COMPLEAT BUSHCRAFT XX: The Ideal Camp

FINDING A GOOD CAMPSITE for the 2015 edition of the Philippine Independence Bushcraft Camp is a priority for me. I remembered in 2012 where I have done it solo in the Babag Mountain Range of Cebu City just a few weeks before that year’s very impressive PIBC. It always brings out the best in me. It takes skill to identify a good campsite, especially for bushcraft use.

A bushcraft camp is so different from a camp used mostly by mainstream outdoor activities. A bushcraft camp does not grow on bald peaks nor on exposed places and does not need a sea of clouds. It stays below treeline where it blends with vegetation and does not desire to be so colorful. An ideal bushcraft camp have to have access to a stream and bamboos. A clean water source is only a bonus since bushcraft could use any water it obtains.

The PIBC is transferring to the hilly areas of the Municipality of Lilo-an, Cebu and I had considered three different sites there. All three places had been visited by me and it has the features and criteria to host a bushcraft camp. However, the PIBC is a big event and this year’s PIBC, I believe, would be participated by many people, not to mention the different PIBC alumni who would volunteer their time to support their new brethren.

It is because of this that I am a bit challenged. These three different places are not that big in terms of camp size, good enough to accommodate more than 30 individual shelters, and the sustainability of a water source to supply drinking water to a good number of people that would swell to around 40. That is a lot and water is very vital as well as security. I need to look and find that camp.

Today, April 11, 2015, I am going to Lilo-an. Coming along is Jhurds Neo, the President of Camp Red Bushcraft and Survival Guild. Automatically, he will sit in the PIBC as the Camp Ramrod – that is the camp administrator in layman’s term. We meet at Mandaue City at 14:00 and commuted in a public utility midget AKA the Multicab. Oh God, I hate that vehicle and I still patronize it. Oh dear!

Anyway, we arrive at 15:15 in Lilo-an and proceed on the business of procuring the food ingredients for our meals at the public market. Both me and Jhurds intend to stay overnight so we will cook and eat dinner tonight and breakfast for tomorrow. Once we have the items, we hired two motorcycles to bring us to the trailhead. I intend to start at the hanging bridge at the village of Mulao but my driver dropped me at the wrong place. Jhurds followed suit.

Upon inquiry with a local, we are a long ways off. We are at Cabadiangan and we will have to walk to a spillway from whence Mulao will start. If we walk fast, it would take us 90 minutes to reach the village hall of Mulao. We start on the road which begins to ascend once we got past the spillway. The road going to Mulao is adorned with garbage bins colored brightly and ornamental plants lining the sides.

We reach the village hall and register our names. We also get to pay a visitor’s fee of ten pesos each since the village had identified certain features of their place as tourist spots. The Cotcot River runs along the village and this same river is the boundary between Lilo-an and another town, Compostela. The river has huge granite rocks and water-polished boulders choking the river and two of these have names – Malingin and Arko’ng Bato.

We go down a path to Cotcot River and reach our old camping site where a lone acacia tree grow. I know there is no water source here but I heard that there is one near Arko’ng Bato and we will have to find it in the failing light. We reach the big boulder on a difficult route and it is already 18:00. It is almost darkness and shadows have claimed the banks where there are vegetation – the likely places where a natural spring would occur.

We are on a wide shelf of granite and we decide to set up camp there. We have water for cooking and drinking and we will use the stream for washing. Immediately, I forage dry driftwood which are plenty on the other side of the bank and that means I have to jump and balance over menacing rocks which would have been slippery and dangerous should it were wet. Warm days made it more acceptable to rubber though.

Once I got firewood, I return to the shelf and break the smaller ones by hand, the bigger ones with my AJF Gahum knife. Jhurds collect four stones of equal size and begins making a fire. I pull out my consortium of black pots and begins to slice 250 grams pork meat, peeled three potatoes, cut 20 green pepper, crush garlic and chop an onion with my Mora Companion knife. I enjoyed coffee first before I start to cook the pork adobao and boiled the potatoes. Jhurds, meanwhile, prepared the cooking of rice.

On an iron grille supported by the four stones, three pots are simultaneously placed over a fire, each having its contents cooked. We eat dinner at 20:00 under the clear starry sky with the frolic of the stream water supplying us music of nature. It is dark but we have small LED lights and a LuminAid solar-powered emergency inflatable lantern to light the place. The granite below us is still warm and this would help in our sleep later.

After that good meal, Jhurds wash the pots downstream. I stand guard with a light on him. It is so silent save for the swirling sounds of the river, the hum of crickets and the calls of geckos. Once in a while, a commercial plane would buzz overhead and pierce the harmony of the night with its engine. I see the familiar geometry in the sky that tell tales of mythical creatures and superhumans.

