Warrior Pilgrimage

Featured in www.pinoyapache.blogspot.com on March 1, 2009

WHILE THE CEBU CITY GOVERNMENT and the Department of Environment and Natural Resources (DENR) were asleep, anonymous termites armed with a chainsaw fell tree after tree in a remote hinterland of the city found either in the boundaries of Sapangdaku, Babag I or Kalunasan. It was in the early afternoon of February 8, 2009 when I chanced upon four stumps of newly-cut tamarind trees, their trunks and branches scattered about along the trail that I traversed from Babag Ridge to the barangay road of Kalunasan.

I was with Boy Toledo and Ernie Salomon and we just concluded an endurance climb session with my group, the Cebu Mountaineering Society, wherein we parted ways with Daddy Frank Cabigon, Boy Olmedo and Grace Ventic and guest Joel Cariño of the USC Mountaineers who decided to cut short their session by way of the Babag Ridge Road exiting to Garaje in Upper Busay. Boy T, Ernie and me, meanwhile, proceeded to explore further the No-Santol-Tree Trail which we accidentally discovered on January 4.

On that date and on the week after that (January 11) these four tamarind trees were still there. Each of the tree were bearing fruit as they were still in their prime and were a natural landmark along the trail because of their imposing location. In just a short span of time, these lovely tamarind trees were reduced to a pitiful assortment of lifeless cut trunk and limbs while their leaves and fruits withered under the heat of the sun, perhaps, all to be buried under a shallow dirt inside a fire hole where the slow ember of a fire would reduce it to commercial charcoal.

Everywhere, whether along the trail or across another hill, I would see spots of cleared hillsides, marked by dried vegetation and dead tree stumps, young and old alike. And located nearby are the charcoal-making holes, black-marked forever on the landscape, so obvious by its presence. A curse to the green living things wrought upon them by greedy traders who capitalized on the remoteness of the area, so wide and so hidden, and on the economic situation of the inhabitants. Another thing, these termites took advantage of the neglect and laziness of people in government...READ MORE (Press CTRL + mouse click)