Plants & Field Trips - December 2006
(Click on thumbnails for larger images)

I had my first unsuccessful collecting trips in December.  I was lucky in October and November - when I went out to find Gomphandra, I found species in fruit.  But no one is lucky all the time, and I did see some new plants, even if I didn't find Gomphandra.  I may try to revisit one of the areas in hopes of finding a very endemic species.

While my fiance David was visiting me, I took him out on collecting trips.  Some might consider this cruel and unusual punishment (what ever happened to lying on a beach or snorkeling?) and at first David wasn't too keen on the idea.  However, neither one of us really enjoys snorkeling, and getting a sunburn on a beach that only has coconut palms for vegetation isn't my idea of fun.  I was able to persuade David that he needed to see what my field research was like, and I pointed at that after flying halfway around the road to see me, it didn't make sense for him to do something else on his own while I went looking for plants.  Well, in the end he didn't get to see my research in action but we did have a wonderful time, even if I did make him sit on a bus for 10 hours and walk along dangerously narrow paths on extremely steep hillsides.

December 13, Luzon, Ifugao Province, Banaue

David and I got a night bus to Banaue on December 12 and slept fitfully during the long, slow ride north.  As soon as the sun came up on the morning of the 13th, we were rewarded for the hours of sitting with fantastic views of the Cordillera mountains.  We passed through Lagawe, the closest city to Banaue, and wound through several series of mountains and valleys.  The bus stopped at one point and the driver got out and visited with someone who lived along the road.  Other passengers started grumbling, and eventually someone told us that the driver was unethical, stopping like that to visit when we were so close to our destination.  The second time the bus stopped, it was because a landslide was blocking the road to Banaue.  Landslides are not uncommon along the road.  The road is cut into the side of the mountains, and most of the mountainsides have been completely deforested, so there's nothing to stop erosion after heavy rain.  The latest typhoon had dumped heavy rains over much of Luzon for the previous 2 days, and a part of the hill above the road had slumped.  We unloaded our bags and walked a narrow path beside the road to the other side of the landslide.  A front end loader was busily working to clear the road, but it was obvious that no buses would be getting through until much later in the day.  We got into a jeepney that was provided free of charge by the bus company and continued on to Banaue.

Once in Banaue, we checked into the inn, had breakfast, and started to plan what we wanted to do.  Banaue's rice terraces are not as impressive as they were 100 years ago.  Traditionally, terrace land is divided among the descendants of the original owners, so at this point many rice fields are too small to be profitably farmed.  Large areas of the terraces have grown back into forest, so the visual impact of the terraces has been lessened.  Now most tourists go to Batad or Mayoyao for the postcard views of the terraces.  David and I decided to do an afternoon hike around the Banaue terraces and head for Batad the next day.  We'd planned to only spend one night in Banaue and then go to Sagada, but given the long bus ride and the beauty of Banaue, we decided to skip Sagada and enjoy Banaue.  We took a brief walk down the main road through town, past a school and houses built down from street level.  I paused to try to photograph a black, pink, and turquoise butterfly visiting some impatiens, but it never perched long enough for me to focus my camera.  I did get a picture of a Ludwigia (Onagraceae) blooming in a drainage ditch beside the road.

Just as we were about to turn around, I saw a sign for a store.   Before coming to Banaue, I had met and talked with a woman who's from the area, and she had mentioned a forester who worked for DENR.  His last name was the same as the name on the sign, so I went into the store and asked the woman behind the counter if she knew.  He turned out to be her cousin, and she told me where to find the DENR office, so after lunch, David and I headed down a steep set of stairs below the People's Lodge and Restaurant in search of the forester.  He wasn't in, but I was explaining my research to the other DENR employee when he arrived.  We talked for a while about forestry research and Banaue.  He said that all the upper mountain slopes had been declared forest, without allowing any land for agriculture, and that every time a farmer cut trees, even on an abandoned plot that had been cultivated for years, he was supposed to put the farmer in jail.  Of course, jailing a poor farmer who's trying to feed his family isn't the best way to protect forests.  I asked about education efforts, and he said there wasn't much money to implement programs.  I asked whether he was familiar with Gomphandra, and though he didn't recognize the genus name, after I described it and drew pictures of flowers and fruit, he said there was a local species that had matching fruit.  He said he could take us to the mossy forest of Mt. Polis to look for it that afternoon and act as a guide.

