John Biton
Siquijor conjures images of the undulant. Straddling the seas off the south of Cebu, cauldron-shaped, it shimmers. People once called it the island of fire.
Yet, there, no fire seems to feed some witch's brew like what the collective imagination supposes. One sees the waves. It's the first thing you notice, the waves. Not those crest and topple over. The waves are rather soft humps, like dunes, phosphorescent in the blue-black of early dawn. The boats sneak into the harbor early, as is their habit in pursuit of shores. The sea is cold, oblivious to the pitch and roll of fate riding its surface. One wonders what seething demon boils far down below, roiling it so. It is the wind that does that, the captain says. The wind that shivers the skin.
Over the boat's bow, the island's silhouette is black against the faintly yellowed sky. Nothing glows where one expects fire-lighted covens on the hillsides. The only lighted place is the pier, and the nearby streets of storekeepers. The town of Larena hides beyond the hill that guards the waterfront.
Dawns are beautifully harsh, but it is in daylight that Siquijor truly speaks its enchantment. From the shores of Larena and the capital town Siquijor, the contours of Cebu and the mountains over Dumaguete are blue humps on the horizon to the northwest. Fire trees - red, orage and yellow-blossomed the whole-year round -- once dotted the island the Spaniards called Isla del Fuego. Now the few that remain have become heirlooms looming over town plazas and some of the streets.
Twenty minutes from Larena, the island's port of entry, the town of Siquijor lie drowsy in the noonday sun. There, everyone bids his own time, even the elderly postman riding the briny seabreeze on his big-wheeled bicycle. A good hundred paces or so from the old capitol's backyard is the sea, blue and green-waved, with silvery slivers sun-sprinkled. There, later in the night, poets Eyon Auman, Januar Yap and Ben Salgado, along with Eyon's son, raised tipsy, albeit noble thoughts in a toast to moonbeams and the merits of a well-done sisig. Our tour, boarding a navy gunboat towards Siquijor and back, was conducted largely by the Philippine Information Agency. An information caravan it was called, participated in by the Department of Foreign Affairs, the Civil Service Commission, some more of one or another government agency, the NGO's and the men from Viscom. It was also a medical mission, bringing nutritional products and medicine to the island.
Not much has been known to this traveler on the history of the island province. Most of its past chanced upon photographs in a forgotten room on his way to the toilet at the back porch of the old capitol building of Siquijor. The pictures were tucked inside a carefully placed photo album where dust settled, gnawing its sides. A party celebration for balikbayans in the 70's huddled over a page. Children of all sorts, including starry-eyed adults, posed beside the anointed villager, the lucky one who came from a far-off fabled land. Who came back bringing stuffed boxes and the scent of that land inside it, sticking in clothes, in those Mickey Mouse plastic toys. A handshaking politician, visiting the island for his votes, strode out the next page. His grin was strewn all over the marketplace. Still, other pictures talk of a humble town, whose people prefer to shy away from cameras and the public eye given the handful of photographs on that single, forgotten picture book.
We were, presumably, medicine men in a land of famed medicine men. It's been heard tell, an oft told tale, that a faith healer once cured Imelda Marcos of a cruel illness. Stories of her illness vary. One variant being that she grew scales when builders of the San Juanico Bridge, her pet, caught a mermaid in the course of the construction. Then there was Juan Ponse from the slopes of San Antonio in Siquijor, the famed healer-cum-voodoo practitioner who landed it big in a spot on Noli de Castro's Magandang Gabi Bayan (TV show). And there were more others. Including the lowly manang selling fried bananas who breeds poison in her undernails, pinching her food before selling them out to the unsuspecting. Enough for travelers to tread the sunny streets as if in darkness, or worse, to get home with a bloated stomach. We opted for the bloated stomach. Feeding in the freshest of Siquijor's seafoods from fish to squid and the juicy clumps of its giant lato (seaweed). Down Larena's sidewalk boulangerie, wolfed on pan elorde (bread) with frozen Mountain Dew. Scorpion stings and green-brownish powders were the farthest thing in our minds. In the filled streets of Larena, we were never safer in the easy grin of the townfolks.
Siquijodnons live on their corn and coconut produce. These are backyard crops to them but are not enough to sustain an export industry. Yet Siquijor seems as self-contained and as modern as any suburbia. Cable TV and Internet have been starting to capture an audience. Those who don't have these can always ride a fastcraft to the movies in Dumaguete a good two hours away. Most of the island's income comes from taxpayers overseas as almost every household has the fortune of having a family member abroad.
On a ride around the island, one can't help but notice the excellent roads in the largely Mactanisque landscape. And the passengers, the passengers who are too courteous to ask you to hand over their fare to the driver up front. Instead, they get off the jeepney and walk over to the driver, dropping him a good two pesos and fifty centavos, sparing him the trouble to dig for a change. Such is the sensitivity of these shy and gently people you would think witches would right away itch for some other place to swat her broom around.
There are a lot more stories to tell, a lot more days and nights to unravel. And not much time. There's the 100-year old church and convent in the town of Lazi. The man-made, greenish lake in Maria, and the white sand beaches of Enrique Villanueva town. The caves of San Antonio that go deeper and longer than any other. Not one ever reached where it ends, if it ever does.
Like good stories, good places, as well as caves, must end. They never will, rest assured. When you go there, you will see truth, and probably some untruths, to what this traveler here babbled. That's the good thing about traveling. You hear places and you talk places but you can never do places like how the other fellow does it, 'eh? But what is certain is the fire of Siquijor. The fire that greeted us and warmed our dawn wind-soaked skin into its hearth the day we got there.
Published on Apr. 6, 1998