Hanging Coffins of Sagada

After completing our rice terrace hike and picking up others in our group who hadn't gone with us, we headed into town for a late supper. We ate at a place that specialized in chicken inasal so I ordered chicken inasal. Inasal is grilled chicken with lemongrass and calamansi which is a native citrus fruit similar to a lime. You can find it just about anywhere in the Philippines though it is known by different regional names. 

The next morning we had some local red rice that we had bought the day before and cooked some to try for breakfast. It looks like Spanish rice but doesn't have tomatoes in it. It is a bit fluffier with less chew than say Jasmine white rice. A traditional Filipino breakfast is rice, over easy egg and some sort of pork product. In this case we had tocino which is a sweet cured pork.

I already posted another version of this photo but after breakfast as we were getting ready for the day my wife shouted at me to get outside quickly and so I did. In case you missed the previous post with this picture, it was school time and the local kids were off heading to school. Many Filipino schools are all year round with larger breaks during the year than they offer here in America. Filipinos also graduate at age 16 as opposed to 18 here.

A picture of the next transport after with a more modern jeepney though it doesn't look all that modern. I am assuming those kids are the ones who will be late for the first bell when they get to school.

Our objective for today was to see one of the many hanging coffin sites in the vicinity on our way out of town as we made our way back to Baguio. I did ask my BIL to stop so I could get out and property photograph this scene even though it was slightly foggy in the morning. I like how the houses were simply built around and among the natural rock outcroppings. 

Twenty-three years ago I had also stopped at one site to see some hanging coffins though they weren't hanging, at least not when I had been there. They were in a large shallow cave and in a huge pile, many stacked upon one another. Several were shattered in pieces and a drift of bones littered the bottom of the cave so perhaps those had been hanging at one point. Back then, we were just by ourselves and I didn't know the why behind these hanging coffins and I hoped this time around we would. We paid our obligatory guide and started down the trail to this particular hanging coffin site but unfortunately our guide was young and didn't really give us any good answers to my questions. Above you can see a cave across the valley along the way where there is a pile of coffins in a shallow cave but in much better shape than the ones I saw twenty-three years ago.

Fortunately, the lady who arranged for our guide was a seasoned local who was able to address all our questions when we got back from the hike. According to her, the hanging coffin site above is an active "cemetery" and the newest addition was less than ten years old. To hang the coffins, the villagers will erect some temporary bamboo scaffolding and drive in some large bolts into the face of the cliff. There they will rest a coffin which they tie to the bolts to hold it in place. Only when this is done is the body of the deceased hoisted up and into the coffin to spend eternity or at least until the wood rots out and falls down to the ground below. But these coffins are all protected by a big overhang above and so will likely last quite awhile before that happens. 

Since the body of the deceased is hauled down the steep trail we had come down to visit this sight, I wondered about that process of handling the body over such terrain. The guide said that it was a great honor to be chosen to carry the body down the trail to the site (maybe a half mile in length) and that any bodily fluids that got on the carriers, was a sign of good luck. 

Although an active cemetery, it wasn't open to just anyone. In order to be buried in a hanging coffin, you had to meet several requirement.

1. You had to be a local family in good standing with the community.

2. You had to be an elder and all your children must have children, all of which are in good standing with the community.

3. You had to participate in all the rituals that are held as a community of which there are a lot. They had rituals for weather, crops, etc. 

If you met all these requirements, you "applied" or asked a local committee and they would hear your case and grant permission if they agreed.  Very few people made the cut.

We visited the dead in the hanging coffins in reserved quietness that befitted the scene and then made our way back. The start of the trail actually began in a more typical cemetery. Due to the rocky ground in the mountains and the high water table in the lowlands, cemeteries in the Philippines are often comprised of small crypts that are just big enough for a single coffin. In this cemetery, there was even a crypt for remains of Americans who died in this area during World War II. The guides didn't know for sure but I suspect those remains have long ago been repatriated back to the mainland but perhaps not. 

This crypt caught my eye since it has a window through which you could view the coffin inside. It turned out to belong to a local priest whose family had been denied a spot on the cliff to hang his body and coffin. He had been in good standing and all his many married kids and grandkids were too. But being a Catholic priest, he didn't participate in the local ritual ceremonies and thus didn't make the cut. As a compromise, his family was allowed to put a window in his crypt so his coffin could be viewed for eternity.

We headed back towards Baguio on the same tortuous winding road that we had arrived on at what felt like a very fast pace of 35 mph due to road conditions. It was very foggy much of the way and once again, it was hard to take decent photographs, the better ones I have already showed on my previous post on the drive up. But I thought I would share this photograph which I captured on the way back just showing you the steepness of the mountains and the communities built on them.

Overall, I was extremely pleased to find out Sagada had changed little since I was there. There were a lot more houses and I didn't see a single native nipa hut like I had seen on my first trip. But there weren't a lot of tourists even though a tourist industry was present. They didn't even really have any souvenir stands though we found a couple native run stands of hand made goods. One was a hand weaving shop where they made all manner of bags and other goods out of native material but a sign asked visitors not to photograph them and so I obeyed. There was also a small stand run by an artist who made jewelry out of recycled copper wire. My daughter got a ring there but again, I didn't photograph it either. Sometimes, I am happy to just leave things for my imagination until the next time I should visit Sagada.