Down and Out in the Bundoks (cont.)

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Down and Out in the Bundoks (cont.)

Our jeepney, decorated with a Las Vegas slot machine/Virgin Mary motif, clashed sharply with the village dwellings, which were equal parts wood, concrete, and corrugated metal. In keeping with Philippine tradition, Anton had to find the mayor and inform him of our plans to raft the river. While he was attending to that, I checked out the arms on the older men who had gathered around the jeepney. Detailed forearm tattoos denoted "outstanding bravery," i.e. successful headhunting forays, but over the last 40 years an elaborate series of peace treaties among the area villages has all but stopped the practice. The last real headhunting heyday was in the decade following World War II, when U.S. forces had scattered the defeated Japanese occupiers into the mountains, where many resistors fell prey to this Kalinga form of tough justice.

The mayor gave us his blessing to proceed, but he sent two guys in their late teens, Ben and Oliver, to escort us. They had no idea we were coming, but they were ready to depart in approximately ten seconds. Their gear was a pair of cutoff shorts each, and their teeth were stained crimson from chewing betel nut, a stimulant taken with quicklime and rolled into the leaves of a vine. The juice they spit trailed out behind them on the rocks and mud like blood from an elk that's been hit with an arrow. Anton agreed to pay them $20 each for three days, a whopping salary by Philippine standards, and it seemed to be a healthy and productive transition toward procuring money instead of body parts. Still, I hoped to use Anton as a translator to ply them for a few of Grandpa's stories about the good old days of headhunting.



	Jeepney ride near Tinglayan.

It took a couple of hours to rig the two rafts. Seven little kids showed up, stripped off their clothes, and used the rafts as water slides, fearlessly slipping under the fast current and emerging downstream. The two Kalinga guides watched us loading the rafts with some interest, and then slapped the boats approvingly and put their helmets on. Ready to go. When we floated away from the shore everything turned calm and quiet—like when you leave a concert, with the rushing water providing the post-amplifier ear buzz.

Instantly, a great managerial power shift had occurred. Instead of being at the mercy of the Philippines' unpredictability, we were now relying on the constancy of gravity. Greg Findley captained the oar raft, with a great load mounded in the back and tied down with a cobweb of blue straps. I coveted this mound dearly, figuring it to be a crow's nest of sorts. Cindy Hanson, an amiable purple-haired graphic artist from Wisconsin, took the shotgun position in front.

The other raft was stripped bare and full of paddlers, with Greg's wife, Bridget—a diver's knife strapped to her jacket—yelling out commands like a guard on a slave-powered Viking ship. Her crew was an eclectic bunch. There was Dave Forsyth, an American soap-opera actor and former combat medic; Greg Von Doersten, a photographer; Anton and two of his Filipino employees, Jasper Inventor and Benny Tasi from Luzon, who were trying to bone up on rafting know-how; Shona Campbell, a camcorder-wielding American graduate student earning a film degree from the University of Montana; plus the Kalinga guides.

Water was everywhere; it rose on the rapids, it came from the sky in showers, it dripped from the overhanging cliffs, and it gushed from the hills in arcing waterfalls. Peaks on the ridgelines above rose up 4,000 feet from the river's floor, and clouds hung from them like bits of passing thunderheads that had ripped free. Some of the ridges were topped with pine, others were rolled over with a coat of vegetation so green and thick it looked like you could pitch a tent on them. Between squalls of rain a visible haze lifted off the jungle.

In the canyon bottom, though, it was no meandering sightseeing trip. The minute we pulled into the river we were hit by near-constant whitewater. Some of the rapids ended in sharp curves that threw the boats elbow-scrapingly close to rock walls. The rest of the rapids ended with more rapids.

Late in the evening, with rain still pouring down, we pulled into camp on a small rise between the river and a stream-fed pond. A few grazing carabao kept it mowed like a lawn, and little spurts of pungent vegetation grew out of the manure piles. Anton and Jasper fried up some dried and salted squid in bacon grease and prepared tapa, a traditional Philippine dish with carabao meat (not from those carabao) marinated in garlic and vinegar and served on rice. Over dinner we cracked jokes and had a long, convoluted conversation that began and ended with whether we'd have to portage the Dead Carabao rapids.

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