by Paul Theroux
"Do you know Fernando Poe?" he asked me.
"In West Africa?" I said, thinking he'd said Fernando Poo. "Never been there."
"Fernando Poe the actor," the mayor said. "He starred in my life story a couple of years ago."
The movie Hagedorn dramatized the colorful life of this reformed gun-toting gambling lord. Poe is the Bruce Willis of Filipino cinema, though physically unlike the real Hagedorn, a small, solid man with a chattering laugh, whose head seemed much too large for his body. He talked fast in the growly voice of a chain-smoker.
"I was a bad boy," he said. "I was a mother's worst fear. I grew up with guns. I hadn't even reformed when I got married!"
He admitted to gunplay and gambling and confrontations with the military—"because they crossed my path. Some people died. I never ran away from trouble—but I changed!" He said he had never been involved in illegal logging, illegal fishing, or the slaughter of sea cows, but he knew a great deal about these activities. Anyway, he'd had a conversion (the high point of the biopic), and the story was that he used his criminally acquired fortune as the controller of an island-wide lotto game called Jueding to finance his mayoral campaign. He was the classic example of a poacher who had become a gamekeeper. He was as voluble in describing his love of guns as he was in telling me of his new career as a greenie.
"When I took over as mayor, there was no law or order," he told me. "Palawan was a microcosm of the Philippines—economic grief and environmental grief. Illegal logging, gambling, fishing, squatting." Sea cows were being killed for their oil and their meat, the forests were being chain-sawed into oblivion, and the fish were vanishing from coastal waters. Villages of migrants were appearing all over Palawan.
In his telling, it was Mayor Hagedorn who single-handedly turned this situation around. With his violent past in mind he said, "I was not afraid to tackle it. Take the illegal fishermen. We had two thousand apprehensions in the first year alone." Others had a different story to tell, and said that Hagedorn was reaping the credit for many people's efforts, including the charismatic Governor Socrates (who had also just been reelected); but the fact is that a place that was going to eco-hell had begun to improve.
You hear the words "illegal fishing" and you think of nets with small interstices, or the snatching of protected species, or the encroachment on preserves. You don't think of cyanide or dynamite or shiploads of abused boys living in an atmosphere of semi-slavery, hundreds of them, spending every waking hour in the water, smashing the Palawan coral reefs with scrap metal attached to rubber tubes and heavy poles to drive fish into nets. This fish-collection technique is called muro-ami, a Japanese word. Yasmin Arquiza's magazine reported cases of muro-ami fishing where the divers (ranging in age from twelve to seventeen) escaped, not because of the brutal method of fishing but because they were physically assaulted by the captain of the vessel.
Then there is the poison. Diners-out in Hong Kong enjoy choosing their main course by pointing to a fat fish gliding around a restaurant aquarium. Until a recent ban on the export of live fish, most of these creatures came from the Philippines. But catching fish alive requires a dubious technique. Fishermen squirt a cyanide compound on the coral reef. The dazed fish float to the surface and are scooped up, revived, and shipped out in barrels, still gasping. Meanwhile, the cyanide soaks into the reef and kills it.
Another fishing method is the use of air freshener and deodorizing blocks that go under the name "urinal candy." This toxic stuff is dumped into creeks all over the Philippines to knock fish unconscious. Then the immobilized fish are gathered.
Dynamite has also been popular in driving fish to the surface. I saw the crime scene. For a chance to paddle my boat and go camping while I was in Puerto Princesa, I took a rickshaw piled high with my equipment about ten miles north to Lourdes Pier, the boat dock at Honda Bay, and there I found a boatman who took me to Pandan Island, where there is a tiny village. I stayed for a few days in my tent, set up my boat, and went snorkeling there and off several other bay islands. Every reef showed signs of serious wreckage: massive collapsed coral walls, the litter of broken antlers and blasted-open brain coral. A broken reef has the look of a boneyard. Some chunks had been smashed by dynamite, and other coral shelves had been killed with poison.
