A Trip to Santa Teresita, Cagayan. July 2017.

Santa Teresita, Cagayan.

It's a fourth class municipality found in what I called bunbunan ng Pilipinas.

Three hours from Tarlac to Manila, twelve hours from Manila to Tuguegarao and two hours from Tuguegarao to Santa Teresita. I had to endure a total of seventeen hours of travel to conduct another training.

Santa Teresita is a very quaint town. No ATMs here. No mainstream franchise retaurants.  It may sound like the urban lurker's nightmare but what it has makes up for what other places lack: a lot of pretty sceneries, good food, hospitable people and natural resources.

Glorious Cagayano specialty batil patong is also available in Santa Teresita.

Among these resources are what locals call bakong. A semi-aquatic plant that kind of resembles pandan grows along the edges of lakes and rivers.

I found out that Santa Teresita has these growing in abundance.  Sometimes to the length of six feet. Now these plants apparently are excellent for fiber production.

I also heard that the local government unit has partnerships with the Design Center of the Philippines in developing textiles from bakong fiber.

Mayor Lolita Garcia of Santa Teresita, with her town's bakong fiber. Photo taken here.

There's even a training conducted (at the same time as my bamboo crafts gimmick) by some ladies from nearby Quirino province where bags of different shapes and sizes were made from weaving bakong.

I met the lady who championed the industry for her people, the same woman who requested assistance from DTI-II, without whom my trip wouldn't be possible. Mayor Lolita Garcia, CPA is a woman who was very much dedicated to her dreams of a better Santa Teresita. The facilities they've invested on the bakong processing hub, the variety of product samples in her office, and my very presence in Cagayan would be proof enough.

She told me about how Santa Teresita used to be so poor. Her municipality, in my opinion, is really fortunate to have someone with a records-savvy mindset for mayor.  Mostly, if not everything's accounted for, from natural and human resources to events and even some items as small as the municipal slaughterhouse's records.

We had a brief exchange of ideas on how her constituents have skills for crafts, and how her municipality can make use of the Department of Environment and Natural Resources's National Greening Program to start and eventually maintain a healthy bamboo industry in Santa Teresita. It was a brief but mentally satisfying meeting of the minds, nothing short of a fantastic prelude to my next few days in town.

My participants came from four municipalities: Santa Teresita, Allacapan, Buguey and Gonzaga.  The former two being landlocked and the latter half being coastal towns.  To them I was introduced by two fine DTI-II associates, Richard Siuagan and Marivic Calvo.

The workshop went on for 5 days, and there was plenty of room for experimentation for the participants.

Some participants were adventurous enough to go beyond what's prescribed.

Nothing like the smell of bamboo.

Participants used two varieties of bamboo, kawayang tinik and bayog. However, one participant brought over this variety he called Chinese bamboo.

Look at the size of that beauty!

With its vast resources, native materials and local industry, Cagayan is set to be known for greatness. With great resources, amazing talent and unwavering hospitality, Northeastern Luzon is a definite must-experience for travelers.

The grandeur of Cagayan skies embracing the rolling plains, mountains and seas of the province sort of remind me of picturesque scenes from Studi Ghibli films.