This is the Seaside Town that They Forgot to Bomb, Come, Come, Come, Nuclear Bomb

Remember me to one who lives there.
She once was a true love of mine.
- Simon and Garfunkel

As I did mention in previous posts, I owe you all an entry about the weekend trip to Corregidor that Jose and I took last year. Last year, meaning, November 15, 2008. Last year, meaning, three long months ago. As you can see, the subject matter has lain inert too long, enough so that I should have discarded the notion of even writing about it at this point. Unfortunately for everyone, I still feel like crowing about the trip -- which was also Jose's birthday gift to me -- largely because it's already gained the status of being The Best Weekend of My Life, cheese aside.

Now let's veer our attention to the island of Corregidor. If you've read enough about it, you will most likely have bumped into a few references that say that the island is shaped exactly like a tadpole. Even WikiPedia (which is not an entirely reliable source, but still!) says something similar in its entry for Corregidor, and I quote:

The island is about 48 kilometers west of Manila. It is shaped like a tadpole, with its tail running eastward, and has a land area of 9 km².

I want to tell you that all these sources that claim that Corregidor looks like a tadpole is lying. Lying! Corregidor might resemble a tadpole, I'll give them that. But the truth is that the island looks more like a sperm cell than a tadpole. It's true. Don't let the Catholic Church tell you otherwise.

To illustrate, here's a map of Corregidor, complete with indiscernable names and all those useless lines and squiggles you so often find in maps:





And below, a side-by-side comparison of a nice widdle tadpole and a sperm cell.





I mean, look at that tadpole! Isn't he the cutest thing? One day he will grow up to be a frog, and I will want to cuddle up to it when I'm lonely late at night. That sperm cell, however. You might as well call it the Corregidor Reproductive Cell. Hee hee, I'm so witty. The Corregidor Reproductive Cell! Biology books everywhere must be revised.

Back to the trip. It's pretty hard to give you a blow-by-blow account at this juncture, since three months have passed, and everyone knows that the state of my memory is comparable to a hunk of Swiss cheese: dense, but full of those goddamn holes. Anyway, enough of that. I want to start where the trip begins: in a bus full of ooh-ing and aah-ing Filipinos, plus a sprinkling of your requisite white foreigners.

Jose and I on the Tramvia, the island's nod to the trams that used to ply the routes along Corregidor.

I was part of the ooh-ing and aah-ing contingent because so much of that island invited nothing less than raw wonder. The tram-like bus we rode on coursed over the island's concrete roads, which snaked between cliffsides and hushed woods, forests that wouldn't let you peer into its heart . Ruins lay in the very same state they were found in, a doleful toppling of beams and charred wood, the concrete rich with lichen and sodden with history's sap.

A park employee in Philippine military garb during the Japanese-Filipino war.

We slinked through dank, labyrinthine tunnels chilled and weighted by the presence of a thousand unseen things, hands that weren't there when you turned around. Our guides showed us the ammunition that had been used during the war, all the cannons and the mortar shells and the scars they bore, the way they were later driven into the earth to become sleeping, harmless juggernauts.

Jose's big gun.

In front of the Malinta Tunnel

Inside the Malinta Tunnel.

In Corregidor Inn, dicking around.

Jose and I spent the night in the Corregidor Inn, which had a wheezing (but surprisingly efficient) airconditioner, white linen sheets, and a general appearance that made it look like a picture straight out of a history book. I will no longer talk about the room or any other activity related to it, because I will gross you out if I go any further, and I don't want to make myself look like a hussy even if I already look like one, in which case, I would like you to shut up.

While that weekend in Corregidor was amazing -- especially since I had spent it with Jose -- I would have been a fool to assume that we would discover something new there. On that island, our eyes met nothing but secrets, and what was ostensibly disclosed to us gave way to more stories that we could not plumb into. Our position in the timeline didn't permit for anything beyond some access to a body of conjecture, a smattering of facts, a relic sealed in a glass case.

What I found instead was this: the island does not mourn itself, and it proceeds anyway in the fashion that it's expected to. Its forests have overcome the violence from decades back, the woods teem with birdcall, and fields of emerald grass lie asprawl around the island. Nature has seen, moved on and forgotten, but there we were, thinking of the dead and gunfire and a war we had never experienced, the onus of remembering sitting square and restless on our chests.