the road to Batad

The road from Banaue to Batad is longer than it looks - a tiny little line on the map, it took an hour and a half to travel by van, a slow and windy path clinging to mountainsides as it climbs from the valley towards the sky.  And it's rough, all gravel and mud and deep-worn ruts.   Occasionally we hit a stretch of concrete around a curve, surrounded by signs advertising the politician responsible for that particular patch of pavement.  But after a few hundred feet the smooth road always ended abruptly, the transitions the bumpiest spots of all, as the path lurched back from road to bumpy trail.  Not just rough, in truth, but varying shades of impassable - jeepneys and tricycles and stubborn cars can follow the road partway, up to the junction, but only vans and single motorcycles travel from the junction to the saddle, and from the saddle, the only way into Batad is by foot.

But above all, the path to Batad is beautiful, breathtakingly beautiful.  The road hugs the curves of the mountains, dipping in and out of the grooves of old cliffsides, looking over valleys and across to gentle peaks.  The ancient mountains are painted in a thousand shades of green, completely forested in a curious mix of palm trees and pines and strange leaves I can't begin to name.  But most striking of all the colors, and most breathtaking of all the vistas, are the yellow-green rice terraces cut neatly into the sides of the mountains.  Some giant once cut out stairways from the valley floors to the mountaintops, or God swept through with an Xacto knife and pared away the cliffsides.  If we forget our own history and thousands of years from now these marvels remain, what myths will we tell ourselves about ther origins?  Surely they could not be crafted by human hands - not so many, not so neatly, not so tall.

The terraces are simultaneously artificial and completely natural.  They look too sharp, glow too brightly green, and seem too angular among the smooth curves of mountains.  I thought of sci-fi novels and terraforming, of wrestling nature into tight constraints and binding her - but with stone and mud instead of steel.  And maybe its those natural materials, or the age, or the beauty, but the terraces also look like they belong.  Their sharp, flat surfaces undulate with the hills and their edges fade smoothly into the trees, and after the first shock at the sight of them, they come to seem as much a part of the landscape as the trees and the sky.  Small stacks behind invididual, isolated houses, entire mountainsides serving small villages, distant curves on a mountain too far away to see any houses at all - around every bend were new landscapes to admire.

But since you can see so many beautiful terraces on the road to Batad, why bother to visit the town?  Why make the effort, I wondered to myself - grumbled to myself - as I followed my guide, Margie, down the steep steps that lead to Batad.  As I hid from the sun beneath umbrellas and palm trees, as we passed bamboo huts and sheet-metal houses, as I calculated just how much this trip was going to cost me, I wondered if it was worth the bother.  And then we turned the final corner, and the amphitheater lay before us, and I gasped as I looked out over the bowl-like valley, filled from bottom to top with perfect stone-walled terraces, and I understood.

As we picked our way down the steep steps, across the paths along the terraces, and down towards the waterfall that lies behind Batad, Margie and I talked.  Mostly, I asked questions.  Some were stupid questions - "is this really the only way into the town?"  Some were boring questions - "how many people live in the town?"  Some were questions she couldn't answer - "How old are the rice terraces, again?"  "Very old, very old... they were here before I was born," she said.  I asked about how one goes about harvesting rice, about how many times she makes this hike in a day, about the schools and the politics and health in the community.  And finally I stopped asking questions and started just listening.

Margie talked about the rice harvest - said despite those expansive rice terraces, the community never grew enough to sell commercially, but only enough to support themselves.  And that this year, because of the El Niño that came so strangely early, destroying most of their crop, they wouldn't even have that.  And as she spoke I thought about the young activist with FDC, leaning forward across the table with fire in his eyes as I asked, "wait, what does 'climate debt' mean?"  and of the posters behind him declaring "the global north caused climate change... and the global south is paying the price."

And Margie talked about how she was at college, studying information technology, until the tuition became too much for her family to pay and she had to drop out.  She said, "financial issues only," and repeated it, fiercely, seeming to insist that she could have stayed, that she was smart enough and working hard enough, it was only the money.  And so I thought of the activists at Kabataan, the youth party-list, and their anger and frustration as they described their failed attempts to block the 300% tuition hike in the public university system.  Margie stepped lightly down the rocky path, stopped to pick a stone out of her thin flip-flops, and I thought of computer technicians and trail guides.

She mentioned her kids, and then her absent husband, and the hatred directed towards her by members of the community who knew she now had a boyfriend.  And I thought of the ban on divorce, and an older activist shaking her head when I asked if she though the Philippines would ever legalize divorce.  And Margie described being a single mother, and relying on her parents to help her care for her young children, and I thought of the young woman who was organizing call center workers, who wouldn't look at me when I took her picture, who said, "the single mothers, you know, if they miss just one day of work because their kids are sick, they get fired."  And I tell this to Margie and she nods, slowly, and sighs, and points to the right path through the verdant rice terraces to all the sights of Batad.

The waterfall was beautiful, shockingly cold, surrounded by greenery and fronted by a bamboo-and-palm-frond pavilion.  White Western backpackers and our brown-skinned guides slowly descended the trails, all of us visitors gasping in the heat.  An old man in traditional Ifugao garb sat in a Nipa hut, waiting for tourists to take pictures of him, while behind him in the little town, the grass of the nipa huts had been replaced with plywood and galvanized iron.  We passed men building a home around a tree, using machetes to notch the wood and bolstering the walls with bamboo.  I took pictures, ceaselessly, and kept listening.

