Lamanok Revisited
On the way to Anda, stops were made at the churches of Baclayon, Valencia, and Duero. Each stop was an immersion into Boholano heritage. Midmorning, we finally arrived in Anda, at a purok house nestling at a cliff’s edge just off the highway.
It has only been a year and a half since my first visit, when the Bohol Alliance of Non-government Organizations (BANGON) and the Bohol Local Development Foundation invited LB over to feature their eco-cultural tourism project for the community of Badiang, Anda.
Coming again to the island, I found that some things were as we left them in our first visit. I also found some things changed.
With sure steps, we made our way down rough-hewn flights of stairs as we held onto bamboo railings. This was certainly less slippery a passage than when we first came. The boat ride in the midst of the mangrove forest is now replaced with a walk, sometimes in the shade and sometimes in the sun, of a few hundred meters on a bamboo walkway at the end of which fishermen in their bancas (outrigger boats) await to ferry guests to Lamanok.
Disembarking from the bancas, we gathered in a clearing where our lunch was being prepared but of which we were to partake much later. The first order of business was to explore the island and for this the group was split in two. The first group, composed of the newbies to Lamanok, was to visit the rock shelter where the hematite paintings were found. The second group was to be taken to another rock shelter that had previously been accessible only by rigorous rock climbing and to which the community had made makeshift ladders and placed weather-beaten beams. There were more skeletal remains there than I had seen before and these did not look like they came from just one person. But it also seemed impossible to complete one skeleton from what bones there were. Not far from the pile were two halves of a boat coffin that time and decay had eaten into. As with my first visit, we bewail the displacement and loss of the bulk of the archaeological finds in Lamanok.
We are told that there are other places in the island where they made their dwellings but these are far more difficult to access. At this, we could only imagine how grueling it must have been for those first Boholanos to simply be alive and survive every day.
My second visit to the hematite rock shelter found less of the paintings than there were before, or maybe it was just imagination and imperfect recollection. But we noted the distress that marked the guide’s face. Some pig-headed visitors never seem to get it into their heads not to touch the paintings, letting curiosity loose and permanently defacing our heritage.
Every which way you go on this island, from the rock shelters to the Shaman’s Trail, from the cave that is called Ka Iska to the cave that gives the island its name, you have to watch your step, not only because the trail is difficult but also because you may not be the only one abroad on this island. If you lose your way, you’ll likely end up in what local folklore says is the biggest cacao plantation of the “dili ingon nato” (the people who are not like us).
Here in Lamanok, “Tabi, Apo.” is not uttered out of habit, but out of respect. That there is a presence in the island is acknowledged. Many visitors to Lamanok, even on their first time, have sensed it. No wonder that it has been a place of ritual since before the coming of any occidental to our archipelago, from a time when our religion was characterized by what we would say today is pagan superstition, animist beliefs, and ancestor worship. But we need to understand that at the root of this our ancestors felt man’s connection to something infinitely greater than himself. Perhaps they could conceive of nothing greater than the world that was around them and the elements, but they did sense the immortal, and we can see, through their hematite paintings, how they strove to be remembered for more than just a generation, to be a part of the immortality that they could feel was around them.
Today, we remember those who came before us.