The Road to Cateel
(Edited Version, originally published in Manila Bulletin, August 15, 2008)
By Danny Castillones Sillada
"Lumapos kaw. Ya tapos. Di kaw mauno."
(You will succeed. You will finish. Nothing bad will happen to you.)
~ Mandaya Panawagtawag Ritual
By Danny Castillones Sillada
"Lumapos kaw. Ya tapos. Di kaw mauno."
(You will succeed. You will finish. Nothing bad will happen to you.)
~ Mandaya Panawagtawag Ritual
The gushing waters from its towering staircases are like the white silken hair of the Mandaya Ompô (old native woman), plunging from the heavenly abode of the Mandaya gods Mansilatan and Badla, down to the long and winding streams past the translucent Cateel River, and, finally, into the womb of the Pacific Ocean.
Neither words nor photographs could describe the sublime encounter and union with such mystical splendor, such as that of Aliwagwag Falls. And only those who have witnessed its magical presence could bring with them a profound experience that only a Mother Nature could give.
Time stands still—green colors flail against the blue sky, wild birds flutter and sing on the canopies of sturdy trees, bubbly waters tumble down the streams murmuring with eternity—as a mesmerized traveler stares at the magnificent beauty of cascading falls descending from a giant stairway to heaven.
Neither words nor photographs could describe the sublime encounter and union with such mystical splendor, such as that of Aliwagwag Falls. And only those who have witnessed its magical presence could bring with them a profound experience that only a Mother Nature could give.
Time stands still—green colors flail against the blue sky, wild birds flutter and sing on the canopies of sturdy trees, bubbly waters tumble down the streams murmuring with eternity—as a mesmerized traveler stares at the magnificent beauty of cascading falls descending from a giant stairway to heaven.
ALIWAGWAG FALLS in Cateel, Davao Oriental
(Images by Olan Emboscado, wayph.com, Danny C. Sillada, & thelostkids.com)
(Images by Olan Emboscado, wayph.com, Danny C. Sillada, & thelostkids.com)
The Stairway of Mandaya Gods
The creation of Aliwagwag Falls can be attributed to the tectonic tension along the rift bordering between the geologic regions of Cateel town, the northeastern part of Davao Oriental province, and Compostela Valley, the eastern part of Davao Del Norte. The mass of boulders on the site of Aliwagwag Falls compressed and sheared into smaller blocks to form a huge pile of rocks. The structure of staircases was formed over millions of years through the unrelenting flow of waters coming from upper cataracts, ridges, and valleys of Cateel Mountains.
One can imagine the natural processes of shaping the Aliwagwag Falls before it finally emerges from its majestic fortress at the heart of the Cateel rainforests. Just 25 kilometers away from the poblacíon or town proper, it overlooks the Compostela Valley on the west and the mouth of Cateel River that kisses the Pacific Ocean on the east.
Known among the natives as the natural creation of the Mandaya gods (the father and son Mansilatan and Badla), Aliwagwag Falls is one of the tallest and exotic waterfalls in the Philippines. Like a giant stairway spiraling from heaven down to the earth, it stands at 1,110 feet (338 meters) high and 30 feet (9 meters) average width with 84 cascading falls.
Along the massive staircases of varying heights and widths, the foamy waters descend unto the bubbly brooks and streams, converging towards the long and winding path of Cateel River. The tallest single drop at the upper stairway is approximately 100 feet (30 meters) high with a 30-foot (9 meters) average width.
On one side of the uppermost level of the falls is a cave, the early Mandaya burial site of their ancestors dated around 1,500 BC to 1000 AD. The Mandaya natives consider the place a sacred sanctuary protected by the good gods Mansilatan and Badla against the evil gods, the husband and wife Pundaugnon and Malimbong.
During the Spanish period, between 1500s and 1800s, the Bagani (Mandaya warriors) resisted invaders on a few occasions—the Spanish conquistadors and the Moros (Muslim raiders)—by fighting ferociously with their kayam (spear) and kampilan (sword), defending their tribal land up to the last drop of their blood.
