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Sunday, October 1, 2023 Vol. 18 No. 349
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Endowed with 63 caves, 61 of which remain unexplored, a Davao del Sur town catches the attention of tourists and spelunkers
IN NATURE’S BELLY By Manuel T. Cayon
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you with an expansive chamber soaring up to 50 meters in height, marked by the presence of two or three winding tunnels branching out like dampened whirlpools.
Photos courtesy of Matanao Tourism Office
ARTH’S crevices have their own way of greeting visitors. Some are plain holes at the side of the hills or mountains, others are like remnants of unplanned diggings on plain surfaces covered by tall and unkempt grasses.
In this interior village far from the población of Matanao, Davao del Sur, the Su’bon Cave looks like a gaping mouth of an ancient Tyrannosaurus rex, with fangs still ready to devour the adventurous spelunkers. A lone white-barked tree rises in splendor atop the cave’s entrance, but its roots grip through the entire outside passage like an immotile creature unwilling to part with its bosom to cling for life. A creek flows endlessly from its mouth, indicating the cave’s origin as a waterway weaving from some hole aboveground and creating a deep crevice that the Blaan tribe described as a hole emitting an unpleasant odor, hence the name Su’bon. “Our tribespeople speak of this cave with a bad impression
of its smell,” Mylene Fernandez, a Blaan tribal cave guide, told the BusinessMirror during a municipality-sponsored guided tour to one of the 63 caves of the town, of which only two have been officially designated as safe and legally allowed to
Festival
be opened for spelunkers. In the distant past, what once emitted an unpleasant odor now unveils a breathtaking natural wonder—a magnificent architectural masterpiece supported and embellished by an array of both
miniature and massive stalactite columns meeting their stalagmite counterparts. Together, they create pillars reaching heights equivalent to a four-story building. At some point of the 250-meter length of winding trail, explor-
ers and visitors would be forced to crawl on all fours for about 20 meters, with only less than two feet of breathing space between the cave’s array of stalactites and flowing cool waters of the cave. Next, another cave welcomes
THE province of Davao del Sur has been anchoring its tourism blitz on its blessed location at the southern foothills of Mount Apo, the country’s highest peak at 10,313.6483 feet or 3,143.6 meters. Besides towering majestically above all other mountains in the country, this dormant volcano is famous for its being home to the rare and endangered Philippine Eagle (Pithecophaga jefferyi), the rare Waling-Waling orchid, and a host of other endemic and critically endangered flora and fauna. Clover Jane C. Sabornido, tourism officer of the municipality of Matanao (this place is called Matan-ao by the local inhabitants and the surrounding provinces), said the municipal government has also devised plans to take a chip off of the provincial push for tourism attraction. “We were thinking of what else should we do to partake of the blessings of the province’s tourism promotion. We agree that we have these caves, all 63 of them in one town, and we find it our unique feature to capture the interest of tourists and to contribute to the total allure of the province,” she told a group of online video bloggers and journalists on September 6. A cave congress was the central event, with spelunking taking the spotlight as the pinnacle activity. This town is 92 kilometers southwest of Davao City and the caves are some 20 kilometers to the west of población Matanao.
In nature’s belly
THE Su’bon Cave is one of the first batches of caves, along with Asbang Cave, to come out of the evaluation by the Department of EnContinued on A2
PESO EXCHANGE RATES n US 56.9610 n JAPAN 0.3816 n UK 69.5323 n HK 7.2756 n CHINA 7.7890 n SINGAPORE 41.7144 n AUSTRALIA 36.6031 n EU 60.1850 n KOREA 0.0423 n SAUDI ARABIA 15.1884 Source: BSP (September 29, 2023)