I was rather astonished.  I'd expected to maybe arrange to get his help if I was able to return to Banaue at some point, but after I checked with David, we headed to the inn to get ready for a hike.  The forester and an elderly man (friend, relative?) met us there in a battered Land Rover.  We stopped to get gas, which I paid for as agreed, stopped by the forester's house so he could change shoes, and started down the road towards Bontoc.  It was paved for a bit but quickly switched to dirt/gravel.  I thought the road was in pretty good shape, considering, but the ride was on the teeth-rattling side.  The Land Rover made a whole symphony of squeaks and groans as it bounced over the road.  The windows had long since given up the ability to be wound up or down and instead rattled side to side in the doors.  The road didn't have much of a shoulder and wound in and out of little valleys, and our guide drove as fast as he could on the road.  I managed to get a few shots out the window after the low clouds lifted a bit.  Most of the hillsides we passed had some vegetation, but it was clear that everything had been cut at one time.  We passed a few areas where men were mining stones and gravel right at the edge of the road.

It took about 45 minutes to drive to Mt. Polis, which is right on the border between Ifugao and Mountain provinces.  We stopped at an area that had a power or communications station and a very large statue of the Virgin Mary.  Our guide's friend stayed behind and we set off through the farm fields surrounding the station.  The farmers in the small village there were growing cabbages, carrots, Chinese cabbage, and potatoes.  The guide explained that the fields are at a high enough elevation that the farmers don't have to water their crops.  He said he'd had a meeting there the previous week to express the importance of not cutting more forest.  Not too far above the fields, we entered the edge of the mossy forest.  My camera batteries were almost drained so I couldn't use the flash and didn't take many pictures, but I saw dwarf oaks, Medinilla (Melastomataceae), ferns, Selaginella, Lycopodium, Sphagnum, Rubus (Rosaceae), a whole variety of orchids including several species of Dendrochilum, Lobaria and Peltigera lichens, and a whole number of trees and shrubs I couldn't identify.  The path was very narrow and several times it seemed like we were walking over tree roots and moss rather than solid ground.  The path kept to the edge of the forest and ended at the cleared summit of Mt. Polis.  I wondered what the forest had been like before most of it had been cut for agriculture.  The tallest trees were only about 20 feet high, but they were covered with orchids and round clumps of moss - a fabulous amount of diversity in a small area.

On the drive back to Banaue we stopped at the Pula trailhead (km 390).  Pula is the remotest village in the Banaue area, requiring about 6 hours of hiking to reach it.  The trail was slick red clay, churned to mud in some places by the cattle or water buffalo that lived in the area.  The surrounding forest was a mixture of pine, tree ferns, and broad leaved trees, but it appeared to be second growth.  The trail was wide enough to drive down, so no trees were right next to it.  I took pictures of a Lycopodium (probably now in another genus), a light pink Melastoma (Melastomataceae), and the species of Alnus (Betulaceae) that was so widespread in Banaue and the surrounding mountains.  We passed a large plant that I assmed was in Zingiberaceae.  On Mt. Polis, our guide had broken off a cluster of fruits from the same kind of plant, saying that the white flesh inside the purplish fruits was edible, if tasteless.  He said he would take it home for his kids, who didn't spend much time in the forest and hadn't eaten it before.  The plant along the Pula trail still had some white flowers blooming at the top of the pendulous inflorescence.  I saw a Callicarpa (Verbeneaceae) with lovely purple fruit in axillary clusters, and later took a picture of strawberry-red Melastoma fruits.  The guide said they were edible too, but I didn't try them.


