66
Summer road trip
Cebu Pacific flies to
General Santos City from
Manila, Cebu and Iloilo.
in at Lemlunay Resort, which is a great
place to decompress when you’ve had
your fill of highway and lost all sense
of time. In the language of the B’laan,
a tribe that was among the original
settlers of this coastal area,
lemlunay
means paradise. Though the area has
seen some development, parts of it still
fit that description. In the waters of
Sarangani Bay, just a few steps from
the resort, divers can explore the 300m
TinutoWall, an underwater sanctuary
that’s home to everything from sea
turtles and reef sharks to schools of
clownfish and napoleon wrasse.
Up in the hills, at the Sarangani
Paragliding Site and SAFII Ranch, we
feast on views stretching from sea to
mountain. We’re here to visit one of
just three paragliding sites nationwide
— the others are in Carmona, Cavite
and Bontoc, Mt Province — to try this
fast-growing sport. In 2009, Jason
Luengo discovered that the wind
conditions in the area made it ideal
for sports like paragliding and hang-
gliding. He became the first to take
to the skies here and now the area is
home to a flying club.
We arrive at 10am for scheduled
tandem flights with the pilots
of Sarangani Paraglide, but the
winds are deemed too strong for
the moment. We pass the time in a
makeshift store —manned, oddly
enough, by a Frenchman — next to a
hilltop construction site. The pilots,
all strapped to as-yet-uninflated
wings, stand in the shade of a solitary
tree, patiently monitoring the wind
conditions. They don’t seem to mind
the punishing heat, the thick dust or
the fact that lunchtime was hours ago.
Flying is their deal and they’re with
their tribe.
The view— of the sea, the hills, the
sun and a clutch of eager pilots — sends
me back to that morning in T’boli town
when one musician inquired after
which tribe I belonged to. Still basking
in a kind of high thanks to everything
I’ve seen inMindanao, it occurs to
me that if you stretch the definition
of “tribe” to encompass its modern
meaning — the people you choose
to call your own — I’ve finally got an
answer for him.
Clockwise: a pilot tests the
wind conditions at the fly site in
Maasim, Sarangani; ready to dive
in and check out the Tinuto Wall
just below Lemlunay Resort; flying
along the 740m cable at Lake Sebu
Seven Falls Zipline
BIKINI TOP BY RIPCURL
