Once Around the Bay

We took a drive around Laguna de Bay on Good Friday, something we wouldn’t consider doing at any other time of the year. We hadn’t done this route for quite a few years, and the prospect of traffic-free driving was enough of a come-on for us to get into the car and go.

First destination was Pagsanjan, although we had no intention of shooting the rapids that scorching day. Ernest Santiago’s fabled restaurant–mouth-watering adobo worth all the suka, bawang and paminta you can buy–was unfortunately though not surprisingly closed, but the guys hawking boatrides to the rapids were open for business. They’ve taken soliciting a step further by chasing prospective customers on a motorcycle and actually blocking the road so you’re forced to stop. One guy comes over to the driver’s window and tries to sound "official" in making his pitch about tourism, with a discount on boatrides and souvenirs thrown in, while his partner on the bike strategically blocks your vehicle. We got away by slowly but determinedly moving forward, until the bike finally gave way. Is this Pagsanjan’s version of Dick Gordon’s tourism hard sell?

After that unpleasant episode we went on to Majayjay to visit its famous old church, the original dating back to the 16th century but destroyed by fire and war and rebuilt several times. Visitors can no longr climb the bell tower, but the lovely lichened stone facade, the cool interiors and the pair of gnarled kalachuchi trees are worth the visit.

We then doubled back a bit to the town of Liliw in search of sapatillas, beaded slippers that the town is known for. The few stores that were open sold leather sandals and rubber slippers, and I hope it was just a lame excuse when they told us there are no more beaders in town. We went to the church instead, where a tableau of the crucifixion was going on inside. We climbed the rusty circular stairs to the choir loft, but decided against another rusty circular staircase up the bell tower. The high windows of the loft offered a view of endless coconut trees until the mountains in the distance.

Our third church was the one in Nagcarlan. We wanted to see the burial chamber under the church but mass was about to start and it didn’t seem proper to be marching up front to the stairs next to the altar. Recent renovations to the church have unfortunately greatly diluted its charm.

That was the end of our impromptu bisita iglesia (a day too late and four churches short of the required seven). We retraced our way back to Pagsanjan to go on to Paete and around the top end of Laguna de Bay. It would’ve been a straight drive back for us except for signs along the road advertising the Exotik restaurant. When we finally saw it just before Paete we decided to stop for a very late lunch.

Exotik is a most interesting place, a multi-level bamboo and stone restaurant that offers exotic–hence the name–fare like bayawak (monitor lizard), sawa (python), palos (eel), usa (deer), ibong ulok (some kind of wild bird) and palaka (frog). We wondered if this violated the cites treaty or some other endangered species legislation, but hey–maybe it’s all really just chicken that’s passed off as exotic meat. We didn’t get to find out because we opted for tamer and definitely not endangered fare like halo-halo, buko and egg sandwich.

We did get to meet Samantha, a 15-foot black Burmese python that is the restaurant’s mascot. Samantha, curled up in a cage in the gift shop to be petted by those who dared (I did), is three years old, with a girth larger than my thigh and a head larger than my fist. Having been in captivity most of her life–she was given to the restaurant two-and-a-half years ago by a "foreigner"–she no longer has the hunting instincts of the wild: she has no taste for live chicken, but prefers to be fed ("sinusubuan siya", according to her caretaker) her diet of three kilos of chicken heads twice a week.

She is taken out of her cage daily for a bath and occasionally for a stroll–or is it a crawl?–around the landscaped grounds, even up to the restaurant proper. It takes at least four peple to move Samantha, and there is no danger of her running away when she’s out making pasyal "kasi mabagal na siya kumilos dahil mataba" (she’s slow because she’s fat). When she first came to the restaurant, her caretaker shares, she was just a few feet long and as large as a woman’s arm. I don’t think though that pythons are meant to veg into contented cows, no matter how kind and well-meaning its owners/caretakers.

We bought a pack of broas (toasted lady fingers) and a map of Laguna from the gift shop (for P75, it was P25 less than at the Pagsanjan Rapids Hotel gift shop), which turned out to be heavy on ads and promo forms but sorely lacking in details. We passed on the belts and wallets that the caretaker said were made from the skin that Samantha shed–monthly. Knowing a tall tale–or a long one–when we hear one, we bade Samantha good-bye and went on our way.

It was a lot cooler going through the mountains around the northern edge of the lake, welcome relief from the burning afternoon sun. Wending our way along the smooth, two-lane mountain road, we often caught a view of the lake below through a break in the leafy trees.

As the afternoon sun dipped townsfolk began their processions, walking behind carrozas bearing images of the entombed Christ and various other figures. In these towns there were no flagellants, no enacted crucifixions; observance of the sacrifice of Christ was more "civilized" in this part of the country, someone remarked. We thought we saw a pair of flagellants near Paete, but they turned out to have been istambays cooling their backs with makeshift pamaypays.

We reached the town of Pililia as the procession of the Santo Entierro was underway, first the men and then the women, all clad in white and barefoot (although the sun was no longer scorching, the asphalt road must still have been pretty hot; but I guess that’s the essence of penitence and sacrifice).

This was our version of domestic tourism, our take on the President’s "holiday economics". Maybe next year we’ll head up north.