The Baywatch program had been set up by Mayor Hagedorn for monitoring illegal fishing. One of the sentry posts was on Honda Bay's Snake Island, but with so many miles of unpoliced coast, it was impossible to eliminate the use of dynamite or sticks or poison entirely.
"Palawan is underdeveloped—ironically, that's why it's so nice," Yasmin Arquiza told me. One of her fears was that Palawan would, as she put it, "become a playground for the rich." Part of it already has, with the Amanpulo Resort—one of those trophy hotels that is half obscenity, half joke—on Pamalican Island, one of the northern outlying islands. The $750 a night (for the "Hillside Casitas") is more than most Filipinos earn in a year, and the clientele are the usual assortment of timid millionaires. An oversized and unpromising resort is being built on the Honda Bay island of Arrecife. I went there in an outrigger pumpboat, bluffed my way past security by calling myself "Dr. Theroux," and made notes on the ridiculous overdevelopment. Tourism is not the answer to Palawan's problems, yet it has an upside: it was partly to attract tourism that Palawan politicians became environmental-minded. Their efforts have resulted in various well-deserved awards from the United Nations, which Mayor Hagedorn fondly listed for me.
The mayor also took credit for the logging ban, and so did Cory Aquino, the former president. It is almost unimaginable that a country with old-growth forests, a small manufacturing base, and limited resources would agree to stop logging for the sake of the environment. This is something that far more prosperous—and forested—countries (the United States, Canada, Brazil, Congo) would not even consider. China is just now eliminating its last forests in the northeast province of Heilungjiang. To people who say, "But they are planting trees too," my reply is: Yes, and creating a monoculture!
Actually, it was a farsighted senator named Orlando Mercado who inserted the logging-ban clause for Palawan in the Philippines' Strategic Economic Plan that was passed in 1992. Three major timber concessions were given a year to wrap up their business. The largest one was not far from Acong's village, at the town of San Vicente, north of Port Barton. The silted-up estuaries remain, but the essential habitat has been preserved, and it is possible to see monkeys, pigs, bearcats, pheasants and many birds—the red-headed tree babbler, the white-throated bulbul, the shama, the flycatchers—among the tall trees.
My route from Puerto Princesa had taken me through passes of Palawan's mountain range—it runs for 270 miles along the spine of the island—to the little harbor of Sabang. This is not only the most direct way from one side of the island to the other, but because boats are available at Sabang, it is the best route to Port Barton, or almost anywhere on the western coast. The roads on Palawan range from bumpy to execrable, but boatmen at most of the coastal settlements make regular trips from one small harbor to another. I chose the western coast over the touristy northern port of El Nido or the pirate-ridden southern islands.
Sabang is well known as the point of departure for the nearby cave system called the Underground River. Some people visit Palawan specifically to travel a mile or so into the five-mile-deep cavern in a paddle-boat. I was not allowed to use my kayak, so I went in one of the outriggers. Pitch black, damp, and dripping, it is inhabited by tens of thousands of tiny bats, and you travel in the gurgling boat by the glow of a twenty-watt flashlight, among orangey stalagmites in a stink of bat shit through the echoey chambers. These caves lie beneath one of Palawan's most beautiful mountains, St. Paul's Mount; this strangely rounded mass, like a fertility goddess tipped onto her back, is visible eighty miles away, on the other side of the island. Some of the ceilings in the cave system are hundreds of feet high, and others scrape your head as you squeeze past.
An elderly Australian sat just behind me in
the boat. He was wife-hunting in the Philippines. He had found a likely prospect in Mindanao, twenty-something, a nurse, eager to get married.
"She's not really a Filipina," he said in the darkness, as though reassuring himself. "She's more a sort of Spanish, and a little Chinese. See, she's almost white."
After one night in Sabang, and another night a few miles away at a friendly place called Panaguman, I took an outrigger about thirty miles up the coast to Port Barton. The settlement at Port Barton is small, but there are half a dozen inexpensive places to stay and a few grocery stores for provisions. Pagdanan Bay is large enough to contain twenty islands and islets, and to the northwest, one of them—Boayan—is huge, with a number of empty beaches to camp on. Many of the islands are deserted, some are privately owned ("No Trespassing"), and others have been settled by migrants from other parts of the Philippines.
