American vehicles
(they are almost all new except the taxis because the ability to buy vehicles
is new for the middle class in the Philippines),
flowing along in a matrix of habal-habal (motorcycles for hire) drivers
swerving in-and-out amongst the traffic, trying to gain advantage at some risk
to self and passenger in order to move quicker than the cars and trucks that
are limited in their speed by sheer number of vehicles on the road. (In the time it took you to read the last
sentence you might have been lucky to drive 10 feet).
The west side is different – there a fewer large trucks,
though there are some; there are fewer cars, though there are some; and there
are fewer habal-habals on the road, though there are some. Introduce another “species” of traffic
regulation, which ensures slower driving speeds – the tricycle. Not a three-wheeled one you recall from your
childhood, but a pedal-drive bicycle or sized-down motorcycle with a sidecar
that can hold two to four people somewhat comfortably if you are small, but up
to 13 if you stack every square inch with at least one or two bodies. The smaller number is the norm. You also see cargo of an occasional hog or
two, and I have seen a cow in one.
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| Not our photo, but we've seen this! |
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| Again, not our photo, but notice the schoolgirls in uniform top left. |
One blessing of the Philippines is that there are many
schools; one mixed-blessing to drivers is that these schools are usually along
the busy roads, and many of the children arrive in a tricycle. With narrow roads filled with all these types
of vehicles and their cargo – your vehicle sometimes does not travel very
fast. Where there is a school coming
up, a barricade is placed upstream a hundred metres of the school on one side
of the highway and downstream on the other side of the school for a hundred
metres. This slows the traffic down, as
you can imagine, but keeps kids safer.
How many big trucks and tricycles can you wait for to take your turn
before you lose your patience? As many
as needed, since there is nothing you can do about it and it is fun to see all
the kids dressed smartly in their school uniforms (with a different set of
colours for each school, and the girls in skirts) and generally with bright
smiles on their faces.
Now we are out of the school areas and onto the “freeway”
reaching speeds regularly of 30 km per hour with bursts up to 50 km per hour
when it is safe to swerve toward on-coming traffic because we are bigger than
they are and they know to move over, or where there actually is room to
pass. Glimpses of the sea to the right,
and the occasional banana stand of a hectare or two (no real plantations along
here) add variety to the usual visual fare of small houses with their tin
roofs, and small businesses at almost every house. The famed “Sari-Sari” store that used to be
the neighborhood 7-11 run by one of the moms has been replaced by a business in
most every dwelling along the busy highways.
You have to make a living and the road traffic provides a continuum of
customers. Everyone has to eat so many
of these are food-based businesses, with phone load signs popping up frequently
and the occasional money-transfer operation.
Small dry goods are on display, but the main display is snacks. Bananas and other fruits in season are
popular items as well.
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| with our leis |
We arrive at Alinguinsan, a small community that would have
started out as a fishing village.
Mary-Rose and I have been here before to catch a bangka for dolphin-watching
and snorkeling. This time, we drive
through the town and continue a bit down the road until we see the second
river, the Bojo. We turn off the highway
to drive down a much smaller, narrower road.
We have arrived at our destination.
A member of our reception committee guides Brother Manning as he moves
the vehicle onto the left side of the road and parks in the space parallel to
the road which is about the size of the van.
We all hop out, glad and thankful to be here. We stretch our legs and aging bodies to get
them going again, and find our bags of snorkeling gear and changes of
clothes. Down the road we go to a path
that will lead us to our next adventure.
We are pleasantly surprised as we each bow our heads and receive a
home-made lei from one of our new Filipina hostesses. Each lei is totally covered in various
patterns of seeds along the strand of fibre that supports colorful flowers and
tiny round, brilliantly colored fruits that adorn each unique creation.
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| Steve on the walkway |
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| Nipa palms and other growth along the river |
We follow our hostess and senior host to a bamboo walkway
that takes us past nipa palms (local shingle making-palms) and other lush
growth along this tidal river.
Purposefully, we have arrived at high-tide time. The water is 9 feet (3 metres) deeper than it
was in the night, so a boat can move along the river to the sea and return
after an expedition before the water drops too much. The mangrove forest typical of tidal waters
crowds the narrow, spring-fed river, and each unique tree type is labelled with
the Latin species name. The guides are
proud of their being able to tell you both the Latin and local names of the
trees, since this is a botanical reserve and our day here will help pay for the
continuation of a reforestation project in the adjoining mountain area, while
providing wages for locals.
