27 January 2013
It was a Sunday morning when I, with a few friends,
went on a hike at Mt. Kalisungan (Calauan, Laguna), my third mountain just yet for the
#13PeaksFor2013 project (a personal year-long vow of conquering 13 peaks in one year). The thing about Mt. Kalisungan is its misleading trails. Unnecessarily, there really is a lot of
it. No one wants to get lost in the middle of the forest, so thanks to Mang Bino, the local tour guide we hired for this climb (+639092971437), we didn’t get
lost and the hike went smooth.
It’s nearing 0930H when we started with the
actual climb, started documenting things as well. Nothing
much special happened during the early part of the climb except for the muddy
trail caused by the horses going down the slope. Wildly growing talahib welcomed us as we reached the summit; these
were the primary reasons why we had to wear gloves on this particular climb.
The assault was quite steep, thus, the climb required us to occasionally seek the trail grasses for support. I was forced to have a stronghold on those razor-sharp leaves to maintain balance.
Some sort of mystery welcomed us at the summit. There was a large hole dug up, allegedly caused by treasure hunters. According
to Mang Bino, the incident took place last December when a group of
hikers camped at the site for five days. But the next thing the authorities
knew was a large hole and no trace of the alleged diggers. Sounds too controversial of a story to tell but this mountain used to be a final stand of
retreating Japanese soldiers towards the end of World War II; so you can do the rest of the imagining, conspiracy theory at best.
After the whole thing, we wrapped things up as the clouds were already
low and the rain's about to pour, with hints of a few lightning sketches.
The skies started to really darken. It's
hard to be caught in the middle of heavy rain up there so we rushed our way
down.
