Of enchanted rivers and engkanto ports

I had asked our driver, Gideon, to stop by a lonely stretch on the road from Burgos to Dapa. We were in the northernmost tip of Siargao Island (of the sea and surf fame) on our way back to our work base south of the island.

We stopped to take pictures of the bumpy dirt road because I wanted to document how hard-to-reach the area is.

“Do you know that we are in Bikdup City?”, Gideon asked me.

“Huh? I didn’t know there is a city within Siargao Island”, I said, surprised.

“Only a few know of Bikdup City. It’s not a human city, only engkantos live there”, he said matter-of-factly.

I nervously looked around. Engkantos are creatures of Filipino folklore typically depicted as nature-dwelling spirits. While they are generally low on the creatures-you-wouldn’t-want-to-meet-on-a-deserted-road scale, still, an encounter with the otherworldly wasn’t on my agenda that morning.

Gideon went on to tell me about a nearby rock formation, by the beach, shaped exactly like a port, replete with a bridge/walkway-like structure and stone steps. He said, as if reading my mind and what I was about to ask,  ”No, it isn’t the ruins of an ancient pier, nor is it an abandoned pier. It’s a natural rock formation. Locals go there to make wishes. It’s said that if you make a wish, what you need will be there, ready, when you return. You have to return it, though, or they’ll get angry”.

It is said that when pista (fiesta) season is drawing near, townfolks who don’t own enough spoons, forks, and plates for guests to use (since guests=practically the whole town) would drop a few coins on the engkanto pier and make a wish. Lo and behold, plates, spoons and forks would be ready for them on their return the next day. No, Gideon didn’t tell me what happened to folks who crossed the engkantos by not returning the loaned utensils.

“Can we go to the engkanto pier?” I asked, my curiosity piqued.

“No, there are prayers in Latin that you have to recite, going there and while there. I don’t know the prayers. If you go near without saying them, you can’t get out of Bikdup City anymore”.

I felt bad not seeing the engkanto port when I was so close by, but happy that I heard another variation of the engkanto story, one that I haven’t read in books or heard before. Folklore is handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth – have we really captured and written down all these stories? How many stories have we lost – the stories of people who live in more remote areas or who never had the means to document this part of their culture?

The other aspect of folklore that is particularly tantalizing is how they were weaved. What events sparked our ancestor-storyteller’s imagination to come up with that tale? What was the motivation? Was it merely to come up with an explanation for the eerily shaped rock formation by the seashores of Siargao Island, for instance? Or maybe the Bikdup City storyteller wanted people to keep out of that lovely piece of seashore because it was his/her trysting place. Thus, the “thou-shalt-recite-prayers-in-Latin” caveat and the story about spirit inhabitants.

Don’t worry, if you have no appetite for folklores, Siargao Island has a lot more to offer, starting with sun, sand, surf, and sea.

Another town, another tale

They say that the Enchanted River in Hinatuan, Surigao del Sur, is being watched over by spirits. They say that you have to get out of the water and stop swimming after sunset, or else you’d be turned into a fish and cursed to forever swim in the river.

Another version tells of two women with long, blonde hair and a gentleman in green who walked on the waters of Enchanted River and disappeared into the bottomless channel below. They say the trio became the spirit-watchers of the river and would occasionally appear before people.

It is not surprising that such stories about Enchanted River abound.

To get to the Enchanted River, one has to endure a bumpy, dusty (during summer and slippery during the rainy season) and hair-raising 30-minute ride through a dirt road.  A hundred meters away from the “river”, you’d notice the vegetation getting more lush. I particularly remember the tree branches meeting to form an arch as our vehicle passed towards the resort entrance.

The long, dusty ride and approaching it from an arch of trees made Enchanted River more magical and “tucked away”. The cool, blue-green, clear body of water is an estuary – a hundred meters or so away, the waters run off to the open sea. Yes, the waters are so clear and clean that you could clearly see the fishes swimming below. You peer in and wonder if the clear, deep-blue, main channel really is bottomless, as what the locals claim. You catch your breath, amazed at such beauty, and think, “Yes, please, keep telling stories about the spirit watchers, and how they guard this place, so people wouldn’t run it down.”