One of the advantages of camping during the hot season in Palawan—it was April and had not rained since December—was that mosquitoes were almost nonexistent, except up the rivers. But the heat was terrific—in the high nineties most days, in the high eighties at night. I estimated that I needed four or more liters of water on paddling days, and as no fresh water was available on the empty islands, I had to go ashore or return to Port Barton every few days for water.
In the yellow-pink of the tropical dawn, the still air was thick with gnats and the mirror of the sea showed a flawless reflection of the deep green mainland, the high outer islands, and the rocky islets that had no names. There was hardly any wind until midmorning, and I paddled on a sea so smooth with air so silent that the only sound was the chuckle of the bow wave and the rattle of passing kingfishers. During my first week the winds were predictable: freshening through the morning and blowing hard in the afternoon, usually offshore. By midafternoon I was supine in the shade of a palm grove, reading in Eminent Victorians about the death of General Gordon and studying the chart for tomorrow's destination.
The shock of my second week of paddling was the sight of ink-black clouds looming in the northwest, the first of the monsoon—this was early May. There was a spatter of windblown rain and a very stiff wind from unexpected directions. One day it veered from west to east; another day I was caught in it and had to surf my kayak through three-and four-foot waves to the nearest island. When I didn't see any fishermen, I took it as a sign to stay ashore.
The sun was the strongest I have ever known over a sea, invariably burning down from a clear sky, dazzling on the water, and shriveling every leaf in sight. Like a weight on my head and shoulders, it made me calculate my island crossings in liters per mile. Anyone who is not careful in such circumstances risks dehydration.
The reward for thrashing my kayak through the water on these hot, clear days was the sight of a green sea turtle craning its neck or the flight of a dozen flying fish strafing my bow. Now and then I would see the swift shadow of a ray flashing in the sea, startling the fish.
One day I paddled about ten miles southwest to a headland and caught sight of an island that had been hidden from where I had been camping. I paddled out three or four miles to this hump of rock and found a sandy beach and some huts. A Germanic-looking man in a green bathing suit stood on the beach to welcome me. He said "Hi" and grabbed my bow line and helped pull my boat to shore.
"Nice kayak," he said. It was salt-smeared and wet from the long haul from the headland. "Isn't that the kind of boat Paul Theroux paddled in his travels around the Pacific?"
Being cautious, I said, "You read that book?"
"Oh, yeah. Great book."
This happens more often in a remote place like Palawan than in places closer to home. "I wrote it."
"Cut the shit."
Soon we were sitting under a palm tree swapping travelers' tales. He was Charlie Kregle, who had left a good job in Chicago three years before to ramble around the world. During those three years, such was the state of the stock market that even when he was traveling third class on an Indonesian ferry or an overcrowded jeepney in Mindanao, he had been earning steadily.
Like the stories of many independent travelers I had met, his were more colorful and complex than most tales I had read. He had traveled in Brazil and Southeast Asia. He had crossed Africa, walking a large part of the way. His life had been on the line many times, and he had experienced the worst of travel, which is not danger but delay, weeks of it, the sort of extreme inconvenience the solo traveler endures in far-off lands. I liked his judgments about places, epitomized by his summary of Equatorial Guinea: "Great place. Anarchic, though. Not ready for prime time." He traveled on a shoestring, and from time to time, when he was in a place that sold newspapers, he checked the stock pages and saw that he was worth much more than the last time he had looked.
He laughed when I told him I knew nothing about the stock market and had no investments.
"What about your 401(k)s?"
"Nothing."
"Why?" he said. "Are you planning to die soon?"
This stockbroker sarcasm seemed odd coming from a young man in a bathing suit who was living in a hut on a small island off Palawan, whose entire earthly goods fitted into a modest-sized rucksack.
A little while later, I asked him to tell me the most amazing thing that had happened to him in the Philippines, and he looked at me and my boat and said, "This!"
