There’s a little tree hugger inside each of us, no matter how urbane. And so when a friend sent me an SMS message along the lines of "Let’s go climb Mt. Pinatubo and swim in the crater, on the cheap, it will be fun!" my first thought was really how to arrange my schedule so I could go with the other barat (cheapskate) backpackers we knew. Following on the heels of that brain blip was, "You can swim in Pinatubo?"
I hadn’t given a thought to Mt. Pinatubo since the stratovolcano blew her top in 1991, 400-500 years after its last eruption. I was in Bicol at the time, a puny fourth grader used to living in the shadow of Mt. Mayon — who’s had her little snits over the years — but that was the first I’d heard of a dormant volcano spewing ash, magma and lahar to such an extent that the effects were felt not just in the Philippines, but in the world. Now the infamous volcano was allowing tourists to swim in the caldera — this I had to see.
Off to see a man about a mountain
It took some coordination, with a few people backing out and one hardy mountaineer, unfortunately, being laid off to get to the final five, but by March 2 we were on the Partas bus and heading to Capas, Tarlac. The bus was comfortable, we’d lucked out on getting one of the air-conditioned road runners, and it cost us a mere P148, for an estimated 100 km ride from Manila to our debarkation point.
We were communicating with a tour guy from Mount Pinatubo Wyne 4x4 Tours, Wendell Mercado, whose cellphone number my friend pulled from the Web; all we knew was that he gave good rates and spoke politely. Later on, we found out that he’s actually president of the Capas Pinatubo 4 wheelers Club Association, all 77 members of which form the backbone of the tourist transport to and from the mountain. Bless the Google god.
Since we had a guy in our group, we couldn’t stay at the ladies-only dorm at Mt. Peniel, a retreat house people in Capas refer to as the "prayer mountain," so our only other choice was Capas Eco Lodge. The building’s a mere P7.50 jeepney ride from the town proper, but the back of it is facing the road, so without the help of a young lady named Princess, we would have definitely missed it. Rule number one in the tourist code is always to befriend the locals, or get lost.
The Lodge is in a sad state, painted a new bright blue on the outside, but with peeling white on the inside. One of the rooms we were given had a broken lock and an air-conditioner that labored so noisily, it had to be shut off for some shuteye. The other room had the dried-up remains of bubblegum stuck to various places on the walls, a guest cockroach and its baby in the tiny bathroom, and stains one did not look too closely at on the teenybopper pink bedspread. The TV only had Channel 7 showing. But for P200 "short time," P500 overnight and P900 for a 24-hour stay, we weren’t expecting much.
We struck an overnight-and-then-some deal with caretaker Precy Aguilar costing us a mere P260 each for the two rooms plus additional P100 for extra bed. We’d be checking out early to leave for the climb, but would return for some of our things and shower for an extra P20. I’m not good at Math but it seemed to me we upheld our "keep it cheap" objectives.
Despite the Lodge being aesthetically unappealing, it fulfilled my minimum requirements of having a working toilet and bath with hot water to boot and a safe roof over my head. Ms. Aguilar, who’s managing the place for her Japan-based brother, is also taking care of a foundling two strange men left at her door; having bonded with the boy, she’s taken steps to adopt him herself. If we gave a little extra for extra service, it was money well spent in my estimation (probably on Moe — what we ended up calling the still unnamed baby — short for Moses).
Stumbling in their footsteps
The Lodge being what it is, when we arrived around 2 p.m. straight from lunch at a carinderia (street-side eatery), we really didn’t feel like hanging out there. So we decided to visit the Capas National Shrine, which we’d spied on the jeepney ride, the 70-meter obelisk sticking out amid hectares of farmland like a sword piercing the sky. Being attracted to grand, dramatic, phallic things, we just had to see it up close.
It took a five-minute walk and P20 to get in; the place is protected by the military, so we weren’t surprised to find a member of the platoon in civilian garb carrying an armalite. The memorial wall and obelisk honor the 66,000 Filipino troops, Scouts, Constabulary and Philippine Army units, who became prisoners of war (POWs) after Bataan was surrendered, and made the infamous Death March to this site.
The shrine lies in 54 hectares of parkland, 35 hectares of which have been planted with 31,000 trees to represent the Filipino and American soldiers who died in the erstwhile concentration camp during World War II.
You had to walk the few meters it took to the shrine to remember that the men took five to nine days to get there, mostly on foot. It was a 55-mile stretch from Mariveles, Bataan, to San Fernando, Pampanga, where every 100 POWs were forced into 1918 model railroad boxcars used in the previous war, for cargo. The train traversed a distance of around 24 miles, and men died standing up, before they reached Capas, Tarlac. Survivors of the train ride had to walk another six miles to the ill-equipped Camp O’Donnell, where an estimated 44,000-50,000 of the Filipinos arrived — the rest were shot, bayoneted, beheaded or bludgeoned to death by their Japanese captors along the way.
Adjacent to the shrine is the Camp O’Donnell Memorial Monument, built by surviving members of "The Battling Bastards of Bataan," in memory of fellow American soldiers who marched and endured the privations of the prison camp alongside their Filipino comrades. Around 25,000 Filipinos (in the first year) and 2,500 foreign servicemen (approximately 1,600 included young Americans, most in their early twenties) died from disease, starvation and torture, and were buried in common graves in the area. Their remains have since been transferred to the US military cemetery and the Libingan ng Mga Bayani (Cemetery of Heroes), where we honor our heroes. I’d known there were soldiers from New Mexico fighting on Philippine soil that time, what surprised me was a marker that honored Czechoslovakians in the same cause.
