From Manila to Mt. Everest and back and back again

Magmula ng ako’y natutong umawit
Nagkabuhay muli ang aking paligid
Ngayong batid ko na ang umibig sa sariling tugtugin o himig
Sa isang makata’y maririnig mga titik, nagsasabing

Kay ganda ng ating musika
Ito ay atin sariling atin
At sa habang buhay awitin natin
—Ryan Cayabyab
(Popularized by Hajii Alejandro)

Today, colonial mentality is steadily taking a back seat and we Filipinos are finally getting our cheer on by toting our red, white, blue and yellow pom poms as we root for the home team. Since family comes first, let me start off by talking about my cousin, Iza Calzado who stars in an independent Hollywood production shot in Canada and New York. Her film is a remake of Sigaw, now titled The Echo starring Jesse Bradford directed by the original Filipino director Yam Laranas. It’s a breath of fresh air that the foreigners are remaking a Filipino film and I hope this catches on to be the latest trend in world entertainment.

Other Filipino actors making it big elsewhere in the world are Dante Basco, Tia Carrere, Rob Schneider, The OC’s Rachel Bilson and High School Musical’s Vanessa Hudgens. The international music scene is also filled with talented Filipinos like Arnel Pineda of Journey, BEP’s Allan Pineda, Billy Crawford, Pussycat Doll Nicole Scherzinger, Mutya Buena, Cassie, MTV VJ Vanessa Minilo, Enrique Iglesias, and Freddie Aguilar. We also have dancers Cheryl Burke and the Hip-Hop all-stars world champs. The sports arena is also well represented by Manny “Pacman” Pacquiao, Paeng Nepomuceno, Efren Bata Reyes and Dave Batista. And of course, we are not to be left behind in the fashion world thanks to the first Asian supermodel Anna Bayle, Ford Supermodel of the World third place winner Charo Ronquillo, Monique Lhuillier and New York-based bag designer Rafe Totengco. Needless to say, Filipinos are making waves all over the world.

Filipino pride is at an all-time high with all the attention Charice is getting. Performance after performance, she is getting rave reviews from no less than the likes of Ellen, Oprah and David Foster (My mother Zsa Zsa Padilla will be playing Charice’s mother in her life story). And of course, there’s the recent win of Pacman versus David Diaz. Once again, the whole Philippines united as one cheering in front of the TV  leaving the streets traffic-free for a few rounds.

I am happy because I know that right now you are saying to yourself that I’ve left out certain names. It is simply because we have amazing talent in our country and an endless list of people we can be proud of. On the top of my own list are a group of Filipinos who climbed Mt. Everest: Leo Oracion, Pastor Emata and Romy Garduce. And of course the three Pinays or the “Kaya ng Pinay” group made up of Noelle Wenceslao, Carina Dayondon and Janet Belarmino-Sardena.

The Pinays who climbed Everest are close to my heart because Noelle was my classmate in high school. For those of you who don’t know this yet, these three young women are the first women in the world to traverse Mt. Everest. This means that they climbed from the north side (Tibet, China) and went down the south side (Nepal). They are also the first Asean women to reach the top of Mt. Everest. On May 16, 2007 “naabot na ng Pinay ang tuktok ng mundo.” (The Filipinas have reached the top of the world).

Noelle and I are friends from Poveda high school. I was a “newbie” during freshman year and she was ever so kind to me while some people were not. We became close because she was usually my groupmate since our last names (Tatlonghari and Wenceslao) fell in the last group in the alphabetized school world.

Noelle graduated top of our class, receiving most of the awards during graduation. Two years after college graduation, my schoolmates and I were shocked to find out that Noelle just finished college at UP. She was sidetracked because of her passion for mountaineering and dragonboat racing. Little did we know that she was slowly positioning herself to accomplish a feat none of us even dreamed about.

A year ago, before the big climb, Noelle texted us and  she said that she was a little bit nervous. Since this girl excelled in everything she ever did, this message of hers puzzled me. So, some fellow Povedans rallied up the troops and we came full force to the “Kaya ng Pinay” send-off party. It was our turn to cheer her on, after all she had spiced up the batch’s cheer routines with her acrobatics like her trademark no hand back tuck.

After the send-off and a successful climb, we organized a homecoming/mini batch reunion in a restaurant in San Juan. We were 30 very proud, noisy girls with high-pitched voices. It proved to be an ear splitting, high decibel welcome. Amidst the excitement, it was evident that Noelle inspired us to find a better version of our own inner “ugly duckling.”

You see, Noelle was not a “swan” in terms of sports early on in life. In fact, she was “not-so-great.” She was an awkward girl in our school’s EDSA softball field. Now, if this girl has bloomed to become one of the country’s sportiest women then there’s hope for us yet.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous article, I totally dislike working out. To break the spell, I asked Noelle to be my work-out buddy. On our first day, she biked from her house to jog with me at The Fort. It was raining that day and I found myself “wishing for classes to be suspended” like a little schoolgirl. When we finally jogged, I asked her if the “dangerous” slippery stairs were anything like Everest.

In my attempt to find another excuse to lounge around, I began my own quest to understand the adventure she had gone through. Sometimes, the best way to understand something is by “putting yourself in somebody’s shoes” which I followed quite literally. I visited the “Kaya ng Pinay” girls Noelle and Carina at the Everest team house in Taguig and I wore their gear. I donned the jacket, goggles, backpack, ice pick and took a picture. It was very heavy and uncomfortable.