We enjoy the ambiance of the place so much that we spent the evening hours in conversations until it surprised us that it is already 23:00. We sleep on our respective hammocks which we use instead as ground sheet and bedding. The shelf is so wide that it removes away your fear of falling on the river while asleep. The smooth rock is warm which would be very helpful when the temperature would dip low during early dawn.

I wake up from time to time to check on our positions in relation to the river’s edge. We did not slide contrary to my fears. A last quarter moon crosses overhead and paints a silvery light on the riverscape. My brain react to the light with dread as if it is daylight. Everything is silent except the usual natural sounds. My fingertips are feeling the bite of the cold and I place hands on the part of my body where it is most warm.

I wake up when the first rays of light touched the highest mountains. I take a leak on the other bank and came back with an armful of firewood. My search for the natural spring is certainly not here and could be upstream. I do not know but it is best if I prepare our breakfast. I break two eggs and stir it briskly on a skillet after I sprinkled salt. I slice three eggplants into thin strips and drop all to the stirred eggs. I also peeled and sliced three potatoes.

Jhurds start the fire where the separate pots for the potatoes and rice are cooked. I place the skillet over the fire and begin frying the eggplant chips with oil. We eat our breakfast at 07:00 and then we start washing our pots. We notice a lot of dead river mudskippers and fresh-water shrimps. The shrimps turned red and I begin to suspect chemicals although I see traces of a poison plant pounded on a rock. I am confused since poison plants do not turn shrimps into red ones, a condition caused only by exposure to heat or strong medicine.

Cotcot River is sick and so polluted with chemicals and I see to it that my pots are thoroughly washed with strong detergents once I got home. The Municipality of Liloan should know about this so preventive measures would not kill the river in the future. I believe people fish for subsistence and wash their clothes here and exposure to chemicals would surely cause health problems for them.

We leave Arko’ng Bato at 08:30 going on a quest to find that natural spring. We meet a local fisherman carrying a sack. We inform him of the dead fishes and shrimps in the river and he showed me a good-sized catfish and a foot-long fresh-water eel. He found these already dead and would have brought these home as food when he noticed our great concern. He left the catfish and eel on a rock and I gave him our uncooked rice, eggplant and egg. Then we found the natural spring that we had been looking since yesterday.

It is surrounded by a spiny bamboo grove (Local name: kagingkingon), a Malabar almond tree (magtalisay) and an elephant apple tree (katmon). The spring gushed forth from the ground where a bamboo trough is placed. Nearby are several natural springs which were not used and the runoff caused a small marshy area. Across the spring is a river pond where bathing is possible and downstream small waterfalls and jacuzzi-like channels.

Satisfied with our find, I taste the water and I notice it has its own distinct taste. Could be from granite. Anyway, a good water source gives the possibility of hosting more people for the PIBC, which I feared would come. We walk on upstream and begin the next phase of finding a good campsite which could accommodate many light shelters, tents or hammocks. We found a good spot where there are several mango trees and a few groves of spiny bamboos in the vicinity.

The spot looks familiar. This is the same place where Aljew Frasco had taught Notching on the rest of Camp Red last March 9, 2014 (CB 11: A Notching class by the Riverside). Then the old hanging bridge linking Mulao of Liloan to the Mulao of Compostela would not be far. The same bridge that we were supposed to get dropped yesterday were it not for my driver’s judgment error. I am bestowed with good fortune today and I am happy that my expectations had turned out right the way it should be.

I know the route now to the hanging bridge but we take a shortcut instead to farms and over a low hill to get there instead of following the river. We reach the bridge at 10:20 and both of us deserve rest and a bottle of cold soda drinks each. After that, we begin another uphill walk on a road which has no trees to shade us. It is concrete and it took us over an hour of walking to reach a road corner where another road goes down to the same road where walked yesterday.

Then the “cavalry” arrived in the form of a red Toyota 2003 pickup driven by Christopher Maru and we were “rescued”. Christopher is Camp Red and had participated the PIBC in 2013 together with Aljew. We reach the town center of Lilo-an before noon and take lunch at open eateries near the municipal hall. Then I make it sure that we will not commute by riding in a public utility midget AKA the Multicab. Our mission is accomplished.

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DO YOU KNOW ANDRES BONIFACIO?

PHILIPPINE HISTORY BOOKS gave a hazy account of the circumstances leading to the death of Andres Bonifacio. He died not from the wounds by the very people he was fighting against but by his own people. History is written by those who benefit from the system fostered by economics, politics or by conflict or by a combination of all. But, do you really know who Andres Bonifacio was before his death?

Bonifacio came from a poor family and, like most Filipinos of that time, has no formal education. The Spanish colonizers deemed it right not to educate the natives for their own good so as to ensure their control of the economy by keeping the most desirable lands for themselves and to assure their places and privileges in society. Bonifacio learned to read and write in his own home, safe enough to be spied upon by anybody.

