Sunday, January 06, 2008 Sun.star Essay: A look at the past By Erma M. Cuizon Sun.Star Essay
THESE days are good tourism days. Like good hair days, you feel good about it.
And we have not only dances and songs but centuries-old memory pieces, cherished structures, communal energies reenacted.
A recent AP news about the seven wonders of the world brought us to the thought of one spot in the country we can be very proud of---the Banaue Rice Terraces. It is one sight no tourist, or even Filipino in another part of the country, could get every day.
The Hagdan-hagdang Palayan ng Banawe, 2,000-year-old rice terraces carved into the mountains of Ifugao, is about 5,000 feet above sea level in over 10,000 square kilometers of mountain space. Water for the fields comes naturally from the rainforests above the terraces, natural springs directed towards irrigation canals down the “steps” in the mountains farms.
The Banaue terraces are in the Rice Terraces of the Philippine Cordilleras where generations of farmers have grown rice nurtured and held on mountains through terrace-like hand-built farms found in Apayao, Benguet, Mountain Province and Ifugao. It’s a Unesco World Heritage Site we can all be proud of but you’d give anything to have the site be declared one of the Seven Wonders of the World, even as we’ve been calling it the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”
But is it still a wonder? It seems as though few farmers stay to maintain it. The “steps” in the terraces have eroded, lacking careful attention. But the young generations are not quite interested in continuing the tradition, they’d probably rather take the jobs in the hospitality industry caused to flourish for tourism, as guides of tourists in Banaue.
But somewhere else in the world, happily enough, people are taking care of their heritage, as seen in the new selection of wonders of the world.
They’ve revived the idea of the seven wonders of the world as inspired by the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World listed by Herodotus, and observers in his time, around 400 years before Christ.
But of the seven wonders of the old world, only the Great Pyramid of Giza in Egypt still stands, not quite as grandly. The six other wonders didn’t last, were either destroyed by earthquakes or fire, like the Statue of Zeus at the temple of Olympia which caught fire in 462 AD. A statue, like this one made of gold, ebony and ivory, and precious stones, couldn’t have lasted untouched.
But these old wonders were fantastic physical expressions of soul thoughts, complete with legends, such as about another wonder, the Lighthouse of Alexandria built around 300 BC which was said to burn enemy ships at sight of it just from where it was, preventing invaders from reaching the shores.
But what wonders have been voted on by 100 million voters cast the world over through the Internet and text messages in a poll are themselves a list of wonders.
It was Swiss-born Canadian businessman and culture enthusiast Bernard Weber who in 1999 launched the New 7 Wonders of the World project. The voting in the nonprofit poll kept on from that year, through six years, and gathered momentum to a final listing last year.
So the Seven Wonders of the World are: the Statue of Christ Redeemer in Brazil; the Machu Picchu in Peru, a pre-Columbian Inca site; the Chichen Itza pyramid of the Mayans in Mexico; the Great Wall of China; Petra, an ancient city carved out of red rock in Jordan; Rome’s Colosseum; and India’s Taj Mahal, a white marble mausoleum on the river Jumna built in 1630.
People, after all, still vote for the more meaningful wonders, with the three lesser wonders voted out among the first 10---the awesome statues on Easter Island, the Acropolis in Athens and the Eiffel Tower of France.
Oh, yes! conversation on places of wonder is a good way to start a year, in appreciation of life.