December 14, Luzon, Ifugao Province, Banaue

We had planned to visit the rice terraces at Batad, but decided that neither of us wanted to spend the whole day hiking to and from the famous amphitheater there.  Instead, we took our time in the morning, visiting the Banaue Museum, buying souvenirs, writing, and finding the post office.  I took a series of pictures from the balcony of the guesthouse, from the northwest to the east.  I also photographed some of the lush lichens and mosses growing on the stone wall below the building, and the stunning orange flowers that the owners had planted along the walkway.

In the afternoon, we had arranged to take a walk through the rice terraces of Banaue with a relative of the woman who helped me plan the Banaue trip.  He had texted me the night before, and we had talked in person when we ran into him as we walked around town.  He met us with a tricycle and driver, and we drove to the Banaue Viewpoint.  We had already bought souvenirs that morning, but I did pick up a jar of peanut brittle, one of the local specialties, at the shop at the viewpoint.  The viewpoint was on the rim of a valley, above most of the rice terraces.  We started down the first of many, many stairs, and it wasn't long before I spotted the first plant that I wanted to photograph.  The walk we were doing was advertised as a 3 hour trek, but I warned David that it would take us longer because I kept getting distracted by plants.  The first plant was obviously parasitic, with brown, purple-striped stems, no leaves, and rose-purple flowers.  I had no idea what it was, but later in Baguio I saw a picture of it on a poster - Aeginetia indica (Orobanchaceae).

At first the path we were following didn't go along the rice terraces, though we had a good view of a terraced hillside.  As we dropped down, the terraces became hidden by tall grass and some regrown forest.  I took a picture of a shrubby sunflower that was very common, assuming that it was a weed.  Nearby I spotted a Brugmansia (Solanaceae), also not native but apparently planted as an ornamental.  A Cyperus growing by the path was probably a terrace weed as well.  We crossed the first of several streams, a small rushing brook lined with alders and low shrubs.  I didn't see many rocks on our walk, but one that was at eye-level as we started climbing up stairs was covered by a large parmelioid lichen.

Most of plants I took pictures of were right next to the path.  Some of them, like the nice Marchantia below, were actually growing on the rocks or concrete steps that made up the path.  In places where runoff flowed down the stairs, mosses, aquatic ferns, and liverworts were abundant.  At the top of one stairway, I saw a paddy tiller parked at the edge of a muddy terrace.  It was probably going to be used next in the terrace around the corner, which was covered by cut rice stalks.  As the guide led us around one hillside and down the next, I saw a number of small shrubby trees with white flowers.  They were growing out of the side of a terrace wall so I couldn't reach them, but I got pictures of the flowers.  The terrace walls were pretty high in some places, so falling off in pursuit of a plant would not have been good.

Many of the plants I saw were small.  I guess they had to be to survive to reproductive size on the terraces, where farmers regularly clear and cut back whatever weeds may be growing on the terraces.  Many of the terraces walls were carpeted by young plants of some weedy Asteraceae, but I spotted a Luzula (Juncaceae) growing out of a patch of Peltigera.  Further along there were small white and purple flowers on a slender peduncle, with leaves so tiny that I couldn't find them in the moss at the base of the plant.  I found a Hypericum in flower in a muddy cleared terrace rim next to the path, and further up another staircase I was surprised to find a Nepenthes.  I later read that they are terrestrial pioneers, but I had only seen them before as epiphytes in fairly mature forest.

The first part of the terrace walk was fairly easy.  There were many stairs, but the paths were wide and the views weren't enough to distract me from looking at plants.  I saw terraced paddies in several stages, but most of them seemed to have been tilled and were flooded.  I hadn't seen any Azolla except a small patch growing on the stairs, so I was delighted to round a corner and see a whole paddy carpeted with the small red and green ferns.  Azolla harbors a nitrogen-fixing cyanobacterium (Anabaena) and acts as a living fertilizer.  We descended again and passed a small Senna (Fabaceae) tree with bright yellow flowers.  The valley opposite was mostly regrown forest, but I could still see traces of the terraces that had been abandoned.  The pines and cogon grass that bordered the stairs also indicated that we were passing through abandoned agricultural land.

