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CALYPSO MOMENTS

A similar version of the article below written by Victor Paul Borg was published in the inflight magazine of Sichuan Airlines.

As he wanders along a deserted beach, scanning the ground for flotsam or detritus, Felix Paguie becomes a wiry figure in a windy scene. He is a lonely and innocuous figure amid the light and desolation – the colours golden and blue and green, the sun blinding, the gusts of wind spiced with salted water, the waves breaking on the white sandy shore. It’s the kind of place where I feel a sense of liberation, or even mild intoxication, a place at the frontier where the Calamian Islands drift between the South China Sea and the Sulu Sea. The Filipinos call the islands the ‘Philippines last frontier.’ 

But Felix isn’t just a wanderer: his job is to give form and flow to pieces of scrap. He creates abstract art from pieces of flotsam, coaxing nature’s inspirational force into definitive shape. I watch him work on a tree trunk: he uses hammer and chisel, carving faces of frogs and monkeys and a naked woman in the crouching position. The wood then starts to take a totemic shape; it seems to speak of nature and tribe and community, or the wholesomeness of life of earth. “I mostly carve faces of animals,” Felix says as he looks up. “But the whole point is to do the carvings according to the nature of the wood: my aim is to bring out the life or mood that's already inherent and apparent in the piece of wood.”

Like Felix, I feel deeply inspired by nature in the Calamian Islands, a cluster of 163 islands that are graced with deserted beaches and rugged karst forests, and fringed by greenish water and relatively healthy coral reefs. Most islanders are fishermen who live in huts built of bamboo and roofed with palm fronds, and then set out to fish in colourful and quaint outrigger canoes. Even the main town in the islands, Coron Town, is a small somnolent town of fishermen coming and going in their boats, all of them laden with fish catches that find themselves at the town’s fresh market. Coron Town’s main street, grandly called the National Highway (it’s less than 15 metres wide), is the domain of a procession of purring tricycles, which are the local form of taxis. But its seafood restaurants are some of the best of the world; my favourites are the Filipino-style seafood grills, with tables set outdoors in courtyards, where I feast on seafood every night – mostly grilled fishes and squid, served with a succulent seagrass salad and a pungent earth-tasting tamarind soup.

One afternoon I trudge up to Tapas Hill, a high summit that towers over the town. It’s a great spot for watching sunset, and there are also young Filipinas striking back-twisting poses for pictures – the girls combine with the romantic vista to make the atmosphere more intoxicating. I felt high, and then I notice Coron Island a couple of kilometres offshore: its girdle of densely forested karst cliffs and interior of dome-shaped mountains give the island the shape reminiscent of a crown.

There’s something enchanting and bewitching about the whole island, and it’s indeed the crown of Coron’s tourism. The island is owned by the Tagbanua, a tribe of coastal people scattered in the Calamians who run the island as their ancestral domain. They live in two villages on the island, making a living from the collection of bird's nests for Guangdong’s bird’s nest soup and now also from charging tourists who visit the island.

The next day I join a boat tour of the island, visiting spectacular lakes cut into dramatic bowls of karst cliffs, lagoons of jade-coloured water, beaches of brilliant white snow, and forests that seem like magic, with a plethora of trees sprouting out of cracks in the rugged rocks. The island is now the Calamians’ main tourist magnet, but I want to head further into the unknown, to the northeastern parts of the archipelago where the dugongs live.

It’s a region that’s still undeveloped and largely off the tourist radar. I base myself in Maricaban Bay, where a small fishermen’s hamlet is set in the cusp of the bay. All day I snoop among the fishermen’s houses, or join the children frolicking on the seafront. And later, in the afternoon, I join a fisherman in his outrigger as we head up the river to trap crabs in the mangrove forests. 

Out in the bay, Dimakya Island (which is home to an upscale resort) is the best place for snorkeling thanks to a long-standing ban on fishing. The reef that fringes the isle is home to an impressive array of marine life, including resident green turtles, giant clams, reef sharks, and shoals of jackfish so thick they block the sun. It proves to be my best snorkeling ever, seeing more species in one day than I had done in 10 years of travels in Southeast Asia.

The dugongs, which I have come to see, are scattered in Maricaban Bay. “We’re seeing more dugong females with calves,” tells me Rolf Winkelahausen, a German who runs a local diving centre that has taken it upon itself to guard the dugongs in the bay. “So that gives us cautious optimism that the dugongs are slowly increasing.” 

That’s good news for the endangered dugongs, the only herbivorous sea mammal in the world, which grow as large as a cow and spend the day devouring sea grasses at a depth of 3-9 metres. Elsewhere in Southeast Asia, the numbers of dugongs are estimated to have plunged by ninety percent, mostly due to deliberate killing by fishermen (their meat tastes like pork) and accidental entanglement and eventual suffocation in fishing nets. “Local fishermen don't kill dugongs for meat,” explains Rolf. “Some fishermen villages even tell us that they have resident dugongs just off the beach.” 

We take a boat and chug past miles of gloriously desolate coastline: empty beaches, mangrove forests, slopes of so-called iron trees, and a string of isles rising out of the glistening metallic water. Some isles have small fishermen settlements, and virtually all isles have white powdery beaches fronted by azure stretches of water – for me, the surprise is that all of this exists and yet it remains undeveloped. Few tropical places in the world hold such promise, in terms of beaches and sea, and yet remain so untouched. I could only hope that when development does come, it would be sensitive, limited, and tightly controlled.

Occasionally a whoop goes up in the boat whenever someone spots the grey back of a dugong breaking the surface of the water to breathe. Then we anchor off an isle that has a few resident dugongs. The beach itself holds a scatter of fishermen's huts. Young boys are foraging for octopuses in outrigger canoes, and we buy lunch from them – we buy and octopus and lobster to complement our packed lunch.

To track dugongs you have to see where they surface to breathe – which they do every five minutes – and then swim to that spot. It takes us me an hour or two (I loose track of time) before I manage to spot a dugong directly underneath me through my goggles: it is feeding, tearing out the seagrasses in a hoovering action. Then it sees me, and rises towards me, giving me a brief pensive glance with its small opaque eyes. It goes to feed again, and I follow its progress for a few minutes until, suddenly, it flaps its tail in a strong graceful stroke and it is gone, disappearing into the distance. That’s all I need: I have fulfilled my pilgrimage and I have a welling distinct sense that my trip to the Calamians has now run its complete course. I have experienced my denouement – my dugong moment.

Article © Victor Paul Borg