Kadaclan: A village trecking experience

COMMUNITY BILLBOARD

Dionie Chungalan

“I need not mention the time,” from a classical Japanese prose, “when the moon is visible, but it is pleasant also to watch fireflies flitting to and fro in the darkness.” Crickets in musical chorus in the night makes one sleep in Adam’s era! Environment like this is strange but amusing to a city lad.

It is in this situation when council of headmen usually gather around a flickering small oak-tree bonfire until the wee hours of the night relating stories in the days of yore; a school of living traditions to the young portrayed in the Kadaclan Menaliyam festival every third week of April annually. A modest Homestay located above a murmuring brook shelters visitors at a cheap price of 100 per person.

Actually, Kadaclan of Barlig in Mountain Province, 58 km or three hours ride southeast of Bontoc has varied faces of beauty. In rainy season, the dewy morning after a drizzle needs no comment but a cool, fresh invigorating feeling. Even the falling rain has its charms. ‘Mamayang’ their tribal customary god, protects the picturesque mountain ranges that supply their basic necessities. During summer, the night is romantic. When the full grown setting sun has sunk very close to majestic Mount Amuyao, native chickens perch on trees, more delightful is a file of duck sounding ‘quack, quack,’ for their supper.

In December, the dawn is magnificent. As the sun climbs the mossy Mount Ammangarkao, east of Natonin, light gradually increases. The rim of enveloping mountain reddens just a bit, and we see scattered purplish-red clouds trailing in the sky with far distant Isabela as a background. Toward midday, life in Kadaclan transforms into a busy farm works of denizens clearing, cultivating in traditional ways their marvelous ancestral domain rice paddies for next planting. After an arduous toil, they dip themselves into a medicinal bath in open, vibrant waterfalls of the SiffuRiver.

Sundays are the leisure days. Here, children and adults attend spiritual services, students engage in sports competitions, while visitors tour unspoiled beauty spots ending with social hour of native wines, commercial liquors blended on western ballad strum in a guitar. Sometimes if needed, the sacred gongs be beaten upon litany of time-honored genealogy and salidummay. Such is the undisturbed lifestyles of village folks devoid of modern complications.

Life, it is said, is tourism by itself. When one is proud of his grassroots, he shares it to others. And when a friend is convinced, he tells it to another friend. As the cycles goes on, tourism is deem alive in a place where no one before dare to go, yet, it should have been a “must-see” tourist destination economically helping the tribe regulated by their own local tourism code for sustainability, long time ago.