Down in Dapitan

Availing ourselves of a budget fare I booked last November (yes, sometimes it surprises me how far ahead I can think when it comes to diversions from work), Beng and I flew down to Dipolog and then motored to Dapitan over the recent long weekend. Why Dipolog? It was practically the only destination that still had a budget fare open when I was clicking through Cebu Pacific’s destinations at that time, and we had never been there; serendipitously, we had always wanted to visit Dapitan, not too far from Dipolog, to follow in the footsteps of Jose Rizal who lived in exile there, and what better time to make that pilgrimage than during his sesquicentennial?

It’s hard to believe that P20 can still get you between two cities in these islands, but that’s all it costs for an Evergood minibus — with, uhm, natural air-conditioning — to carry you the 12 kilometers from Dipolog to Dapitan. The tricycle ride from the airport in Dipolog to the bus terminal downtown, where all the shuttles from Dipolog to Dapitan and parts beyond can be found, is fixed at P60 per trip. This meant that Beng and I got from the airport to Dapitan within an hour for a total of P100, against the P1,000 that our hotel was quoting us for its shuttle.

It’s the kind of ride you’re likely to share with chickens and jerrycans apart from students, employees, and the local homeboys, and the minibus will stop for yet more passengers just when you think it’s about to burst at the seams, but everyone takes things in good humor and you should, too; the scent of smoke wafting off the heaps of dry leaves being burnt in front yards and of papaya blossoms exerts a narcotic effect. The minibus dropped us off at its terminal in the small city market, and from there it was a short tricycle ride to our hotel. (In Dapitan, the tricycles have unusually low-roofed sidecars, and there’s just enough space in front of your legs for a bag, so travel light!)

I’d picked out our hotel online — not that there were too many choices there — and the Dapitan City Resort Hotel on the aptly named Sunset Boulevard facing Dapitan Bay proved to be more than satisfactory. It was right on the beach, and yet had its own large, well-maintained swimming pool, a swish of a sliding door away from our ground-level room. Dapitan Bay, like many such bays, is a half-moon of water with a curved arm of mountain on each side. This is where the sun sets behind a gauzy screen of clouds, and the view can’t have been much different more than a century ago when Jose Rizal gazed across the water, thinking of what he had left behind.

If you stand in the middle of the bay facing the sunset and look to your right, you’d see the silhouette of Talisay, a strip of land facing the water, where the history books tell us Rizal spent four years in exile, from 1892 to 1896; when he left it on July 31, 1896, he had exactly just six months to live. In the meanwhile he led what appears by most accounts to have been a happy and productive life in Dapitan, using the proceeds of a winning lottery ticket to build a small estate in Talisay, where he farmed, taught some local boys, and presumably took many long walks on the beach with his “sweet foreigner,” Josephine Bracken, whose adoptive father had sought his help for his blindness.

The Rizal Shrine, as it’s now known, is well kept by the government and by volunteer Rizalistas, followers who believe in the divinity of their hero. It was a short, seven-peso tricycle ride away from our hotel (everything in Dapitan seems to pretty much fall into this category), and we entered a wooded cluster of houses, one most prominently in the hexagonal shape that Rizal supposedly designed for optimal lighting. Beng and I were very capably guided by Ghen, a politican science graduate from the local state university. Save for one or two posts, said Ghen, almost all the buildings were now replicas; there was, however, a tall, 200-year-old banulad tree that would already have been mature in Rizal’s time, and some of his clothes — trousers and jackets — were on display in the modest museum in a corner of the shrine. (Every time I see what Pepe wore — another full outfit is on display in Fort Santiago — I marvel at how small, by modern standards, the man really was; and he was no fashion slouch; the trousers had fake pockets, I suppose a trendy sartorial touch in the 1890s.)

All that history made me hungry, and we rode another tricycle back to the boulevard to enjoy another of Dapitan’s come-ons — incredibly good food at incredibly low prices. I’m a junk food junkie, but anytime I go south I binge on tinolang tanguigue and all the seafood I can get (besides, a sign on the street said “Chow King 12 kms”). You can get a bowlful of fresh shrimp in perfectly soured broth for P120 from one of the many joints along the boulevard. Mind the nuances of language, however; Beng and I had dinner at Dampa, a riverside restaurant known for its inato, which in places like Dumaguete means something grilled, but much to our surprise — not an unpleasant one — we were served chicken steeped in curried coconut milk.

A reconstructed house on Rizal’s Talisay estate, supposedly used by the hero for his ophthalmological practice.

Dapitan has a few other points of interest; most tourists head straight for the well-known Dakak Beach resort nearby, but Beng and I had our reasons to spend our pesos elsewhere. Indeed we discovered that the bayfront was full of small but cozy inns and B&B’s, which I’m sure were much cheaper than our P1,600-a-night room and probably just as adequate. I also wished that I’d seen the sprawling Alexandra by the Sea hotel earlier, which cost just about as much but looked much more stately and luxurious —but it somehow never turned up online (I think this is what they call search engine optimization is all about — in this age where Google rules the roost, if you don’t figure online, you don’t exist).

An impressive new city hall is being built in Dapitan, but the rest of the city feels very much unlike one — you have to walk many blocks to find an ATM, which likely will be out of service — but I’m not complaining. Our hotel had free Wi-Fi in the lobby, but on the street it was still the kind of place where our tricycle driver stopped his rig, got off, unscrewed the cap of his gas tank, then stuck his nose into the cavity to sniff — I suppose from the pungency of the fumes — how much fuel we had left before gamely plodding on down Sunset Boulevard. To our right, some boys were playing football three to a side on the rippled sand. If I had four years to kill, and if I wanted time to stretch past the far horizon with my head on the lap of my dulce extranjera, Dapitan, too, is where I might go.

As Rizal himself wrote about his time there,

So pass the days of my life in my obscure retreat;

Cast out of the world where once I dwelt; such is my rare

Good fortune; and Providence be praised for my condition:

A disregarded pebble that craves nothing but moss

To hide from all the treasure that in myself I bear.

* * *

Email me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.ph.