His industry and good common sense brought him to decent positions in an international trading house where no pure-blood Filipino had been. He taught himself bookkeeping which appeased his masters and learned foreign languages, aside from Chinese and Spanish, which gave him a rare privilege to hobnob foreign traders, businessmen, guests and dignitaries. He could understand and converse a little French and, probably too, of a little English.

He was known to keep many books, to include French and English titles, and from among these, he may have read of the French Revolution, the taking of the Bastille, of George Washington and the American Revolution. For low-caste Filipinos, access to books are hard to come by and, if ever they are fortunate enough to possess one, it would be indecipherable by virtue of their illiteracy. Possession of books not approved by authorities at that time subject one to severe punishment, public humiliation, dispossession or death.

Bonifacio was just an ordinary man yet he has leadership skills excellent enough to lead men of even greater standing than he, organize an effective resistance against the oppressors through many successes in armed engagements and gained a lot of adherents for the Katipunan because of his willingness to lead his men on the frontlines. He was a man of action and emphasized that by tearing down his personal document which gave him access to travel to his place of work and to exercise his occupation.

His renown and accomplishments have parallel similarity to that of Scotland's greatest hero – William Wallace. They both were of the common class, fought with a blade and went down in history succumbing to the intrigues, ambitions and betrayals perpetrated by the upper class of the very people that each championed. Bonifacio, together with his brothers, were murdered and his wife raped and history was written by those who benefited from this dark chapter.

On November 28, 29 and 30, 2015, the Warrior Pilgrimage Blog and the Camp Red Bushcraft and Survival Guild honors his memory as a true hero of the people by holding the first-ever BONIFACIO DAY SPECIAL BUSHCRAFT CAMP. It would be held at Camp Damazo, somewhere among the hidden jungles of the Babag Mountain Range, Cebu City. It is a three-day wilderness skills training akin to the Philippine Independence Bushcraft Camp.

This writer convenes this special bushcraft camp for the benefit of those that failed to participate the recent PIBC MMXV and that the long weekend which culminate to the commemoration of Bonifacio Day may well be a good excuse. For the first time, seven minors would be participating. It is a great privilege to impart real-world skills to young people considering that most of them are wired to the electric outlet resulting to that phenomenon called nature-deficit disorder. They would join twelve others.

First day would start with a long Discovery Hike from the assembly area in Guadalupe to Camp Damazo passing by grasslands, forests and jungle streams. Upon setting up of camp, lectures will immediately start. Introduction to Bushcraft, Ethical Bushcraft and Knife Care and Safety would take much of the day until dusk falls where a campfire would be lit up. Aljew Frasco (2013) and Mark Lepon (2015) will assist me during the instructions.

Second day shall be devoted for Survival Tool-Making, Shelter, Plant ID and Foraging, Firecraft and Outdoor Cooking. All, including the camp staff, shall experience the angst of a person in a survival situation by fasting and all shall take feast on the results of their Nocturnal Hunting. Campfire Yarns and Storytelling shall commence to enhance more camaraderie.

Third day will be an occasion for the observance of Bonifacio Day thru the singing of the national anthem and followed by pledging of allegiance to flag and country. Then the bushcraft tradition of the pageantry of the knives becomes the center of attraction called the Blade Porn and photo sessions follow. Official Camp Hawkeye will be Eli Bryn Tambiga (2012). Together with Christopher Ngosiok (2015), he will also attend to the chores as Camp Medic.

Clearing of camp follows and all proceed to the Lanipao Rainforest Resort for relaxing in its spring-fed swimming pools and to enjoy refreshments and that deserved lunch prepared by our Camp Fixer – Ernie Salomon (2011). Giving of Certificates of Training and the raffling of freebies to all participants shall be carried out by our Camp Ramrod – Jhurds Neo (2012) - during the socials.

The Knifemaker of Mandaue City and Seseblades of Pampanga supports this initiative by providing their blade products for use and for free giveaways. Paracord Manila will also give away their products. Paracord bracelets made by the different PIBC alumni will also be given away aside from the items prepared for by Jhurds Neo, the President of Camp Red.

An event T-shirt will be part of the minimal P800 registration fee paid by each participant aside from the certificate, transportation, real camping experience, a meal and the use of the amenities of the Lanipao Rainforest Resort. Finishing the Bonifacio Day Special Bushcraft Camp gives you the option to join Camp Red. You can either improve yourself further through self-practice or through participation of activities hosted by Camp Red. This bushcraft camp will open many possibilities for you that you have thought had not existed.

Andres Bonifacio did not die in vain. He united the different ethnic groups and gave a sense of a nation for all native inhabitants to aspire for and govern for themselves. His dreams of a Free Philippine Republic gave hope to all who have been subjected to the yoke of a harsh and cruel master. His dreams never died. It lived on. Dreams Never End.

Andres Bonifacio art from the Concerned Artists of the Philippines

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