Begnas di Yabyab (Written last Nov 2013)

 

Little cutie all dressed up for the Begnas di Yabyab

It was not strange to find the street empty. Thousands of miles above and away from the lowlands where I was raised, the people of Sagada rose before the sun did, and at almost 8am I had already missed them by hours. It was the morning after a storm, and plants that had been too weak against the rain and wind lay helplessly in the mud. The air hung warm with the steam of the wet earth, relief from the cold. Minutes ago, a friend had said brusquely through the phone, to come out by the road and wait. Not knowing what to expect, I drifted into a nearby weaving shop to pace, first out of faith, and then desperation. The storeowner, amused at my unease, later took me aside, asking if I was there to watch the indians, and, confused, I stood with him by the door as he explained what warranted my waiting.

Undas Report: Panag-Apoy Festival 2013

Dusk begins early on November 1, the famous Sagada sunset neglected as locals light pyres for their dead.

 
     "It's hell on Earth," locals like to joke, my host's 12 year old nephew Osong among them. As early as finishing lunch, the Isagada head on to church, submitting the names of their deceased to a list, later to be read aloud before the Panag-apoy (to light a fire). The reading of names take hours, readers replacing one another, a calm, monotonous drone. People stack pinewood atop graves and may choose to light them early. 5pm: stray lines of smoke; 5:15pm: isolated bursts of flame; 5:30pm: the air turns grey, then black; 5:45pm: Inferno.
    "It's a specific kind of Pine," says Blue, a man I met on the bus, and I can't remember if he said Saeng or Saleng, only that the sap catches flame easily. Back at home, we are told, "agtukkeltayo," set up [candles]. Nobody uses candles in Sagada for that, I am told.

    At some point, the padi (priest) comes to bless the graves, after which the people put out the flames and return home for dinner, saying that the dead can join them if they wanted to.

Finding Luck in Sagada

It was the last days of summer, and a cloud of gloom followed my mother wherever she went. We had just come home to her, my sister and I, from Abu Dhabi, heavy hearts lifted by the sight of each other. I had said that we should go to Sagada, a little resort town in the Mountain Province, where I had been to a handful of times (most without my mother knowing, but that is another story). Cities take their toll, and we had wanted to go somewhere far away, together, to find some happiness.

Chunky the death moth (named such because of this author's ignorance regarding the
 true names of moths) overseeing the goings-on of the Kanip-Aw Lodge common room.

We lived in a lodge overlooking the cliffs, and at night the common room fluttered with moths. When I had been little, on the nights we spent by the sea, I would attempt to kill moths for flying too near. "Don't!" said my mother then, "moths carry good luck." And I had taken care to never harm moths since then. Now I wonder if this is related to the myth of butterflies being souls of the dead. I wonder if butterflies and moths are, instead, messengers.

chos.

This one saw us off as we set for a Kiltepan sunrise

Anyway. We had nothing but good fortune, in Sagada. 

Finding Sagada with a Fork (or spoon. or your fingers.)

It's how enthusiastically the people who go there talk about food that draws others to it: "Big servings, not so pricey!" Back when I still worked in an office, my co-workers showed me food pictures of a recent Sagada outing they had taken. "So cheap," they told me breathlessly as I leafed through shots of big plates heaping with toast and side vegetables. I remembered hours-long road trips with my Aunt in California, past tunnels of redwood and cliffs overlooking the ocean and pit stops with plates filled to the rim with local crops and homemade pancakes. "Just like the States," they giggle. "Just like the States."

Lemongrass Tea at the Yoghurt House. Demeter, who owns a reader's cafe, once told me
 its local name so I could look for it in the Saturday market but I have since then, unfortunately, forgotten.

It's been said that to know a place is to eat it (in the form of what is served locally of course). Pateros is the Balut; Batangas, the lomi. Binondo is Chinese food, with its fried siopao and dumplings that go beyond their stripped down, streetwise distant cousin, siomai (to be completely truthful, I don't know much about food as local identity, but I'll get to the point, I promise!). 

There is nothing of Sagada that you can see in their food, is what I've heard from unimpressed foodies. "It's all just bastardized Western food."

How Most Pictures I Have of Sagada Are of People's Backs

Drummer and Hunter walking ahead in Sagada

Sagada had been an accident, in that I had not expected to be there. It had always been that place that former co-workers would bring up enthusiastically and rent vans to whenever they tired of Baguio. "Sagada has great Lemon Pies," they would say, and so Sagada was to me up until that point, That Place with the Great Lemon Pies. And so, having inherited the partiality for lemons and all things sour--having a citrus for a name also somewhat at fault for this need, i think--I put it in my mind that one day I would go to Sagada for their lemon pies.

Until, one day in November, while in Bontoc waiting for a bus back to Manila, Hunter casually grinned and said, "Let's go to Sagada." I shrugged. I trusted him with my life, and I shrugged. One should take note that even the most lighthearted things that people who have lived here their whole lives say, have roots in conviction. It is only best that you--tourist, visitor, transient, passersby--just go along. These mountains are greater than doubt, or fear.