February 1, 2024: It has been almost a full week now. The young writer from Infanta Sebastian Penamante and I did the short but steep hike up Mount Harap to the Tatlong Krus (Three Crosses) in Paete. It only took ten months of living in Paete for this old tourist to get around to it, thanks to photographer Peps Cadapan for showing me the trailhead and to Jep of the Gitna Cafe for talking about it enough that I finally made the climb. Jep, Mhica, and Ivan of the Gitna Cafe have become my tourist information center here in Paete, haha 😂. They also help me with my pathetic use of the tagalog language, haha 😂.
As an amatuer-tourist-outsider I can only make superficial observations of the Philippines.
Having read an absolutely terribly shallow article on Malate by a so-called "Travel Journalist" who only spent a day or two there, I am thankful to this person, who has taught me how completely wrong surface impressions can be. In fairness, there are many unholy juxtapositions and It is not an easy task for outsiders to step into the shoes of the people who have lived the history, or step into shoes of the responsible journalist, anthropologist and historian.
Contrarily, we all observe the world as this "so called Travel Journalist." It makes writing difficult, as the Artist Ed Badajos once put it "writing isn't hard, it's mpossible." It's this kind of humility "that makes us rather bears the ills we have than fly to others we know not of."
Also a philosophy instructor once put it from his Buddhist perspective "...we're just looking for a higher quality bullshit."
Thankfully poetry exists.
The mountain is always a good start for the new year. It is the natural reservoir. The source.
Staring through the forest on the mountainside is like staring at the stars, one looks back through time.
Climbing the switchbacks, we give pause within a pocket between the many forested shoulders of the mountain-the frozen sets of waves which peak and break in geological time. The silence echoing not a white noise, but rather a layered transparent silence. The trees whisper to each other above the baking vibration of insects and birds, not completely unlike the sensation of being under water...Sebastian mentions the word "incanto."
Once at the top, the promised winds did not disappoint, and the ritual selfies dissolved pale beneath a looming omnipresence dosing all into their art trances.
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