A Passage to the Philippines

I had a bit of a scare after midnight. The night bus from Manila to Sagada stopped on a mountain road in the middle of nowhere and did not budge for ten minutes, then twenty, then half an hour. As the cars kept moving past us, I wondered what could have happened. Had we run a flat tyre? Had there been a landslide? Either way, what would we do? Would we wait until morning for someone to repair the road or our bus? Would we turn back to Manila? In my groggy state, I eventually noticed that cars were only driving past us from the opposite direction, which meant that we were likely waiting to drive through a narrow pass. After what seemed like an eternity but realistically did not take longer than an hour, the cars stopped coming and it was our turn to go. Our bus then hurtled down the winding roads, which in some places narrowed to the width of a single car.

I was properly awake after six o’clock, when I became aware of the conditions under which we had been barrelling up and down the mountains. It was frightfully foggy, and before daybreak, the driver could not have seen farther than a few metres ahead. I was glad that this realisation did not strike me while I was asleep, and as daylight dispersed the fog, my terror began to subside.

We arrived in the tiny town of Sagada just before eight o’clock in the morning. Following the instructions I found on the internet, I made my way directly to the Tourist Information Centre to register and pay the tourist fee, after which I planned to head directly to Echo Valley – a clearing that stands directly below the Hanging Coffins of Sagada. This curious sight is by far the most famous attraction in Sagada, continuing a tradition that dates back as long as two thousand years and has survived the region’s belated Christianisation. Local people believe that the higher the coffin is, the better the deceased’s lot will be in the afterlife. This type of burial is reserved for people who had been married and had grandchildren during their lifetime; oftentimes, their bones are broken in attempts to fit them into the coffins.

When I arrived by the till, however, I found out that Echo Valley was closed to visitors. The worker on duty explained that the community was conducting rituals, for which reason practically all attractions in the area were closed. He suggested that I come back the following day, which I could not do because of my tight itinerary and the sheer amount of time it takes to get between one mountain village and another. As it turned out, waiting a day would not have helped anyway, as the signs by the trailhead to the valley said the closure would last until December fourteenth. The worker then, with an almost maddening insouciance, asked me to register and pay the tourist fee anyway. When I asked what for, he blithely replied that I could walk around the sleepy one-horse town. For my one hundred pesos, I received a map displaying all the places I could not visit, as well as a brochure with a list of attractions, on which the worker underlined the one cave that would likely be open.

Still, I was hopeful that even if I would not be allowed to visit Echo Valley, I could perhaps catch a glimpse of the coffins from somewhere close-by. To leave Sagada “emptyhanded” after an eleven-hour bus ride seemed like a positively insane waste of time. I walked to Saint Mary’s Episcopal Church and made it all the way to the hill on the other side, but the prohibition was posted right in front of the trailhead, from which I could not see anything. Scrambling for a plan, I opened Google Maps and started searching madly for other locations with hanging coffins. There did not seem to be any, so I started searching for viewpoints instead. This latter search yielded a few results, and after looking through some of the grainy pictures, I concluded that there would be spots along the town’s South Road from which a few coffins could be seen.

After much suspense – and after breakfasting on two slices of lemon pie, which appears to be a local specialty – I finally reached a gentle bend in the road from which I could see the coffins fixed tenuously to the town’s bare grey rocks. There were not many and they were rather far away, but this was clearly the best view I would get. As I sauntered along the road, a van full of local tourists pulled up and their guide pointed out the coffins, which strengthened this conviction.

Still, I had a lot of time until the next bus left from Sagada to Banaue, so I continued along the road until Sumaguing Cave, which was closed as well. On the way, I took in the views of the surrounding rocks and rice fields, where I saw a small figure of a man ploughing through the water with the help of a buffalo. Then, I turned around and went all the way back to Sagada, where I bought my bus tickets for Banaue, drank some tea and ate lunch. In the morning, I had arranged with my inn to pick me up from the Banaue bus stop, but the price I was quoted would have brought me dangerously close to exhausting all my remaining funds. I would not be able to afford the ride back to Banaue, and I certainly would not be able to buy any food for the rest of the trip. Luckily, the inn was amenable to letting me pay by PayPal, which is not my preferred payment option but seemed better than feeding my debit card to a rural and possibly feral ATM.

The bus arrived in Banaue just before five o’clock, and after paying the environmental fee of fifty pesos, I hopped into the tricycle with my driver, who had identified me based on my WhatsApp picture. Once again, the mist and rain set in. At some point, I realised that the glass in front of me was not fogging up; I simply could not see because of the mist. Right after that, I realised that this meant my driver could not see a thing either. Nevertheless, I survived, and after arriving at the parking area ten minutes away from the inn, I was picked up by the establishment’s tour guide.

We chatted on our way over, and I mentioned the festivities in Sagada. He said the people there have conserved their traditions better than in Batad, where such celebrations only take a day instead of a whole week. When I asked what happens during these festivities, the guide attempted to prevaricate before admitting that they often involve animal sacrifices to the local spirits. This had already been my hunch in Sagada, where it struck me as strange that the church was open and empty while the celebrations were going on elsewhere, and that they were not written on the church calendar at all. When I probed the guide about how these sacrifices square with Christianity, his tone implied that he anticipated the question. He replied that the two do not contradict each other: after all, the spirits are clearly not evil if they help the crops grow.