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| Ron toting our snorkeling gear in our fancy Canadian pillowcase |
Again
we are greeted warmly, but this time by a chorus of four aging ladies and their
aged guitar player. After our applause
we are again given welcome drinks – buko juice.
A young coconut has been trimmed at the top for each of us, a small hole
cut into the thin layer of young coconut meat to let a stainless-steel straw enter the
refreshing coconut water inside. A
hibiscus flower adorns the top of each coconut, bringing out the deep reds of the large blossoms. We are seated and then again welcomed in
local tradition by the aged man bringing a smoking smudge pot and manoeuvring
it around or by each chair to ward off evil and provide safety. The thick thatched nipa palm roof provides a
deep shade as we refresh with coconut water and enjoy conversation with our
hosts and hostesses.
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| Welcome song and dance |
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Buko (young coconut) welcome drinks
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It’s time to get ready to go on the boat and head out to
sea. Mary-Rose and I had seen the
connection of this river to the sea on our dolphin-watching expedition – I
cannot say the estuary because there is none.
It is as if a large knife cut a narrow passage for the river through the
landscape to form two large cliffs on either side at the meeting place of the
river and the ocean. Here at the small
boat dock, we saw a relatively flat narrow river valley with a broad ribbon of
vegetation on-and-in either side, sloping up the vegetated landscapes at all
angles towards hill tops off to the sides.
Our gazes turned to duty – don’t be the one holding up the boat
ride. Get your snorkeling gear together
and put on your rash guard. We climbed
laid-stone steps up to the combined CR-dressing room building that had two
toilet stalls and four other shower rooms big enough for a person to get into
their gear. And amazingly, it also had toilet tissue! Meanwhile, Elder Manning negotiated our travel
in a glass-bottomed boat as part of the deal with no increase in price (amazing
in the Philippines, since usually every little extra has an accompanying price
tag, often not much extra but annoying).
We are assisted in to the boat by some male helpers. Our guides are two ladies,
mga babaye. One speaks to us as we travel along the river
about the project to preserve this area and to develop sustainable farming
practices in the region. She points out
the various species of trees as we travel slowly along the narrow free-water
surface of the river between the mangroves on either side and I am sure none of
us remember the Latin or local names, but enjoyed the message that came along with
those. Our journey was not long, just
1.4 km until we saw it – no trees, just sheer walls on two sides and the
conjunction of an azure blue river with the deep almost black-blue depths of
the ocean. From 3 metres to 90 fathoms
in a few feet.
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| L to R: Lea, Armi, Steve, Boatman, Elder and Sister Manning, Ron, Sister and Elder Pace, Mary-Rose |
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| Out into the ocean |
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| Calm, sunny, with great company and beautiful surroundings |
Our second guide, Rosanna, now took over.
She is a botanist of other sorts, a marine biologist who knows the
corals and the fish and the dangers. We
get instructed first. We paid 250 pesos
($5 US) each extra for this opportunity to snorkel, not always offered on these
tours. Brother Manning had come many
times before and so they knew him and knew we would be a cooperative group that
would respect their responsibility to maintain the area and follow
instructions. We floated out the passageway
onto the ocean. What a beautiful day! The last time we passed by here out on the
ocean a few hundred metres off-shore, we were fighting 4- to 5-foot waves in a
small bangka as we traveled back from our dolphin search and some snorkeling
and picnic at Hermit’s Cove, a wonderful little, secluded beach just a couple
miles away. Today the waves were no
bigger than those in a swimming pool. I
debated whether to get in the water, as my last snorkeling activity included
being in 5- to 6-foot waves off Apo Island where my snorkel did not work well
and I had difficulty breathing and panicked a bit. Another story but the guide hauled me a
hundred yards back to boat, and I later got in again but in calm water on the
other side of the island. So I debated,
but my life jacket was the right size and I slipped on my snorkeling mask and
fins and followed Mary-Rose, merlady, into the water. The guide reminded me to relax, and I just
bobbed to test the life jacket – it worked.