One of the interesting things about the terrace tour was that something different lay around each twist in the path.  Not only were the terraces impressive pieces of construction in their own right, but as we wound from a south facing wall to an east facing wall, the plant community of the walls changed, sometimes dramatically.  We descended to a waterfall, swollen from the rain of the previous few days, and edged across a very narrow and rickety improvised bridge.  The slope next to the waterfall was covered with forest regrowth, and I paused in the shade of a tree fern to take a picture back towards the viewpoint where we had started our walk.  The forest provided a shadier and damper habitat, and several different plants grew in the irrigation ditch next to the path.  A delicate white-flowered Apiaceae was in bloom, horsetails (Equisetum sp.) curved upwards from the terrace walls, and the pretty blue flowers of some plant I couldn't identify rose above its strikingly asymmetrical leaves.

Along the same stretch of the path, I saw what looked like a Desmodium (Fabaceae) with orange flowers.  Further along, some sort of mint with pale purple flowers stuck out above the small weedy Asteraceae that carpeted most of the terrace walls.  We had been walking along a fairly decent path, but at this point the concrete edge of the irrigation ditches started to narrow.  On one side was a terrace wall, overgrown with vegetation that hid the ditch, which might have been dry or filled with water and was probably several feet deep.  On the other side was a good 5-10 foot drop into a wet and muddy rice paddy.  I had to stop and convince myself that I could walk along without falling off to either side.  After walking for a bit, I became comfortable enough to crouch down and bend over the terrace wall to take pictures of a pink Spiranthes cf sinensis (Orchidaceae).

I had seen a lot of ferns on the walk, but I hadn't been in the habit of taking pictures of them.  I didn't know of a reference book that I could use to identify them, and I don't know fern families the way I know flowering plant families, partly because fern taxonomy isn't necessarily well settled and partly because I've never had a chance to take a tropical fern families course.  However, I couldn't resist taking a picture of a very lacy Sphenomeris retusa, growing together with Sphenomeris chinensis.  Around the next bend, in a sunnier area, I saw what at first appeared to be a member of Commelinaceae.  Closer inspection revealed it to be an orchid that was a bit past its prime.  I carefully walked along the very narrow path (only as wide as my foot), passed another area of freshly tilled paddies, and then found the same orchid again, this time in bloom.  An ant was resting among the bracts that subtended the flowers, and I spent a bit of time trying to get a good shot of the open flower.  The orchid was a Spathoglottis, probably plicata.

After I took the orchid pictures, we rounded another bend and the plant diversity dropped off.  The terrace walls had been more recently cleared, and because I wasn't seeing any new plants, I took some pictures of the town, visible in the distance, and water-filled paddies with the sun and sky reflecting off their surfaces.  The path was still narrow, and much of my time was also spent carefully watching where I placed my feet.  Looking down did have its advantages - I found a tiny orchid with brownish flowers growing out of a terrace wall below my feet.  Later, in a wider spot, I paused to take a picture of terraces framed by pine trees.

Perhaps understandably, I had to work hard not to trail behind during our tour.  I had a hard time getting the little wall orchid in focus, so David thought perhaps I'd fallen off the wall and came back to look for me.  I used the opportunity to take a picture of him - I think he's smiling partly because I didn't fall off and partly because of the view.  By this point we were at the last part of our walk, which was more or less the final long descent.  The path widened again and we passed several paddies that showed signs of very recent work.  Golden apple snails had laid their bright pink eggs on the terrace walls.  The snails are considered pests, but they're also harvested and eaten as a delicacy.  We went down an improvised set of stairs - branches that had been stuck into a dirt-and-stone terrace wall.  As we approached the uppermost houses of the village, I paused to take a picture of one of the few stalks of rice that the harvesters had missed.  Down below the first set of houses, I finally had a glimpse of the waterfally that I'd been able to see from our inn's balcony.

