Down and Out in the Bundoks

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Outside Magazine's 2002 Travel Guide

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Down and Out in the Bundoks
Past and Future Collide on the Class V Rapids of the Philippines' Chico River

By Steven Rinella


	At play in the spray: Greg Findley at the helm on the Chico River.

Until I went to the Philippines, I had been living with the delusional belief that whitewater rafting was a simple process that involved taking an inflatable boat down a river with an irregular streambed profile. Well, after a few days on Luzon, the largest of the nation's 7,100-odd islands, I was beginning to realize that rafting in that country has as much to do with navigating Class V roads as it does with running rivers. We began in the capital, Manila, where the traffic is as crowded and tight as a raging dance party moving between the book stacks in a library. As we traveled north, the roads were still clogged—with aggressive street vendors, military checkpoints, washed-out switchbacks, and mudslides.



	Kalinga kids at the Tinglayan put-in.

Then, as we finally closed in on the upper reaches of the Chico River, about 390 road miles north of Manila, a new roadway nemesis took the form of chickens and pigs crisscrossing in front of our vehicle, a truck/bus hybrid called a jeepney. These were no ordinary fowl and swine, either. Should a driver hit one of these chickens, he'd not only pay for that bird, but also the next three generations of lost chicken offspring. The animals were owned by the Kalinga, a highland tribe of former headhunters who have cultivated over the last several hundred years a general impression amongst neighboring tribes that it's a bad idea to travel along the Chico. The week before we passed through, a driver hit and injured a child. I heard the settlement process broke down when the child's father hacked the driver to death in the street with a machete.

The Archipelago Adventure Guide

Where to raft, sea kayak, rock climb, bike, swim, scuba dive, surf, camp, beachcomb, trek, and just kick back. (With all these sports, you'll need more shoes than Imelda).

The person in charge of seeing us through this drive and all other logistical obstacles was Anton Carag, a tall, laid-back Filipino from nearby Tuguegarao, a town along the lower Cagayan River. A politician's son and former rancher, Anton became a whitewater enthusiast in a nation that did not have a preformed kayaking clique. But with the Philippine economy in shambles and extractive industries and damming on the rise, Anton felt that the best way to create viable jobs and promote conservation in the region was to establish an environmentally friendly adventure-travel company. So he and some partners from Manila founded Adventures and Expeditions Philippines. Via mutual acquaintances, they hooked up with Mukuni, a wilderness-whitewater company based in the States and owned by Greg and Bridget Findley, from Bozeman, Montana, who wanted to come over with a few clients to check out the potential rafting scene and train local guides.

The initial Mukuni plan was to do an exploratory trip on the Class IV upper Cagayan, the Philippines' longest river, which drains the Sierra Madre in north Luzon. But then, as our group of five American clients and several Filipino guides-in-training assembled in Manila, word came that Marxist guerrillas had raided a police station for weapons. They were holed up in Nueva Ecija, along the only road leading to the river's upper stretches. A plan that had brewed in the minds of Anton and the Findleys for two years was gone in seconds.

"There's been a slight change of plans," announced Greg. Anton, totally familiar with this kind of thing, just smiled and shook his head. Then he and Greg quickly began deciding what exactly the new plan would be. Fortunately, Luzon is full of wild, raging rivers barely touched by travelers. After a couple of days of logistical shuffling they had it pegged. We would travel to the jungled Cordillera Central and then raft the upper Chico River, including Dead Carabao, a Class V rapid named after a bloated water buffalo some American kayakers had found spinning in a back eddy a few weeks earlier. But before we could deal with Dead Carabao we had to get through the live hogs on the road.

With no livestock casualties to speak of, we closed in on the village of Tinglayan, which sits in the mountains on the west side of the Chico where a steep canyon wall tapers off at the narrow floodplain. Here and there, centuries-old rice terraces cantilevered out of the surrounding hillsides in descending steps. Thick stands of coconut palms and banana plants on both sides of the river jutted far above the impenetrable jungle of tangled vines. Below us, the river flowed and frothed. Roughly a hundred miles to the north, after merging into the lower Cagayan, it dumped into the Babuyan Channel between the South China and Philippine Seas.

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