There’s a place five or six hours north of Manila where the temperature at 4 in the afternoon is 14 degree Celsius and drops lower as the day turns to night. One gets there by car or public transport and the ride, when it finally ends, chills one to the bone. No, not the sinister chills one gets from horror movies but the relaxing kind of chills making one look forward to what remains of the daylight as you take on the view of the place. It’s this eponymous destination called Malico, after the winding road snaking some 1300 meters up the Caraballo Mountains, where the air is sweet and clean-scented by dipterocarps and, oh my goodness, by sayote plots that help keep its inhabitants nourished.
Yes, it isn’t a touristy place at this point and, personally, I don’t look forward to that because there is a certain fragility to Malico that lures city slickers and the mayhem that comes with them. It’s funny, too, that one takes a fully paved road all the way from Manila but have it end just a few hundred meters from the village, at that place where a concrete bridge should soon rise, and follow a dirt path from there. Soon after you find out why.
The BusinessMirror came to this place on the occasion of the Second Hulpon Festival, a tribal event celebrating the concept of sharing, or pagtutulungan, which is at the core of the Kalanguya spirit life. Much of that life is falling away and forgotten as the generations move from centuries of tradition to the digital hurry of the second millennium. Not everyone is pleased that the age of the Internet allows even the Kalanguya to interact in real time with cousins not just in the lowlands of Pangasinan but with kith and kin from around the world. There are obvious advantages to going digital 1,300 meters from sea level, especially for lowlanders as the Tagalogs or Bulakeños. For the Kalanguya, however, it is much more complicated than that.
Consider that the Hulpon Festival is an attempt to keep the local culture alive against the inroads of modern commercialism that has eaten away at the soul of the Kalanguya, by lore a once fearsome tribe no stranger to headhunting its enemies but now made gentle by Christian tenets and principles. Its people still wear traditional clothing but only on particular tribal dates. To an outsider, their garments look much like that of other Ifugao tribes but we’re told they are certainly unique to the Kalanguya who inhabit the highlands of Nueva Vizcaya. In Malico, Santa Fe town, its inhabitants are some of the friendliest anyone can meet. They walk barefoot some mornings, the men perfectly at home in their G-strings and upper vestments over which they put on thermal jackets made in China. As for the women and girls, they look no different from cell phone-wielding, denim-clad teens parading down Fifth Avenue in Caloocan City.
And prettier, too!
But the one thing an outsider quickly notices is that most everyone is wearing warm apparel. Sure, it isn’t April yet when it can be 36 degrees in the shade in Manila but it does feel very cold in Malico all the time, even at noon as one tries to stand near a pile of burning wood with men milling around a very large wok tending to a recently butchered sow. You can imagine how cold it is at 5 in the morning when maybe half of Luzon is still asleep and one struggles to reach the top of one of the promontories that dot the place, still shrouded in fog.
Malico is cold even in the summer, locals say. Colder than Baguio certainly, they add, which is some 140 kilometers or four hours by car to the northwest via the Benguet-Nueva Vizcaya road. So we repeat, Malico is nearer and colder than Baguio and has far more grand vistas and scenery than the country’s summer capital.
Which is why entrepreneurial lowlanders, like Edgardo C. Amistad and others like him who have adapted to the Kalanguya way of life, are even now working with the locals to ensure against overdevelopment of the place. Amistad and his friends have become adopted sons and daughters of the Kalanguya who are by nature a closed group of people wary of lowlanders. He and his friends, people of good standing in their respective communities, went through a years-long vetting process meant to uncover their commitment to a culture that should soon vanish unless the transition is done right.
“We fear the completion of the [Benguet-Nueva Viczaya] road because people can come visit us anytime soon,” former Indigenous People’s Commissioner Langley Secundo said of the road construction going on just outside the village.
His apprehension sums up the frame of mind of locals eager to join the rest of humanity represented by the world wide web entertain but at the same time are wary of such other unintended consequences best summed up by Amistad on just one word: over development. But as president of the UCPB-CIIF Foundation, the corporate responsibility arm of the universal lender United Coconut Planters Bank, Amistad made a solemn commitment to his spiritual brothers that the community to which he now belongs should not suffer from the same fate befalling many other transitioning indigenous communities before it.
“Zoning is the next project,” Amistad said of the immediate future the locals plan even now with their help. Such a plan forms the blueprint of Malico seen just a few years forward in hopes of preserving as much of the place as possible before it is overran by tourists and opportunistic landowners looking only to make money at the expense of cultural heritage and integrity. Amistad, Segundo and Malico Association President Nobtin Attiw are all for the phased integration of this expanse of heaven by the forest and they all commit to a development that keeps as much of the Malico way of life as progress dictates.
In this regard, Amistad supports community efforts at preserving what cultural ties the Malico community still has with its past, such as sending boys to learn the art of beating the drum or bronze gong, weaving fabric for the girls and preserving their collective memory as a people whose details reside only in the minds of elders and whose death, when it comes, has incalculable cultural costs.
Segundo is happy the Malico youth take pride in their cultural uniqueness, that they still identify themselves as such no matter that their frequent interaction with the youth of the lowlands inevitably resulted to some mutations. The youth taking part at the Second Hulpon Festival beauty contest spoke of themselves as “indigenous”, but perfectly, happy to use the Internet and the cell phone to spread the message that the highland community dwellers are as much Filipino as any one else. The young man who said that at the pageant received the most thunderous applause not just from the elders who approved of the sentiment but even the young people who rooted for their friends strutting their stuff on stage.
As for Amistad, he is just happy for the community that has welcomed him in their midst and allow him to visit as frequently as circumstance permits. It is close to noon but the thermometer indicates 12 degrees as he looks out past the verandah and into the ridges of the Caraballo Mountains and says: “It certainly is cool here. I come as frequently as I can.”