Margie confessed that she has a dream - she wants to become an OFW, an overseas foreign worker, one of the millions of Filipinos and Filipinas deployed around the world to work on cruise ships, clean floors, care for the elderly, wear any of a thousand different uniforms.  She said she doesn't care how hard she has to work, or how many hours, and I said it must be hard to leave your kids to move to another country, and she said simply, "Yes."  And I remembered N., in my very first interview here, breaking her easy good humor and optimism to scowl as she said, "You know, the biggest export of the Philippines is Filipinas.  It's not right."

And Margie said she needs 35,000 pesos, and she paid 10,000 as a down payment, and needs 25,000 more, and isn't sure where or how she'll get it.  And I calculated in my head that that's $500, give or take, and I thought about how I'm paying her about 700 pesos for an entire day's hot work, which seemed like a lot this morning, but is only $15.  I thought about what labor is worth.  And Margie said she knows she'll have to work very hard, and I said to be careful, that lots of those programs are dangerous scams, and she shrugged.  She said, "All I care about is that I work somewhere that includes food.  I don't want to have to be hungry.  But anything else..."  And despite myself, I think of the young members of the anti-trafficking network, and the women who get trapped into prostitution rings, and the desperation that leads them to trust their lives to anyone who promises to take them out of the Philippines.

I ate lunch overlooking the terraces, wrote a letter that I've lost, watched a baby play with an empty Coke bottle and dogs beg for my scraps, until I asked Margie to guide me back to the top.  I had an appointment with a motorcycle - the fastest way back to Banaue, the best way (my van driver promised) for me to make it back to my bus in time.  After the ride up these mountains, I was more than a little bit wary of taking such a trip back down, but I checked my watch and sighed as we slowly climbed back towards the sky.  Margie asked if I would put her number on the internet, so other visitors could call her as their guide - she called them her 'guests,' the people she guides - and I said yes, of course, I can do that.  And she smiled and gave me her number as we climbed towards the top.  Two boys - they looked young, so young - carried rolls of galvanized steel down the mountain, and middle-aged women carried huge sacks of rice.  It's a long, hard walk to Batad.

And then we were back at the saddle, in the mid-afternoon heat, and Jun-jun was waiting with his motorcycle - my knight on a shining Honda, ready to help me catch my bus.  I took a deep, deep breath and climbed on behind him.  My camera strapped across one shoulder and my purse across the other, bandolier-style, I gripped his waist, said a brief prayer - "God, if you're there, please don't let me die on these mountains - they're beautiful and all, but I promised my parents I'd come home!" - and off we went.

I am honestly not sure which I should have been more scared of - the rocks filling the road, as big as my head, and the sound of wheels sliding across gravel as we skidded around turns, or the fact that the road was smoothest close to the edge, so we spent the whole ride skirting the edge of cliffs.  Probably both should have had me terrified, but after we started down the road, I wasn't scared at all.  Maybe it was acceptance of the fact that at this point - helmetless, bare-armed, in the middle of the mountains, on the back of a motorcycle, no cell phone service - there wasn't much I could do, so why worry?  Maybe it was the beautiful scenery, keeping me distracted as we slipped round yet another turn, gravel grinding, another green-covered mountainside opening up before us.  Maybe I'm just stupid.  Certainly Jun was no comfort - when I commented, "You're quite brave to ride a motorcycle down these mountains!" he nodded seriously and said, "Yes, it's very dangerous."  (Note to the Juns of the world:  NOT the reaction a nervous passenger is looking for!)   But for whatever reason, as soon as the wheels started turning, my fear fell out of my pocket and stayed somewhere on the rocky ground on the top of the saddle, while I headed down the mountain.  Pulse calming, I settled in on the back of that motorcycle as the sun started to set behind the mountains.

We drove through a world that seemed like it must have stopped existing eons ago, a world I once thought was only found in the pages of National Geographic and history books.  A tiny bamboo house sat precariously on the edges of the cliffside, no other habitation in sight, only a small stack of rice terraces and a little vegetable plot to feed the inhabitants.  An old woman, her back so arched it seemed a wonder she could walk at all, held herself up on a wooden stick as she slowly approached the front door.  Skinny dogs crossed the road before us, chickens and roosters clucked at its edges, and we passed onto the next mountainside, pure wilderness.

And another curve, and we were surrounded by a cluster of homes and a bevy of children, who shouted a greeting and all waved hello.  One boy held his fingers in the shape of a gun, and carefully pointed it at me as we rode by.  I waited for him to pull his invisible trigger, but he never did - just kept his fingers cocked, waiting.  I thought of the "activistas" that I'm not interviewing, the ones who used to live in these mountains but have shifted farther south.  I thought, I admit it, of all the guns of colonization.  And then I reminded myself that he's a kid, not a blank slate for projecting all my own ideologies, and that Margie, too, and the whole village, and all of these mountain inhabitants, are people whose lives I do not know or understand.  They are more than supporting evidence for the arguments of activists, more than illustrating examples. And I looked back behind me, and the boy was still pointing the barrel of his index finger directly at my back, legs spread in a strong stance, ready to fire.

And another curve, another mountain, another valley, another line of cliffs.  A woman with a baby strapped to her chest fanned herself in the shade of her home.  I smiled at her as we passed and she looked up in surprise, then smiled back at me.  Small children played in front of the door, and three boys ran towards us and followed us down the road, shouting in Tagalog.

"What are they saying?"  I leaned forward to ask Jun.  He turned his head to listen.

"They said, 'Say goodbye!  Say goodbye!'"

And we skidded around another curve, and I looked back, and they were gone.