We hadn’t gone there for a couple of years, so Beng and I joined a posse of pilgrims — friends from our pen collectors’ group, the Fountain Pen Network-Philippines — on a sortie to the Pahiyas festival in Lucban, Quezon a couple of Saturdays ago.
Pahiyas — otherwise the feast day of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers — always falls on May 15, and this year we were lucky that it came on a Saturday, when more of us could go, many for the first time. Well, lucky and no — the weekend also meant that hordes of visitors went south with us, guaranteeing horrendous traffic both ways; but more on that later.
We took what I call the scenic route, via Antipolo, Teresa, Morong, and Pililla, descending on the zigzag road into Mabitac in Laguna, and thence to Pagsanjan and Lucban. I’ve traveled this route many times, and I’m always pleasantly amazed by how pretty the countryside can be just an hour out of the city, especially with the flame trees and golden showers abloom.
There’s a spot in Pililla on the crest of the highway that overlooks Laguna de Bay and the surrounding towns along the lakeshore, and we always make it a point to stop here for a cool drink or to snap some pictures, but really to appreciate the majesty of the scenery, rivaled only by Taal on the other side of the horizon.
This is a crook of the road that leads to a string of roadside stalls selling jackfruit, mangoes, coconuts, and woven baskets, just before the view opens up to the lush ricefields and belfries of Laguna. It doesn’t get more Pinoy than this, and to urbanites like myself steeped in the frigid air of malls and condos, the blast of sunlight and the slow curls of smoke in the distance are a bracing reminder of what life was like — and still is — for our countrymen in different situations.
And it isn’t all romantic, because this sprawling valley and the mountains that surround them have cradled a history of suffering and conflict. In September 1900, Mabitac was the scene of an important battle between Filipino forces under Gen. Juan Cailles and the American invaders under Col. Benjamin Cheatham; the Filipinos won, having the advantage of familiarity with the muddy landscape. And as I told my friends as we took our lunch at the aptly named Exotik restaurant in Kalayaan (formerly Longos), Laguna, we were in the very neighborhood where the Huks operated in the 1950s. Even earlier than the Huks, the schoolteacher-turned-rebel organizer Teodoro Asedillo was born there in Longos in 1883; he would be killed in an encounter with government troops in 1935 in nearby Cavinti, his savaged body paraded thereafter from town to town as a warning to insurrectionists.
But last Saturday morning, save for the infernally slow traffic on Ortigas Avenue all the way to Antipolo (a tip for future pilgrims: take the long, lazy route along Sumulong Highway instead of Ortigas, then turn left towards Teresa at the very end), our thoughts were directed to pleasant things: our pens (of course), movies (how good Robin Hood was), martial arts (Jay Ignacio’s film on kali), and more pens (of course).
We’d left the Ortigas area around 10, and didn’t get to Exotik, just beyond Paete, until past 1 p.m. Living up to its name, they keep huge pet pythons in the place — no, they’re not on the menu — including a fat one named Samantha who was sleepy in her cage from having swallowed what looked like a couple of sandbags. I don’t much like snakes, although I dream about them (and the ocean) quite often; I was glad to see one so perfect of form, and so obviously cared for and cared about by its handler. Other than its serpentine attractions, Exotik’s food (yes, they do serve frog’s legs and other uncommon dishes) is well worth the long drive, and it won’t break the bank — our party of 14, including the driver, ordered whatever we wanted and got stuffed to the gills, and the total bill came out to less than P4,000, or about P300 each.
It was past three when we finally drove into Lucban, which may sound awfully late for anyone coming into a festival, but I knew from previous experience that this was just right in terms of catching the procession of carabaos around town; the scorching midday heat would also have simmered down a bit. And so we caught Pahiyas in its full glory and frenzy; the streets were jammed with throngs of townspeople and visitors like us poking their Nikon and Canons at anything colorful. And the town was ablaze and awash with color, the gay pastels of the rice-leaf kiping brightening every window along this year’s appointed route.
At 6 p.m., we regrouped for the journey home, many bearing bundles of the town’s famous longanisa. We took the southern route back via Calamba — big mistake, as it turned out, because of logjams in Calamba and on the expressway, which was anything but. It was a good thing we’d paused for dinner at a roadside restaurant in Victoria called Kainan sa Fiesta Laguna, where I had the best lechon kawali ever — crisp and crackling on the outside, scrumptiously soft on the inside. That pretty much sedated me for the rest of the unbelievably long trip. It was past 3 a.m. when we staggered off the van in Diliman. “We could’ve gone to Baguio and back!” I remember saying, but sometimes southern sorties can be more interesting.
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