By Joel B. Belinan
This week I came across a post in our most popular social media from one of the pioneers of Tabuk City during the early 50s. The post was about the vast plains and grasslands there with only very few people whose names he can easily enumerate and who inhabited a small fraction of the land. I believe the post is credible as it comes from a pioneer who later became the military mayor of the newly opened homestead area in the old Mountain Province.
My memory is still very clear on my childhood years in the mid-70s and the early 80s in Tabuk, Kalinga. In 1974, our family from our hometown in Besao, Mountain Province migrated to Tabuk in search of greener pasture. That time, while it was already much more populated compared to how it must have been in the 50s, still there were vast tracks of land that were idle. In fact, if one found a vantage point, usually in the Bulanao area, you could see several kilometers without any obstruction, unlike in most other parts of the Cordillera. Indeed, Tabuk which is now the second biggest city in the country in terms of land area is one of the very few exceptions in our region of mountains, hills, gullies, and all sorts of geographical obstacles.
Farmlands during the 70s and early 80s were rain-fed, thus, during the dry months people resorted to crops that could tolerate the humidity with very minimal water. Hence, I also experienced eating corn and cassava as a staple food. It was until 1983 that the irrigation system finally got operational, watering tens of thousands of hectares. This eventually earned for the place the title of The Rice Granary of the Cordillera. Although the land area is much smaller than the Cagayan Valley region or Central Luzon, its rice production per hectare is much higher due to its being a virgin farm land compared to those in other lowland provinces which were being tilled since the Spanish period.
The irrigation system in Tabuk was the alternative to the planned but botched Chico-River dam supposed to be funded by the World Bank.
In the mid 80s we left Tabuk for Baguio City.
In 1989, I started traveling abroad as an Ananda Marga missionary and I was usually very observant of the topography of the countries we visited. While I saw several countries in Southeast Asia and South Asia, none could compare with the vastness of India especially its rural areas. Traveling via train from New Delhi to Calcutta and New Delhi to Mumbai City or vice versa usually took 24 hours to 26 hours almost non-stop, covering thousands of kilometers of the sub-continent of Asia. It was always an amazing experience to me. This dwarfed my orientation on Tabuk City’s wide areas. Later on, I had the chance of a train ride from Madras city in South India to Calcutta which was at least 36 to 42 hours, almost non-stop, covering a distance of almost double that of the previous two areas and which even showed much wider areas of flatlands. The big difference though is that most of India’s frontiers are desert, at least those areas I mentioned. The eastern states like Nagaland that borders Myanmar and Kashmir, Jammu and Punjab that are located at the foot of the Himalayas are different due to their climates.
What I cannot forget about my travel experiences in those areas in India are the extreme conditions. Where could one experience the best of things and, at the same time, the worst of things? As they say, traveling India is an experience of mysticism where one can find things that are unimaginable in other countries but are very normal there. Where traveling from East to West and South to North was like a short-cut travel to the whole world.
In 1993 and still as a Missionary of Ananda Marga, I was assigned in Davao City. There, my outlook of Tabuk also became pale when riding a bus from Davao City to Cagayan de Oro City passing by the hundreds of kilometers of flat farmlands. Not the usual rice fields we see in Luzon but banana and pineapple plantations. Even the farmlands within Davao City easily dwarfed those in Tabuk City. I can only console myself that Tabuk rice is known as one of the best rice, maybe due to its relatively fresh farmlands. Then I learned that Davao City is the biggest city in the country in terms of land area. What makes Davao City even more attractive is its relatively good temperature which is between warm and cold, making its fruits second to none in the entire world. That might be the reason they have very sweet and tasty pomelo, mango, lanzones, rambutan, marang, durian, jackfruit, name it, and they have it.
Indeed, traveling is one of the best teachers. It opens one’s eyes and consciousness to the wonders, beauty, and enjoyment of creation. **
