DESTINATION WHERE?

 The only thing better than travelling is re-living the experience by telling people about it afterwards

My wife and I have decided, recently, that our travelling days are behind us.  Oh, we know people of our age, and older, find that a cruise works well for them but that means that most cruise ships these days are little more than floating retirement villages and, in these days of COVID, they could well be called plague ships.

 

We’ve been fortunate to have enjoyed heady days when, with just the minimum of planning, we could catch a jet aeroplane to the other side of the world.  Digital photographs  and mementoes bring back warm recollections of our adventures and Youtube videos can remind us of the excitement of being in exotic places.  But it is our own memories which help us best re-live those remarkable experiences we enjoyed when we were younger.

 

Sadly, though I enjoy talking about my experiences in out-of-the-way places, I am not so enthusiastic about hearing of the exploits of my friends and neighbours.  The downside of my being able to enjoy all that the world has to offer is that every Tom, Dick and Hermione has probably been to all those exotic places too, and wants to talk about them, ad nauseum.  The mere mention of London can open the floodgates of anecdotes, interesting only to the teller.

 

I have made a pledge to myself that I will avoid talking about the mundane, the ordinary, the places that everyone has been.  What more can be said about New Zealand, or Bali or Paris?  Better to boast about visiting Vladivostok or Takayama or, in fact, Sagada in the Philippines.

 

One time my wife and I found ourselves in the small town of Batad in the north of Luzon, the main island of the Phillipines.  We were there to see the World Heritage site of the Rice Terraces which have been carved out of the hillsides over generations and are still in use today.  Unlike similar terraces in other Asian countries, these had not been built by slave labour but by the determined cooperation of families living hand-to-mouth in good times and bad.

 

After a couple of days marvelling at the lives of these hardy people, our hostess told us she was taking us across the mountains to the town of Sagada which is well known, in that part of the world, for its practice of burying its dead in nearby caves or hanging from clifftops.  Having walked recently through the gardens here in Australia where our parents’ ashes are interred, my wife and I were keen to see how other cultures deal with the inevitability of death.

 

Arriving in the town, we picked up a local guide who told us his name was Elvis.  He directed us north for several kilometres, then told the driver to stop at what seemed like a random spot.  There were no signs or indications that this place was any different to anywhere else along the road but Elvis led us down a faint track through the long grass, pushing through some scrubby bushes, thorns and nettles until the entrance of a cave appeared in front of us.  Again, there were no signs to tell us of the significance of this place.  It was eerily quiet as we entered the wide opening.  It was very dirty and dusty but there was evidence in the dirt underfoot that this was a place where people had often passed.

 

There was plenty of light from the entrance behind us and, in front of us, we could see rows and stacks of stone and wooden coffins, piled willy-nilly on top of each other.  There must have been hundreds of them and we could see that the haphazard pile continued back into the far reaches of the cavern.

 

Elvis told us that many, many generations of the local people were buried here. Many of the wooden coffins were breaking up with age and the weight of others stacked on top.  In several places, we could see skulls staring out as us through cracks in the wood.  Sadly, there were some bones scattered across the floor and I wondered about scavengers.   It was an horrific sight and, yet, it was curiously mundane.

 

Nobody was employed to tend this place of death.  There were no signs to warn of its existence.  It was primitive, and filthy and disorganised but, in the eyes of the people of Sagada, that was just the way it was. Of course, this is a very poor, rural community where many of its inhabitants live frugally from day to day.  There is certainly no money for lavish displays.

 

I thought again of the Lawn Cemetery back in Australia where we have buried the ashes of our parents, with its carefully-manicured grass, lovingly-tended roses and the solemn piped music coming from the chapel. Was it just a bit too unnecessary?

 

Every civilisation deals with its dead in different ways and who is to say which is better?