Wednesday, June 04, 2008 Wenceslao: Trek to Pamutan By Bong O. Wenceslao Candid Thoughts
THE last time I was in Pamutan was a couple of years ago. I was with two friends who so believed in my claim about knowing the Cebu City hinterlands that they used me as their guide. I had mapped out our itinerary: ride a habal-habal to Babag, walk on foot following the mountain ridges overlooking the city proper and exit through Buhisan.
My confidence in the eventual success of that one-day trek sprang from my faith in my recollection of the area’s terrain. I would close my eyes and I could still remember the footpaths, the bushy and grassy areas, even the position of the houses of old villages. But I did not reckon change. As we set foot in Babag, my confidence started to disappear.
Of course, the position of the mountains was the same as it was around two decades ago. What jarred me were the change in foliage and the shift in the position of the villages especially in Bocawe in Barangay Sapangdaku. After we ate lunch under a shade in a patch of land near a farm, I swallowed pride and asked a farmer for directions.
We went back, followed another footpath, descended through a bushy area and espied houses, some of them eerily deserted. After a few more hours, I gave up and decided to just look for a road that I thought was our only way of ever getting back to the city before nightfall. We ended up in what we would later find out was the Pamutan road.
Our dilemma was whether to go uphill or to go downhill. My argument that since we were headed back to the plains downhill was the way to go prevailed. We were tired and probably looked amusing with the uncertainty etched on our faces. Fortunately, we passed by a group of farmers resting in a hut. They asked us where we were going.
I thought I saw the farmers smile when we told them we were going to Buhisan. “If you continue walking that way,” one of them said in Cebuano while pointing to the road ahead of us, “you’d all end in Campo 4. You should go uphill and descend a little until you reach the area where the road intersects with another one. Then you turn right.”
I was suppressing a laugh while the farmer talked, noting how stupid we must have looked. In the end, we did the next best thing when we reached the intersection, which was to ride a habal-habal to Buhisan. Which was good because Buhisan was still far downhill. The next barangay from Pamutan was Buwacao, and it was getting dark.
We did go back to Pamutan weeks later, this time with a more reliable guide and in a multicab. The trip was easier and gave me a chance to reconcile my recollection of the place with what it is now. Through it all the old forested area, the linsa that protects the Buhisan watershed, loomed over us. We used the road to Sapangdaku for our exit.
Last Monday, continuous rain caused landslides on portions of the two roads going to Pamutan. That mountain barangay sells its agricultural produce to the city. (I think charcoal making is still a source of livelihood there.) Road blockades won’t be a life-and-death thing, of course, but these would add difficulty to an already difficult life.
In that one-day trek, I found out how the simple act of paving and concreting portions of the roads (yes, the road connecting Sapangdaku to Pamutan and the other one connecting Buhisan to Buwacao and then to Pamutan were already gravel routes in the ‘80s) has improved the lives of the farmers. Those roads saved us, strangers, from harm.
