I was soon on my way to the Cordilleras by helicopter. From the air, the city of Manila seemed veiled in smoke. Tall buildings sprouted among a patchwork of corrugated iron roofs, sari-sari stores and cluttered, polluted streets congested with cars, jeepneys and trucks. As we left the city behind, the shadow skimmed over a quilted shimmering land of water-submerged rice fields.

We stopped to refuel at an airfield near Clark base where black phantom choppers flown by Americans during the Vietnam War rusted in the dawn. As we prepared to take off again, the blades of our helicopter began to rotate in the heavy, humid air. We swept over a gray landscape created by the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo. Only rooftops and store signs were visible above the cemented clay, and most of the buildings had been abandoned. Some persevering destitute people who refused to abandon their investments, lived like moles in the buried maze of tunnels they had dug into their entombed homes or shops.

The helicopter veered north and soon we were sweeping over Ifugao province with its mountains of endless, winding rice terraces. It was overwhelming to think that the Ifugao people had carved the giant rice terraces, whose combined length is equal to half the earth’s diameter, into the winding contours of these rugged mountains using only primitive tools. While other wonders such as the Great Wall of China and the Egyptian pyramids were constructed with the sweat and blood of oppression, the Rice Terraces were built by these strong and brave people in their voluntary and cooperative struggle for survival.

After we landed in Lagaue, the capital of Ifugao province, I took a jeepney to the office of the Ifugao Environment Defense Movement. The front yard looked like an excavation site with a wheelbarrow, several tools and planks of wood lying about. I wondered if I had come to the wrong place until an Ifugao community organizer – a short man with wavy black hair and discolored teeth, wearing a T-shirt with the logo ‘What the hell am I doing at IEDM?’ –  introduced himself as Manuel. He was standing by a sandbox filled with ripening coffee beans and spitting out mouthfuls of crimson betel nut juice. The red stained rocks surrounding him resembled the site of a massacre between the Bontoc and Ifugao tribes.

I learned from booklets I’d read before coming here that the Ifugao ancestors had once been headhunters. If a man lost face with his tribe, he would journey to a Bontoc village and using stealth and surprise tactics under the cover of night, behead a man from the enemy tribe and return to his village triumphant. Having reestablished his dignity, he would again be considered worthy to attend village feasts and socio-religious rituals.

Francis Ford Coppola hired a number of Ifugao men as extras for his film Apocalypse Now to portray the tribe that worshiped Kurtz as a demigod.

An Ifugao tribal ritual was performed at the end of the film, the dancers hopping on one leg and spreading their arms like an eagle in flight during the ceremony when the buffalo was slaughtered.   

Nathan showed me around the house that served as their headquarters. An old typewriter sat on a tarnished desk against a stained wall and all the furniture was placed strategically to avoid the potholes in the cement floor. The women sat behind their desks, shifting butt positions and changing knee crossings, painting their nails and chatting while Air Supply serenaded them from the radio.

After a lunch of dried fish and rice, I was introduced to Nathan, a British volunteer working on a micro-hydro project. He had been living in Ifugao for two years and had mastered the tribal dialect. My language orientation was begun with basic phrases.

“When you greet people,” he said, “you ask them, ‘Where you going?’ When they ask you where you’re going, you reply by pointing and saying ‘Over there!’ ‘Good-bye’ isn’t used as it is too final and ‘Thank you’ is implied. ‘Hello’ in Ifugao is a greeting that translates as ‘Do you have betelnut?’ and implicates a long social encounter.”

Nathan must have been very sociable as his teeth were already discolored with betel nut stains.