Thursday, February 1, 2018

Climbing - what a great excuse to visit random places!

One of the reasons I love climbing is that it takes me to places I otherwise would not go to. They are not Lonely Planet recommended sights but often random rural spots that happen to have climbable rock. One of them is Cantabaco in the Philippines. It is a village – or actually rather a strip of road with population – in the middle of the jungly Cebu Island.

Me and my climbing partner arrived in Cantabaco a week before Christmas. We settled into this run-down “resort” called Spring Park that had already seen its days of glory. It has four more or less functional swimming pools (apparently instead of repairing existing pools they had decided to just build new ones), a big hall (that I used as my yoga centre) and bungalows of varying comfort levels. On our first evening we showed up at the main building to order dinner, just to find out it was not served that day. Since there are no restaurants in the village we ended up buying street BBQ sticks, fluffy sugary buns and bananas, that became our diet for the next days. At 11pm we started hearing Christmas carols from the neighboring church, and it became fully activated at 4am with ringing bells and loud singing. We learned that the nightly church parties would go on until Christmas Day.




Local kids eagerly showed us the way to the climbing crag; across a bamboo bridge, through a farm home and up steep stairs we went to reach a beautiful white limestone wall. Luckily it was possible to climb there even in pouring rain. Even though rainy season was supposed to end by mid-December, we got hit by rainfall almost every day. Climbing the naturally polished rock in high humidity definitely added difficulty to the routes, that offer differing styles from powerful overhangs to more technical pockets and cracks. In total there are around 50 routes there, optimally suited for a mid-7s climber. Unfortunately the prime time at the main wall is just a couple of hours before sunset, unless it is overcast or one enjoys masocistic sweating in sunshine.




After spending Christmas at the beach we returned to Cantabaco prepared: we had hired a motorbike to get to nearby towns for fruit & veggie markets, night eating stalls and supermarkets. We had also advised our later arriving friends to bring along camping cookers. We used them to make our own morning porridge, until eventually we befriended with the Spring Park staff well enough to freely use the resort kitchen. Occasionally also the cook showed up to prepare food for us, which we enjoyed in loud karaoke noise. (The resort's karaoke machine is a top local entertainment, and most singers compensate their lack of skill with volume.)





Despite being a small village, Cantabaco is anything but quiet. Add to the church and karaoke singing almost daily happening fiestas, screaming animals and tooting traffic. Also gunshots were often heard while climbing. Bernard, whose wife owns the crag land, is a retired army official and enthusiastic shooter, who even invited us to join him one day. Anyhow the main Cantabaco entertainment is cock fighting, that takes place every Tuesday and Saturday. One afternoon we attended a fight in the stadium packed with excited villagers. It was interesting to follow first rooster matching, then bet setting (that seemed to cause most enthusiasm amongst the crowd) and finally fighting itself. The actual fights were shorter and less bloody than I had expected, and killed chickens get eaten afterwards, so I was not that disgusted after all.


Even though I reached a big climbing high in Cantabaco – sending my first 7b after persistent projecting – above all I will remember the experience of staying in that authentic Filipino village. I keep thanking climbing for giving me the excuse to visit these fascinating random places around the world.  

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