Tap, tap, tap goes Whang-od

Our new friend, Brian from Manila, gave us lots of fantastic recommendations: where to find things, where to unlock my still-under-contract phone (screw you AT&T), where to go in the northern Philippines, and best of all where to get a traditional tattoo from “the last tattoo artist of the Kalinga tribe”.

We boarded the overnight bus to Banaue then caught a van through Bontoc to Sagada (a story for another time). We were apprehensive to make the rest of the trip up to Kalinga as it meant going back down south just to catch the bus up north. This we found later, would be a theme in our Philippine travels, but having already come that far, it seemed somehow wasteful to not keep going. So we took the 4 hour journey to the village of Buscalan, where Whang-od has lived for all 98 of her years.

add some pics of buscalan or the video of driving through.

To our great surprise the jeepney driver, who had otherwise barreled easily over treacherous terrain, turned around, shrugged, and emptied the bus when he encountered a real roadblock. Rocks and dirt had washed down the mountainside – a common occurrence. Not knowing how far there was to go and with fading daylight, we accepted our new reality with as much sweaty grace as we could muster, pulled our backpacks on, and continued up the road. Thankfully, we could use our amazing wheeled backpacks on the paved road! The group of local boys, maybe 10 or 11 years old, seemed completely amused at our bags and our periodic breaks. “Where are you going? Where are you staying?” one boy asked us. “With Charlie,” we replied. He looked us up and down and said “OK, I’ll take you. I’m worried for you,” he explained as he watched our pace slow over the paved road which gave way to a dirt road – and then to a narrow, overgrown trail of dirt, and then a narrower-still, even more overgrown path of dirt, girded by a sheer, rocky drop into the ravine below.

“Are we going over there?” Girl Alex asked, pointing at a village high up on the mountain in front of us. “Oh no,” laughed the boy. ” We go there,” he pointed, directing our eyes to a village half as high up on the mountain just around the bend. Then we rounded the bend and the road began to decline. It turns out you have to go down a mountain to go up another one…

It was time to go up. We reshuffled our backpacks – all 15 kilos (~35 lbs) of our possessions for the next year – and started hiking up – the absurdly vertical steps and slippery switchbacks up to the village.

Our adolescent guide, who smoked cigarettes through most of the arduous hike, took us straight to our homestay, Charlie’s. Charlie welcomed us energetically with the local coffee and other local delicacies, compelling with his mischievous smile to sit, smoke, drink, and pick out our tattoos from books featuring indigenous designs.

Charlie was running around looking busier than a man in a small village should. We soon learned that the 7 young college kids from Manila who had come up for a day trip had not been able to all get their tattoos due to the long wait, so Charlie had taken them in and was running around trying to find room for everyone. This meant that there were 7 tattoos and a cloud of menthol cigarettes between us and our tattoos.

We woke up, drank more coffee, ate breakfast, drank more coffee, and headed to Whang-od’s house for our tattoos. We could hear the tap-tap-tap of her tools as we approached. She was already several people into her full day of tattooing. A group waiting to be next had formed, so we sat down at her beautiful porch overlooking the mountains and waited.

We met a man with a hippie ponytail and a command of Tagalog who had guided up a small group including a woman named Agnes. And we waited. We watched one of the young college kids from Manila blackout while getting tattooed for his first time – on his forearm no less – and we understood that for most of them, this would be their first and only tattoo – and we waited.

We chatted with anyone who would sit down and we tried to see if she was changing the needles between each tattoo, especially since I’m not up-to-date on my hepatitis vaccines. And we waited. And waited. We made friends. We waited.  We got cut in line by groups with aggressive tour guides. We waited more.

Agnes, who had come up looking for proof that she had the strength to be a spiritual healer and to mark her own spiritual healing, sat sweating in her sensible, reversible, traveler’s beige everything, debating with herself about whether to get a tattoo. With a lot of back-and-forth, she concluded that she surely must get a tattoo after climbing all the way here. Now the debate for what to get started…and after more deliberation, she chose a spiral, not from the board of designs, but from my shirt. Then, she struggled to customize it, settling on making it go counter-clock-wise. And she did. And we waited.

As it neared lunch time, we saw a thinning of the crowd and a lack of old faces. Finally it was our turn! I walked over to get tattooed, just as Whang-od stood up to eat and rest. We climbed back up to Charlie’s to eat and wait.

We came back after an hour, this time with Charlie’s wife who became concerned that we hadn’t been tattooed yet. She waited and watched Whang-od with us to make sure we didn’t lose our place in line again.

We waited more as a guy who was getting a full sleeve done by her sat for a third session. It was becoming clear that we weren’t going to get a turn today, so I was told that I could get one by her granddaughter, Grace, instead. I agreed to be tattooed by Grace, but with one of the guide’s assistance, Sleeve Guy allowed me to interrupt a small part of his turn to have Whang-od draw and start my tattoo, so I could experience the feel of her tap-tap-tap. Then, Grace finished the rest of it with her much softer (and straighter) tapping.

Next it was Girl Alex’s turn, but right before she could jump in, Sleeve Guy sat down again just as the last of the day was escaping. She had traveled for half a day, climbed nearly 5km, and waited over 9 hours, but as I turned to her to talk about maybe staying an extra day, she said, “Forget it. I don’t really want one. It feels like I should be getting one because I came all the way up here, but I don’t like being told what to do so….and besides, I already got a tattoo! She held up her arm to proudly display the long scratch she had gotten when climbing between the different houses looking for the missing book of tattoo designs. Bringing her scraped forearm, which she had decorated amid the wait, back down in a victorious fist she declared,

“I got my tattoo! Let’s go!”

Girl Alex adorned her authentic Kalinga tattoo.