The mountain get-up doesn’t look very fashionable, it is like couture outfits in the sense that it costs a lot of money. Since the team’s budget isn’t that big, they bought bargain jackets in the Katmandu ukay-ukay or second hand stores. In Nepal, right before the climb, the Pinay girls were mistaken as locals by the actual locals because they blended in so well as they washed their clothes in the river.

Even though these girls don’t mind roughing it up, Noelle still didn’t get off easy from the stereotype that girls like her “make tusok tusok the fishballs” even if that joke references people from a different school. “There’s no driver or yaya on Mt. Everest!” Noelle’s fellow adventure racers warned her jokingly before the climb.

Jokes aside, it’s a winning trait of all the “Kaya ng Pinay” girls to be cowboys (pronounced ko-boy) in the Filipino sense of the word. For instance, even if hygiene was still very important in the bundoks, the girls had to improvise with wet wipes since showers cost around P300.

Even if it’s a bit gross, I think that I could go three months without a bath but I’m sure that for most, that would already be a quitting factor. On second thought, maybe I could survive three days and not months. Those discomforts are just the tip of the iceberg of what the mountaineers had to go through. The most troubling stories that the girls shared with me is that there are sick and dying bodies on the mountain. And yet with all the danger, all the Filipinos who have climbed have successfully lived to tell of the tale of their journey to the top. This begs the question “how did the girls prepare for Everest?”

Apart from the usual training, the girls went through technical training in India last 2004. They also tagged along when the first Filipino men conquered Everest. Janet, who had just given birth to her baby Himalaya three months prior to the climb, missed a lot of the crucial mountain training. She also had the emotional difficulty of being a new mother who would have to be away from her first newborn baby. But as Carina says, “Kailangan yung passion” and since the Pinays have that, there was no point in time when they even thought of quitting.

There was no room for turning back after three years of preparation. Carina shares with us. “Sabi nga ni Sir Art (the Everest expedition leader): ‘the mountain saw our kindness’ kaya naging mabait din sa amin ang bundok, yung mga tao ay mabait din sa amin, ang panahon nakikibagay sa amin. Sa ibang bundok marami kaming hirap na naranasan.” Noelle recalls they encountered many obstacles. “Pasama na nang pasama and we still kept on going. We went through every single imaginable obstacle: Financial, spiritual, everything. But we still kept going.” The girls both said that they were strong on the spiritual side and that’s what they held on to.

All the training in the world helps one get to the finish line but of course there are little unique touches from home that make the climb more like a walk in the park. For Noelle it was a picture of her mom inside a zip lock bag and for Janet, it was a picture of her baby. Carina had rosary, a wooden elephant and the mp3 of the song Kaya ng Pinay written and performed by team doctor, Dr. Ted Esguerra and his band.

Everest graduate Pastor Emata gamely cooked sinigang, fried chicken and adobo in the kitchen tent at base camp to give a feel of home. The girls also brought smelly comfort food like bagoong and tuyo which made their Sherpas (locals who guide and assist climbers during their climb) uncomfortable because of the unusual odor. The Sherpas eventually grew to love the wonders of bagoong. Who knew that bagoong and tuyo can help you get to the top of the world.

“I’m on the top of the world looking down on creation”

I’ve always had my own idea of what it’s like at the top. The Amazing Race host will congratulate me as I take the Philippine flag from my backpack and plant it among a hundred other flags from different countries. And then I jump and twirl around as I sing “the hills are alive with the sound of music.” As I shared my Everest fantasy scene with the girls, I discovered that it was flawed in every way possible. First, the mountaintop is full of Buddhist prayer flags, not national flags. It looks messy and colorful. Second, it’s not the place where you rejoice because it’s only halfway the expedition. One must conserve their energy for the descent. Descent was harder for the team because they spent so much energy, plus it was uncharted territory for them since they took a different path down. When the three girls were safely back on the ground, the fixed rope which serves as a safety line for all the climbers broke because the anchor snapped. Four died from that incident.

All in all 10 people died during the same time that the Pinays were on Everest and although they said they wouldn’t climb it again, they went back just recently for the Tenzing-Hillary marathon. This marathon commemorates the first Everest climb by Sir Edmund Hillary and his Sherpa Tenzing Norgay.

Participants of the marathon were Carina, Art Valdez, Pastor Emata and Dr. Ted Esguerra. Noelle and logistics head Fred Jamili were also part of the team behind the marathon expedition. Art who is the brother of world-renowned theater actor Leo Valdez shares with us that “the Everest marathon is the test of the ultimate: The lungs, endurance of the runner, and physical stamina. It is harder than any marathon in the world because of the thin air.”

Carina made us proud once again by placing first in the women’s foreigner group. She broke last year’s record by a female foreigner by 45 minutes. Dr. Ted  made it to the Top 10 foreign men list even if he got delayed by two hours for stopping several times to treat people on his path. Apart from this, the team also donated medicine to marathon runners and also to a local hospital. To top it all, Dr. Ted performed surgery at the dining hall on his way down to base camp. This all proves that the group’s purpose goes far beyond breaking world records, making us Filipinos doubly proud of our modern-day heroes.

The Everest team has done so much for my sense of nationalism. Before, it went as far as wearing Team Manila shirts and singing the national anthem with my hand on my chest in movie houses. But being from Laguna, the hometown of our National Hero Jose Rizal, I felt compelled to do something more which is why I wanted to write this article.

I’m a big believer in Filipinos. A big fan of my race. No more being racist to our own race. Gone are the days when we value imported goods and foreign artists over our own. A paradigm shift is slowly taking place as we learn to love our own work, our own people and support our own race.

In the future, the Everest team is considering crossing the Sahara desert, and the adventure continues for us all.