Indeed, if a traveler were to listen intently to the garrulous sound of tumbling waters descending from the stairway of Aliwagwag Falls, he or she could almost hear the scarlet sound of Bagani’s blood dripping downstream towards the Cateel River.
Brief History of Cateel
The Philippine Archipelago is composed of 7,107 islands with three major islands, namely, Luzon (northern region), Visayas (central region),and Mindanao (southern region). The Southern Philippines, commonly known as Mindanao, has 25 provinces and 27 cities with an estimated 25.5 million inhabitants (PSA, 2018).
VICINITY MAP OF CATEEL
(Graphics by Danny C. Sillada, based on Google & Maphill maps; Aliwagwag Falls image by wayph.com)
(Graphics by Danny C. Sillada, based on Google & Maphill maps; Aliwagwag Falls image by wayph.com)
Along the southeastern region of Mindanao facing the Pacific Ocean is the province of Davao Oriental, formerly known as Provincia de Caraga during the Spanish colonial period. And there, in the northeastern part of the province, lies the coastal town of Cateel, one of the 11 municipalities of Davao Oriental, surrounded by the Pacific Ocean in the east, Compostela Valley in the west, and Boston and Baganga municipalities in the north and south respectively.
Early Mandaya Settlement (Ngini 'Yang Kanami) (Illustration by Federico “Boy” Dominguez, 2009)
The Mandaya natives and a handful of Chinese merchants and native Muslims (Kalagan or Moro) occupied the town before the Spanish conquistadors and missionaries arrived in the early 17th century.
Mandaya, literally means “upstream” or people from the upland (mountains and valleys), is theoretically the product of the third waves of migration of Chinese aborigines from Yunnan in southwest China via Taiwan then sieved through Malaysia and Indonesia before reaching the Philippine archipelago in the south between 4000 and 2000 BC. Some features of the old pureblooded Mandaya women between 60s and 80s are similar to the aboriginal Yunnan and Taiwanese women with a striking resemblance to their costumes, the Mandaya dagmay and badô.
In 1610, during the advent of the Spanish colonial era, the Spanish friar Miguel de Santo Tomas and Sgt. Juan Camacho de dela Peña arrived at the northern side of Cateel called Sitio Lapad, known today as Barrio San Rafael. They disembarked on the riverbank where they saw a Mandaya splitting a rattan vine. When they asked the Mandaya native what place it was, he thought that they were asking what he was holding, so he responded "catil." Hence, from there the town’s name was derived and would later be known as "Cateel."
A contemporary anecdote of the town’s name was attributed to the American Maryknoll Missionaries who arrived in Cateel in the mid-1900s with a similar tale, albeit with a new twist. Accordingly, as the American missionaries set foot on the river bank, in the eastern side of Cateel River, they saw a cat pawing a huge casili (eel) washed up on the muddy shore. When they asked a native fisherman what place it was, he could not reply because he did not understand their words. The American missionaries then called the place Cateel, based on that visual narrative of a cat catching an eel.
MODERN MANDAYA in Caraga town, Davao Oriental, with a male elder performing a Bayok Ritual surrounded by children amid bonfire (Image by Eden Licayan, 2013).
By the end of the 19th century, a new breed of dwellers occupied the town, and they were the mestizos descending from the Mandaya, Malay, Spanish, and Chinese, and a trickle of minority ancestries such as Arab, Dutch, French, Hindu, and Portuguese.
In 1840, when the Spanish governor Luis Lardezabal sent an expedition to eastern Mindanao, known today as Davao Oriental, to organize settlements with a significant number of inhabitants, Cateel was named as a pueblo (town or settlement) on the same site at Sitio Lapad. In 1856, the central town was moved to the seacoast, the present site of the poblacíon today. And by the late 1800s, the Cateel pueblo was fully Christianized from the majority Mandaya animistic beliefs and minor religions (e.g., Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism) under a Caraga mission headed by a Jesuit missionary Fr. Pablo Pastells.