It’s a peaceful place, this modern version of Camp O’Donnell, very clean, with manicured green grass and well-maintained marble. It’s hard to visualize how it was a den of dysentery, malaria, dengue, and beriberi, where men lay strung up in bamboo poles or by the side of already fouled up ditches, waiting for the next wave of vomit or call of nature, dehydrated and starving, worried sick over their lost friends, grieved beyond belief by the deaths they’d witnessed and the betrayal of comrades-in-arms turned predators, feeling abandoned by their country, and made sport of by their enemies.
"I see no gleam of victory alluring, no chance of splendid booty if I endure — I must go on enduring and my reward for bearing pain — is pain yet. Though the thrill, the zest, the hope are gone, something within me keeps fighting on," is etched on one wall, the words of 1st lieutenant Henry G. Lee, and you remember that although a lot of the men lost their will and their capacity to live, there were others who somehow survived. Standing in front of these monuments, reading the names and words of men who fought with our grandfathers, it’s a moving experience.
First star on the left, straight on until sunrise
The night passed uneventfully, which was a blessing considering we had to wake up early for our climb. By 5 a.m. the driver is honking at the gate of the lodge, so we troop obediently to the six-seater 4x4 jeep. It’s a bumpy ride up the trail to Mr. Mercado’s house, where we meet our host, who admonishes us to be careful at the crater, which has depths of 1,000 feet. Serious mountaineers take the base to crater walk, which lasts 10 hours and since overnight stays at the top have been prohibited since February, for "security" reasons, they’re too tired to make a descent. Mr. Mercado would usually send one of his three 4x4 Jeeps to pick them up.
If you take a Jeep to the tourist office, and from there, walk to the crater, it takes three hours; unfortunately, you’d have to ford a river. Since we didn’t have the shoes for the river, we opted to take the Jeep to the tourist center and onwards, through the so-called Skyway route, and take the 40-minute (more like one hour) walk to the crater. The Skyway is a shortcut trail laboriously maintained by the Pull Destination Company (PDC), a Korean company, for the 4x4 Jeeps to pass through. It gets eroded during the rainy season and they have to pave the way again, so each tourist group who passes this way pays a toll fee at the tourist office. Filipino trekkers need P2,500 for the jeep rental, P500 for the toll, P500 for the guide and P100 tip for goodwill (hey, we’re appreciative, even if we’re cheap), and P200 conservation fee (P50 per person). Expenditures total P3,800, which is a mere P760, split five ways, for a fun time. This is a little below the all-expenses paid tour for foreign tourists amounting to as much as P4,000 solo or P800 per head for a group of five.
At 5:30 a.m. the tourist office is still closed, but we pick up our guide Willy Gutierrez anyway, and move on, only to be pulled up short at the gate by soldiers who tell us we’ve got to make a detour because the last of the Balikatan rites — joint training drills by the US and Philippine armies — were ongoing. By the time we’d circled the clearing where the military men were huddled, crossed a shallow stream of water, and made our first pit stop at a small canyon, the sun was up. We take a breather and then pile back in, eager for the climb.
On the way to higher ground, we passed an Aeta camp, waving to the kids with their wild hair and big eyes, and nearly ran over a wild chicken. It was the first time I saw a hen fly five feet over the shrubs. Uncanny. You’d think the harbinger of adventure would be an egret or an eagle, but I guess a flying chicken was apt for our crew.
The view was both barren and lush, with bare trees in the foreground and green mountains in the background. The trail was dusty all the way to the top (a bandana is indispensable), and when we finally parked at the clearing and continued on foot, the same erosive granite and soil took us down another sheer mini-canyon, up a water trail that was drier than it should have been (filled with stones the guides would sell for P90 per four sacks, for stone-washing denim), up a few steep concrete steps, and finally at the summit, with a view of the spectacularly cyan-blue crater.
This is where you sigh and say, damn, that was worth the climb. Where all tree-huggers take a minute at the viewdeck or one of the open huts to gasp, "What a wonderful world!" Where the spiritual behold the crater lake, the mountain ridges and their mantle of clouds, and the wildflowers blooming amid the weeds, reflecting on how we had absolutely nothing to do with any of it, and say a little prayer to the Creator. This is where we, of course, like true turistas, danced a jig and went crazy with the photographs.
Admittedly, I like climbing mountains because of the natural high. There’s that rush of adrenaline it takes to push up against gravity, and hypoxia — the lack of oxygen leading to a state of euphoria — upon reaching high elevations and thin air. Add to that the warm, fuzzy feelings due to biophilia, defined as the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms, or in laymen’s terms, "being one with nature." I did make my genuflection to the higher power, because out of the destructiveness of Mt. Pinatubo’s eruption, we have something beautiful to show for it, something that can turn deadly if not given the proper respect (the crater’s enlargement has been controlled since 2001). Something we’ve got to protect and not just make money from, because the many Koreans, Japanese, Europeans, Americans, Indians, and whoever else, that make their way up this mountain, also know it’s something unique to this terrain.
So we went down to the crater, another steep stair descent, and enjoyed what was left of the apples, bananas, and sandwich fixings including cold cuts, that we lugged with us, and drank the last of our individual two liters of water. We briefly considered taking one of the kayaks around the lake before realizing the Koreans had chained these together, griped about the sticks of Virginia Slims we saw on the banks, and took the cold plunge, but strayed no further than the water’s edge and mid-lake, with a life vest on. All the while, we thought to ourselves, that life was good, and the world is pretty damn wonderful.
Originally published on 14-15 March 2008 as the main feature in BusinessWorld Weekender and republished on 25 March 2008 in GMA News Online.