Mental Gymnastics

Trekking in Anawangin

This one goes into one of my favorite outdoor destinations. Anawangin, with it's fine greyish white sand, pine trees by the beach, and cool river spewing out into the sea, offers so much more.

We loaded our packs on the boat in Pundakit, some 30 minutes away from the Anawangin cove. We were to go on a 3 hour trek up the mountains, through the river and finally to the beach. It really did sound that simple. We had with us a four year old kid who's as hyped as everyone else to go to the mountains. Boy, are we in for a surprise!

Water check: We had almost a liter of water per person, or at least for us guests who were all clad in shorts and slippers.

Headcount: 21

I had my P99 backpack, which looked more like a lunchbox. In it was my water bottle, a bag of chips, some crackers, mint, headlamp with extra batteries, kikay kit and wet wipes.

Our TL said we didn't need a guide since he didn't want to encourage the locals in that business endeavor. We hiked through the barangay of seafarers (a fishing village). The greenery was more of cogon grass, which I thought was far better than the tall, sharp grass at Cinco Picos. There were lots of rocks. The riverbed was dry. We crossed some streams and began our ascend. The kid kept hitting the grass and stones with his trekking pole. I kept my distance with him coz he's likely to hit me by accident. By noon, we weren't even near the summit. We skipped lunch coz we thought we'd be cooking our lunch at camp. I had a dip in the stream to cool off. It was getting hot. We resumed our trek. As we began with the assault, they started carrying the kid. The kid had a positive attitude. He wanted to "win the race!"

We were like climbing invisible staircases that goes winding up, down, sideways. We stopped twice and had to backtrack twice. Our TL couldn't find the trail since the grass has pretty much erased it. Finally, we sidetracked our way to the summit. There, we finally had a better view of our destination.

The beach was barely visible and I can see that it's still a long way down. I began to be mindful of my water load. We began our descend and that's where the adventure started.

My legs began to feel queasy as i looked down on those slopes where our TL and Gio disappeared. Those were slippery slopes and I had no choice but to get moving. I tried to humor myself as I fell twice unintentionally. Thank God for those bushes which broke my fall.

The lead pack began to disappear. We started yelling and the response was "just follow the river!" Ok, what river? By that they meant those rocks by the ridge. I actually preferred rocks than the slippery slopes. I've made a couple of rocks fall and they rolled down way too fast. It wasn't reassuring. So we kept moving down, traversing our way through a cliff. No ropes, just your gut instinct and the hope that you can find a nice foothold. The rocks often chip off when you grab them so I made it a good practice to make sure that they're steady before I put all my weight on it.

It wasn't hot anymore and we were losing daylight. Looking up, I knew that we covered a lot of ground on our descend. I kept praying that the kid and whoever's carrying him are doing ok. We took out our headlamps and proceeded trekking down the slippery river bed. It was already getting dark and I still couldn't hear the waterfall. I thought we were headed towards the waterfall which is supposed to be near the campsite.

I felt hunder pangs and this time, I was beginning to see stars. The sweepers began to catch up with me. By nightfall, I was walking behind everyone else. My pacing was extremely slow and I couldn't even walk up straight. Darn, I should've eaten more during breakfast! There was a watersource nearby and I had my water bottle reloaded. I didn't even have the strength to fetch the water myself making me feel low since I was slowing down the group.

We caught up with bossing, and Raissa and the kid. She was firm on staying put and spending the night there since it was obviously too dangerous for them to go on. We couldn't argue with that but we were all concerned too. Peter and Thads had a stash of food that they shared with group, some rice, menudo and vienna sausage. Eventually, bossing found us a nice spot to camp and there, we managed to re-group with the other 18 participants. Our camping gear included a fly sheet, where we slept, some garbage bags, and an IPOD with speakers playing ABBA.

It was 8pm when we layed down. The sky was awesome! All the stars were visible. Conversations kept going back to food of course as we were all hungry. It was a lovely evening and we shared some roasted peanuts and rhum. Later that evening, we were roused up by flashing headlamps at the summit. It was Bajay, Jon and Manong who were looking for us. We waited for them the next morning. They guided us to the camp and by 8am, I was too busy taking pictures of the beach and the camp almost forgetting that I've just been through.

We had our meal and was energized once again. I stayed in the water for a few hours, almost forgetting about Kathy and Gio and our usual round of pictorials. I was happy for weekend.

posted by kquill @ 3:09 PM