Today we are in Banahaw. Well, we did not trek Mt. Banahaw itself, but in the area nearby. Nonetheless, it was still quite the adventure.
This is the PI 100 fieldtrip (Life and Works of Rizal). It is more or less academic in nature. Officially, the aim is to meet the Rizalistas, experience their worship, and other technical words. But mostly it's just the first two.
First we visited their churches. The first church was from the Spiritual Filipino Catholic Church. It is very similar to the Roman Catholic church, where there is a center altar and two rows of benches. It was very small, around 10 steps wide with a seating capacity of maybe 50 cramped people. The architecture is that of an ark, copying from Noah.
Their apologetics are a hodgepodge of verses taken out of context. But that does not matter, because the appeal is to the natural logic and the Filipino tendency to be animistic and ritualistic.
Then we had lunch, and proceeded with the trek.
The trek was really fun. For someone like me who really likes trees and soil and water and rain (basically nature in general), in a way it feels at home. For five hours, we climbed mountains and descended steep slopes. We dipped in pools and bathed in waterfalls and squirmed in caves and slid down moss-coveree large, unhewn rocks and walked under the rain. The trails were well-defined, but they were still very difficult. Smoothened rocks were unable to wound, but are deadly slippery.
The sky was overcast, and the stars were completely out of sight. But the full golden moon still shines through brightly like a true queen of the night.
I'd like to detail this more but I'm rather sleepy now.
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