14/09/2022
Paul Proust de la Gironière, a French traveler who arrived in the Philippines in 1820 shares his adventures in hiking a native forest in Rizal.
Excerpt below:
"For more than two hours we climbed up a mountain covered with heavy timber, the ascent was rough and fatiguing, at last we reached the top, quite exhausted, where there was a vast flat, which it would take us some days to traverse. It was there, on this flat, that I beheld the most majestic, the finest virgin forest that existed in the world. It consists of gigantic trees, grown up as straight as a rush, and to a prodigious height. Their tops, where alone their branches grow, are laced into one another, so as to form a vault impenetrable to the rays of the sun.
Under this vault, and among those fine trees, prolific nature has given birth to a crowd of climbing plants of a most remarkable description.
The rattan and the flexible liana mount up to the topmost branches, and re-descending to the earth, take fresh root, receive new sustenance, and then remount anew, and at various distances they join themselves to the friendly trunks of their supporting columns, and thus they form very often most beautiful decorations.
Varieties of the pandanus are to be seen, of which the leaves, in bunches, start from the ground, forming beautiful sheaves.
Enormous ferns were to be met with, real trees in shape, and up which we clambered often, to cut the top branches, for their delicious perfume and which serve as food nearly the same as the palms.
But, in the midst of this extraordinary vegetation nature is gloomy and silent; not a sound is to be heard, unless perhaps the wind that shakes the tops of the trees, or from time to time the distant noise of a torrent, which, falling precipitately, cascades from the heights of the mountains to their base. The ground is moist, as it never receives the sun’s rays: the little lakes and the rivers, that never flow unless when swollen by the storms, present to the eye water black and stagnant, on which the reflection of the fine clear blue sky is never to be seen.
The sole inhabitants of these melancholy though majestic solitudes are deer, buffaloes and wild boars, which being hidden in their lairs and dens in the daytime, come out at night in search of food. Birds are seldom seen, and the monkeys so common in the Philippines, shun the solitude of these immense forests. One kind of insect is met with in great abundance, and it plagues the traveller to the utmost; they are the small leeches, which are found on all the mountains of the Philippines that are covered with forests. They lie close to the ground in the grass, or on the leaves of the trees, and dart like grasshoppers on their prey, to which they fasten."
- "Adventures in the Philippine Islands", Translated from the French of Paul P. de la Gironiere
Reposted from Coco Midel