Subsequently, a migration of the Visayans from the central Philippine archipelago arrived in Mindanao in the early 1900s, some of them settled in various pueblos of Davao Oriental, among them is Cateel, and they were the Cebuanos, the Leytiños, and Ilonggos, so that by the mid-20th century onwards, the town was completely muddled with inhabitants of eclectic origins, while the Mandaya natives were slowly driven away from their lands towards the mountains and valleys of Cateel.
On October 29, 1903, under the American military government, Cateel was created into a municipality. From this period onwards, significant events followed like the construction of Cateel Provincial High School in 1947, the reconstruction of St. James Catholic Church in 1953, and the arrival of the Maryknoll Missionaries, the American priests and nuns, in 1961, to name a few.
In December 2012, a super typhoon, Pablo or Bopha, ravaged Cateel and its neighboring towns, flattening the houses, coconut trees, and forests (Images by Harry Castro).
Today, Cateel is a second-class municipality of Davao Oriental province with approximately 40,000 inhabitants, with five major spoken languages among the 187 languages and dialects in the Philippines. And they are Modern Mandaya (known as Mandaya or Kamayo), Cebuano, English, Filipino, and the original Mandaya with melodic intonation (belonging to the Austronesian linguistic family), which is already on the verge of extinction, still spoken by the older generations of the natives between 50s and 80s.
The Spanish language in Cateel slowly died down in the early 20th century gobbled up by English as a compulsory language (oral and written) in schools and written documents in commerce, Catholic Church, and government institution. Some Spanish words, however, refused to die, and they survived and integrated into the Modern Mandaya, a hybrid language emanating from the original Mandayan, Visayan, Spanish, Tagalog, and Chinese languages and dialects respectively.
The Nostalgic Memory of Cateel
The town of Cateel in the 1970s and 1980s, as remembered by this writer, is like a forgotten paradise bereft of any infrastructure, regressive as it was since the Spaniards, the Japanese, and the Americans came: no electricity, no television, and no telephone lines.
When rainy season came, the muddy roads and dilapidated bridges would be impassable, forcing the vacationers from the city during holidays to travel by motorboat via the Surigao route. The faint-hearted would die from a heart attack due to nervousness from the monstrous waves of the Pacific Ocean.
The Spanish language in Cateel slowly died down in the early 20th century gobbled up by English as a compulsory language (oral and written) in schools and written documents in commerce, Catholic Church, and government institution. Some Spanish words, however, refused to die, and they survived and integrated into the Modern Mandaya, a hybrid language emanating from the original Mandayan, Visayan, Spanish, Tagalog, and Chinese languages and dialects respectively.
The Nostalgic Memory of Cateel
The town of Cateel in the 1970s and 1980s, as remembered by this writer, is like a forgotten paradise bereft of any infrastructure, regressive as it was since the Spaniards, the Japanese, and the Americans came: no electricity, no television, and no telephone lines.
When rainy season came, the muddy roads and dilapidated bridges would be impassable, forcing the vacationers from the city during holidays to travel by motorboat via the Surigao route. The faint-hearted would die from a heart attack due to nervousness from the monstrous waves of the Pacific Ocean.
Activities in Cateel during summers in the 70s & 80s: (1) Kite Flying, (2) Swimming in Cateel River, (3) Moon Watching, and (4) Gambling (Images by Danny C. Sillada).
During summer, children would fly a kite in the middle of the rice fields with whistling winds coming from the Pacific Ocean in the east and the lush mountains in the west. Naked boys and girls, ranging from 7 to 15 years old (including this writer), would dive and swim into the crystal-clear Cateel River in barrio Tagadao, splashing their laughter under the heat of summer.
At nightfall, it was like a ghost town with the faint light of sugâ (kerosene lamps) flickering from stilt houses made of nipa, bamboo, and timber. The only indulgence that the townsfolk could afford and enjoy at night, aside from singing and gambling, was to watch the surging full moon that came only once a month.
Then came the 1990s, streets at the poblacíon slowly hardened with cement, and bridges and highways gradually emerged like mushrooms, courtesy of the town’s two prominent politicians, daughters of Cateel, Maria Elena Toroba Palma Gil and Corazon Nuñez Malanyaon who were intermittently elected into the Philippine House of Congress respectively. The latter, Rep. Corazon Nuñez Malanyaon, a former governor of Davao Oriental, finished all the infrastructure projects in Davao Oriental, particularly Cateel.
