Strolls, Shops, Stairways to the Sky

MVP Trip to the Cordilleras, March 7-10

"Rice terraces are the identity of the highlanders. The meaning of Ifugao is 'People from the earth'. A major part of our culture is based on the rice terraces-from the planting to the harvesting, to thanksgiving and the building of houses. We are connected to our land," says Albert Indunan, the barangay captain of Kiangan in Ifugao (he is also Jean's brother). "Once we are without this land, we have no identity, we will lose our culture. We will be just like anybody else. We will just be plain Filipinos!"

Albert's comments sum up what we experienced during our four-day trip to Ifugao in March. We learned about the fascinating age-old, complex culture of the Ifugao that is inseparably connected to their rice terraces. But we also heard about the imminent threat of the degradation of these terraces - and with it, the loss of the culture connected to it. We were lucky to have two extremely knowledgeable local guides: MVP member Jean Getchell, who hails from Kiangan, and her friend Aurora Ammayo-Hettel, who is a Banaue native but now lives with her German-American husband in Los Baños, Laguna.

The Ifugao rice terraces-often called the 'eighth wonder of the world'-are the highest and most extensive on earth. Each rice field has been painstakingly constructed by hand. If the walls were placed end to end, they would reach more than half way around the world. In 1995, the rice terraces were put on Unesco's World Heritage List-as one of the few 'continuous cultural landscapes' in which the original function of the site still continues today. Last December, however, Unesco declared the terraces a 'World Heritage in Danger' site. Some 25-30% of the terraces are now abandoned, we were told at the province government in Lagawe, where we stopped en route to Banaue. The abandonment leads to the collapse of walls, because their maintenance requires constant attention. Many fields are now used for cash crop production, which totally changes the landscape and brings problems for irrigation.

There are many reasons for the degradation of the rice fields. The native rice variety has only one crop per year, for example, which is not enough to feed everybody due to the mounting population pressure. There is a lot of out-migration-especially among younger Ifugao-who are looking for 'greener pastures' elsewhere. Other problems are pest infestations like the giant earthworm, the Ifugao heritage law that gives all the fields to the oldest child, and the impossibility to use modern technology on steep upland fields. The local government is urgently trying to find solutions for the preservation of the terraces and of Ifugao culture-with the help of national institutions like the National Commission for Culture and the Arts as well as international organisations like the European Union-funded Central Cordillera Agricultural Program (CECAP). When the officials at the provincial governor's office in Langawe treated us to lunch while presenting the problems of the area we felt that they had also placed some hope in us, due to our connections in the international community in Manila. 

Ironically, after hearing so much about the rice terraces it took us a while to actually see them. When we arrived in Banaue after what seemed like an endless bus ride, the weather was misty and rainy and we couldn't see a thing. Instead, most group members soon embarked on an activity that became the greatest passion for many until the end of the trip: Shopping!!! About the only limitation for the continuous shopping spree during the whole trip was the size of our bus! After we arrived in Banaue, some of us went to see the interesting small and private H. Otley Beyer Museum. After watching a cultural show at the Banaue hotel later that evening most of us dropped half-dead into bed! 

The next day was equally exhausting. The more than 40 of us went in four jeepneys first to Bontoc, then to Sagada. While suffering from the heat in Manila as I am writing this it's hard to imagine how cold it was in these jeepneys! Some of us even bought woolen hats in Sagada-and almost didn't make it back to Banaue that night because of their prolonged shopping spree. They arrived a long time after nightfall-chauffeured in by a very worried, unhappy jeepney driver! 

In Bontoc, we visited the very interesting museum on Ifugao culture. What particularly stuck in my mind were the photos-especially those of headhunting practices and of the old Ifugao custom of putting dead bodies on chairs in front of the house for a period of time. It seems like a lot smoother way of getting used to someone's death and of saying goodbye than the western practice of removing the dead immediately from their families. An open-air replica of a traditional Ifugao village behind the museum gave us an idea of how small and simple the Ifugao houses with their thatched roofs are-or rather were, because fewer and fewer people now use traditional materials to build houses. Most dwellings we saw were more western-style buildings.

In Sagada, we went to see a weaving school and the house of Eduardo Masferré-the "father of Philippine photography". His widow Nena showed us some of her late husband's famous black-and-white photographs of Ifugao life, taken mostly from the nineteen-thirties to the fifties. Ms Masferré has created somewhat of a cottage industry selling books, T-shirts, bags and posters using reprints of her husband's photos. She is also the owner of a lovely restaurant where we had lunch.

The famous hanging coffins of Sagada were a bit of a disappointment. We only saw one coffin on a rock-too far away to see it clearly. We saw some more coffins in a nearby cave and hiked down to another cave filled with bats (which we didn't actually see-but we could hear and smell them!) The beautiful landscape around Sagada alone made the trip worthwhile, although the rice-terraces here are not as spectacular as those in Banaue. Half-frozen, covered in dust and with brains shaken to numbness after several hours on the bumpy roads, we were more than happy to get out of the jeepneys after we arrived in Banaue.