Around midafternoon I paddled back to my camp, but an offshore wind had sprung up and the journey took me almost four hours. The next morning, I saw a woman holding a yellow umbrella seated in a canoe being paddled by three men. The canoe glided onto what I thought of as my beach. The woman got out, her umbrella upright, and she walked in a stately way along the sand. That was how I discovered that I shared this island with a small village.
Later that day, looking for a new island, I ran across Acong. He was fishing on the reef, and with his shirt wrapped and folded neatly around his head against the sun, he looked like an Egyptian sitting cross-legged in his canoe. He had learned English at school but had dropped out "in elementary." His boat was too small for taking people out to the islands. He used it for fishing and for transporting the rattan and coconuts he collected to barter with.
"Those people are from Visaya," Acong said of the village at the far end of the little island on which I had been camped.
He said it with a trace of bitterness, because it was unregulated immigration. Many people in Palawan told me that such squatting was the cause of land disputes. Yasmin Arquiza had said, "Tribal people here had no homestead patents." To protect them, the Philippine government instituted a "Certificate of Ancestral Domain Claim." This was not a land title, but it gave them priority when the government handed out concessions for rattan and almasiga, a resin (sometimes called copal) used in varnish. The indigenous people had rights to the concession and could profit from it.
I told Acong that I was looking for a new campsite on an empty island. He suggested one that had a hidden cove, a sandy beach, and a coral reef that had not been dynamited or poisoned. Acong's outrigger was small enough to negotiate shallow water, silted-up rivers, and remote parts of the great bay where coral heads jutted out of the water. I followed him to these places in my kayak. The largest river that emptied into the bay is the Darapiton. We traveled it up to a narrow tributary, the Togdunan. The rivers were muddy, narrow, humid, buggy, and the deeper we went, the more shadowy they became, overhung with a tunnel of boughs. The inconvenience of such branches is minor, but coiled on many of them were snakes—the thick, yellow and black five-footers Acong called binturan. Strung across other branches were spider webs with hairy, deep green, claw-shaped spiders clinging at the edges, at the level of my face.
"The snakes will not trouble you if you do not trouble them," Acong said.
After a few miles on the tributary we came to an obstruction, a tree lying across the river. Acong was surprised and worried: it was not the custom of the people here to block the rivers. It was widely known that the Tag Banua and the Palawan and Batak peoples ha
d no traditional concept of land ownership. So this barrier was a grotesque novelty that had been brought about by all the encroachment and the new settlers.
"We could slide our boats over the log," I said. But I was just needling him, to see what he would say.
"No. We stop here."
Even though these people were of his own language group, he felt it was a bad idea to go farther. Our intrusive presence might be misunderstood.
The Tag Banua were not territorial in any modern sense. Like many indigenous peoples, they did not buy or sell land, because they could not separate themselves from the land: it would be perverse to sell it, something like an amputation.
On the way back, he told me about the loggers, and how Japanese ships had been moored for years just offshore to pick up the big apitong logs, and how the logging coincided with the mudslides, and how the rivers and river mouths were not deep anymore.
The word banua interested me, because it seemed so similar to the Fijian word vanua, or land (as in Vanua Levu, the name of the second-largest Fiji island). Acong said that banua, too, meant "land," and Tag Banua meant "People of the Land." I had made it a habit to compile word lists whenever I was in a remote place in Oceania, to assess the linguistic relationships among islanders who had dispersed the Austronesian languages over thousands of nautical miles and thousands of years. There are fifty basic words that are useful to compare. Alfred Russel Wallace lists many of them in an appendix to The Malay Archipelago. I asked Acong the words for various numbers and for "big," "small," "dog," "fish," "eye," "canoe," "house," "day," "sun," "moon," "water," and so forth; and I discovered that many Tag Banua words were cognate with ones from the Celebes, and others were taken straight from Malay—ikan for fish, lima for five, and mata for eye (as in Mata Hari, "Eye of the Day"). Mata in Hawaiian is maka. Captain Cook, also a compiler of Polynesian word lists, was the first to observe that Oceania is linguistically one world.