Abandoned Churches And Happy Goats

Tam gets these crazy notions sometimes. Honestly, most of the time it turns into some crazy amazing adventure and we find some remarkable uncrowded mysto cool spot.

But not always…

Sometimes it turns into a ninety degree stifling bushwhack through dense jungle foliage interlaced with big fucking spiderwebs. Yuck. All this for a mysterious waterfall in the jungle that she found one very vague mention of from some http://www.article a thousand years ago (yeah, from way back in the time when the internet was still relatively new).

The (very, very vague) directions said to find an old abandoned church and then find the trail behind the church, and follow that to the waterfall. We found the church after a three mile walk in the blazing tropical sun, asking every local we crossed paths with along the way. Strangely, none of them knew the location of, nor had actually heard of a waterfall on Boracay.

Hmmmm.

Anyway, we found the church.

It was actually pretty cool. It had been destroyed by a typhoon (I am not sure when), but some of it remained intact, if just slightly overgrown.

Jesus seemed to be in pretty good shape. If not the roof.

We found Mary laying around in the jungle next to the altar. It seems the typhoon was a bit rough on her. She wasn’t in the best shape.

It led to me to feel that her posture laying down like this was more implying a question, like, “how could it all come to this? Laying on the floor for eternity”. I thought about trying to stand her back up, but I believe it is better to leave things as they are sometimes. Who knows why nobody had done it before? I try not to interject my personal feelings on cultures that I don’t completely understand. Besides, maybe she was enjoying a nice relaxing rest in the shade?

This part of the building was surprisingly intact, and, strangely, they had just left paintings on the wall, sculptures, and this giant cabinet. Tam wanted me to climb in the cabinet and see if Narnia was somewhere through the back wall, but in the end I chickened out (probably due to the giant spiders everywhere).

We never found the trail to the waterfall. We bushwhacked as far as possible through the wall of green and spiders, trudging through malodorous bogs with stinking feet and sweaty heads to no avail. Tam was determined, however, and insisted every slight gap between two trees was the beginning of the mystery trail and warranted further exploration. I think we ended up looking at every space between every two trees in that jungle for at least twelve hours. It was a bust, though I did meet many new varieties of spider, and several other species of undiscovered creatures.

I suppose it’s good to make new friends.

We also made some new happy goat friends.

This was the shiny happy goat. He wasn’t all that friendly, but super pretty. Maybe a little too pretty to hang out with the likes of us, all stinky and covered in bog mud as we were.

This one was the friendliest, happiest goat we found. She just wanted to hang out with us, and adored any attention she could get.

She just loved to be scratched and petted, and would just rest her chin in your hand.

Yeah, it might be anthropomorphism, but I love that smile!

We actually ended up walking fifteen minutes back to where she was tied up just so we could give her an apple core we saved for her.

Like any other outing with Tam, it may have been a bit wacky and have resulted in some hardship, but in the end it was a grand adventure. We saw the church, made some new friends, and got some exercise.

Way, way, way too much exercise.