The electricity from DORECO began to flow and illuminate the once bleak and ghostly town at nighttime. The townsfolk stopped sending letters and telegrams to their children who were studying in various major cities of the Philippines. They could now hear each other’s voices through the telephone services provided by the town’s municipality.
At nightfall, it was like a ghost town with the faint light of sugâ (kerosene lamps) flickering from stilt houses made of nipa, bamboo, and timber. The only indulgence that the townsfolk could afford and enjoy at night, aside from singing and gambling, was to watch the surging full moon that came only once a month.
Then came the 1990s, streets at the poblacíon slowly hardened with cement, and bridges and highways gradually emerged like mushrooms, courtesy of the town’s two prominent politicians, daughters of Cateel, Maria Elena Toroba Palma Gil and Corazon Nuñez Malanyaon who were intermittently elected into the Philippine House of Congress respectively. The latter, Rep. Corazon Nuñez Malanyaon, a former governor of Davao Oriental, finished all the infrastructure projects in Davao Oriental, particularly Cateel.
The electricity from DORECO began to flow and illuminate the once bleak and ghostly town at nighttime. The townsfolk stopped sending letters and telegrams to their children who were studying in various major cities of the Philippines. They could now hear each other’s voices through the telephone services provided by the town’s municipality.
Some Idyllic Scenery in Cateel: (1) Town's Church and Plaza, (2) Cateel River, (3) Rice Field, (4) Cream Sand Beach (Images by Danny C. Sillada).
Further onwards, from the late 1990s up to the present, almost every household could already watch Korean telenovelas on cable television. Everyone could now send text messages through mobile phones as far as the USA, Russia, and Iraq and as near as the bedroom and comfort room at home, and send email messages to friends and loved ones, if not chatting with strangers on social media, on the internet.
Consumer products are surging like the ever-flowing waters of Aliwagwag Falls. Unfamiliar faces establish their residences and businesses in town, concrete and modern houses flourish, and the transportation could now travel in 3 to 5 hours from the town to the city of Davao via Compostela Valley, instead of 10 to 12 hours via the Surigao route by land or by sea. And Cateel, the once naïve and idyllic town, would never be the same again.
The Endangered Stairway to Heaven
The influx of progress in the town of Cateel has a price, and the price is the deterioration of its ecological system. The thick forests that surround the Aliwagwag Falls, for instance, are slowly vanishing, wild animals like the kaguang (flying lemur) and the usà (wild deer) are disappearing, and the mystical hoot of limocon (bird of omen) is going silent. The gradual denudation of Cateel rainforests caused by the logging concessionaires in the 1970s took on momentum with new aggressive illegal loggers in the 1980s up to the early 2000s.
The native dwellers are driven further away from their lands searching for a physical and spiritual home at the upper ridges and plateaus of the town's mountain, a distant place where the limocon birds are still singing, and the natives can chant their bayok (performative poetry) from a regretful journey that once beset the verdant sanctuary of their tribal communities in the lowlands, but not for long.
Lamentably, it took millions of years to fashion the magical beauty of Aliwagwag Falls but only three decades or so for a man to disfigure its pristine forests and wildlife, endangering her ever-flowing waters to ebb away in another few decades, in the once laid-back and ecologically opulent town of Cateel.
‘Luha ko da lamang yang paagayon,’ (I’ll just let my tears flow away) with poignancy amid the vanishing green colors and balding mountains that were once the cradle of this writer’s dreams.
Town’s Plaza: Cateel today circa 2018 after its recovery from super typhoon Pablo (Bopha) in 2012.
(Image by Eden Licayan)
(Image by Eden Licayan)
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MLA citation:
Sillada, Danny Castillones. “The Road to Cateel.” Manila Bulletin, 15 Aug. 2008, p. F4 & 5. Print.
MLA citation:
Sillada, Danny Castillones. “The Road to Cateel.” Manila Bulletin, 15 Aug. 2008, p. F4 & 5. Print.