I pulled the mask over my face and breathed to make sure things worked okay
this time. I put my face in the water
and breathed a few breaths, and then relaxed and headed out for about 40
minutes within easy stride of the boat.
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| Looking and learning about different corals |
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Photos can't capture the peace and beauty of the underwater world .
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When shallow coral meets deep, deep ocean, life teems. The fish were as varied as they were beautiful. My first sight was a school of small, striped fish each with vertical tiger colors as if each was stamped in the same mold. They swam as if they were ignoring me while basking in the sunbeams that pierced the water like an above-ground sunburst. Tiny gold fish – not orange like the ones in a glass bowl, but really gold-colored, swam in doubles or triples. Emily Dickinson would have delighted in the sight and her poem describing a humming bird would have been apropos: “A route of evanescence, …a rush of cochineal”. Sorry, or maybe not sorry that is all of the poem that I remember from poetry class at the U of L in 1972. Let it be said that the colors were as a kaleidoscope and the variety of fishes kept me glued to travelling the edge of the undersea precipice where little fish could feed in the shallows of the corals and bigger fish could hide at depth. Scuba gear next? Not likely, but I only caught glimpses of the bigger fish that occasionally flashed a silvery side toward the sky above for the depths below. Nothing really big though.
I had some minor cramping in my foot and so I headed back to
the boat to make sure I was okay. Our
guide took Mary-Rose, Brother Pace and Brother Manning over the corals
explaining their different names and roles in the coral ecology. Although they were about 100 metres away, I
thought I would swim toward them as I tested my rested legs out again. One of the male guides was swimming that way
with a life ring and so I stayed within 20 or so feet from him as I extended my
range and met up with the others. They
had seen some sea horses and I was interested.
At least until I saw one and it looked more like a worm than the seas
horse we see in picture books. But with
every 5 to 10 metres covered, new and interesting life added variety to the
ocean’s beauty. We will miss this when
we go back to our land-locked Alberta.
In our newly renovated bathroom, our shower curtain is a montage of
dolphins and ocean fish in their brilliant colors over an ocean-blue
background. I told Mary-Rose she could
put on her snorkeling gear in the shower, but I don’t think she is “biting on
that bait.”
All good things must come to an end. I had regained quite a bit of confidence in
snorkeling again and we had seen more of creation that beautifies the earth. These memories will be locked into our minds
– we forgot our underwater camera – but we are glad that Brother Pace and
Brother Manning brought their cameras along so we can also put them on to a
screen to relive our experiences again.
Should I say, it snowed at home today?
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| Coco the grasshopper with his creator, Lea |
Although the highlight was past, our adventure
continued. With all that energy exerted,
it was time to refuel. We returned, got
into dry clothes, and were treated to a Filipino buffet of fried fish, fish
soup, rice, pork adobo with saba (cooked bananas), and more buko juice, for
those who had ordered it. We all found
something that was delightfully delicious.
Then came the demonstration of how to make the traditional
rice cooker – an 8-side container made by weaving one coconut leaflet into a
structure about 4 to 5 inches total height and about 2.5 to 3 inches in
width. If you can imagine putting two,
four-sided pyramids one on top of the other, that would be the shape. In brief, the mid-rib of the coconut leaf is
stripped out, leaving the two long sides of the coconut leaf. The strands of leaf are about 2 cm (3/4 inch)
wide and are still joined together at the bottom. These two strands are woven together to form
the little, double pointed basket. When
the strands are loosened at the top once the weaving is completed, rice can be
inserted into the container which can now be lowered into a pot of boiling
water. Once the rice is cooked, out
comes the rice pre-packaged. You can buy
these for 10 pesos each with the rice inside.
Small ones sell for 5 pesos each including rice. We received 4 of these and I tried to make
one with lots of help so we have 5 of these as decorations in our apartment. Decorating our wall is also a 6-inch long
grasshopper, origami-like, made of coconut leaf as well.
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| Rice pouches |
Our send-off came from the same singing group as they
expressed their thanks in song and wished us on our way. Mary-Rose purchased a number of small and
larger handbags woven by local folks, before w
e
bid a fond farewell.
Off to the van, and a small miracle followed – the traffic
heading home was much, much lighter than we expected. We quote MacArthur “I shall return.”