The last part of the tour was mostly taken up with descent.  More and more of Banaue became visible, and the stairs changed from branches and stone to concrete.  I'm not sure how much of the concrete was for the tourists and how much was for the ease of the locals.  The only way to get bags of cement mix to the area was to carry it.  In fact, everything had to be carried up by someone.  We passed children, heading home from school, who were climbing up the stairs.  I realized that for them, life on a steep slope was normal.  They probably learned at an early age the dangers of not watching where they walked, and the daily trek up and down was just a part of their routine.  One of the last paddies we walked past had a small sea of green in its middle.  Rice that hadn't been threshed from its stalks had been set down in neat rows to germinate and provide seedlings for the next planting.  The vegetation on the terrace walls was almost nonexistent in the upper parts of the village, but I spotted some fertile Marchantia growing on a damp patch of wall.  I took one last shot of the terraces and the valley back toward our starting point, and then we dropped down into the village and walked to the inn.

That was the end of our tour but not the end of the day.  We had timed things just right - dusk was falling as we walked (uphill) to the inn.  Earlier we had talked about eating dinner at the restaurant where we'd had lunch, and the woman who had served us said that they were always open.  So I was surprised when we found the place dark and tightly shut after we changed and walked back to the town center.  We made do at another place, and for the first time we weren't the only customers.  Some other tourists, perhaps British or Australian, sat at one of the other tables, drinking, smoking, and watching a basketball game.  Banaue was one of the only places I've been where they allowed smoking in restaurants.  I had asked for some food to go, so that we could have lunch the next day on the bus, but our server didn't quite understand me, so I had to reorder after we had finished our dinner.  Eventually we got the food and headed back to the inn, to pack and go to bed early.

December 15

We got up before the sun in order to be ready to catch the bus to Baguio.  The night had been cloudy, but as the eastern horizon lightened and became suffused with a peachy yellow light, the clouds started to roll back.  I used the balcony railing in lieu of a tripod to capture the dawn, though the picture doesn't do the event justice.  Though I usually don't think of such things, I decided to take a picture of the inn's dining area, so we would have a reminder of the glorious use of wood throughout the place.

I didn't take any pictures the rest of the day.  We traveled south toward Lagawe, the nearest city, stopping at various points to pick up passengers, packages, and mail.  The views of the Cordillera mountains and valleys were spectacular, but they came in glimpses as the bus wound around curves or passed by gaps in the roadside vegetation.  When we reached the area of the landslide, the bus just managed to scrape through the gap that had been dug out of the mound of dirt that still covered most of the road.  The ride to Baguio was long, but it wasn't boring.  All of the scenery was new because the ride up had been at night.  We reached the valley south of the Cordillera Central and passed by long stretches of rice fields.  After we reached Rosario, the bus started the long uphill climb to Baguio.  At one point the driver pulled off the road at a place that had a small store and canteen.  Two people grabbed hoses and started washing the sides of the bus.  When they sprayed water into the wheel wells, clouds of steam came billowing out.  The rest stop was partly to let the brakes cool.  It might not seem like the driver would use the brakes heavily while going uphill, but he had to slow down for each curve, and the road was nothing but curves.

We got off the bus at Burnham Park and waited a while until Edwin found us.  I had asked my family members if they wanted to come up to Baguio because I was paying for a van to come up, but they had said they couldn't.  So I was quite to surprised to find them all there, with the addition of Edwin's parents, who had lost part of their house and couldn't afford a vacation on their own.  We did some shopping at the open air market and got other food supplies at the huge SM.  Marilyn had reserved rooms at a hostel that has connections to UP Los Baños.  David and I got settled into one room while the women started dinner preparations in the tiny kitchen.  I figured I would just get in the way with five people already working in there, so I read and David wrote while we waited for dinner.  The night was pretty cool, but we had brought fleece sweaters for the freezing bus ride and the cool weather in Banaue, so we were prepared.

December 16, Mt. Santo Tomas, Baguio, Benguet Province

We got up early in the morning, had breakfast, and prepared to head out to Mt. Santo Tomas.  Originally when I had asked Marilyn to reserve the van, the plan had been that the van would drive us from one forested area to another so that I could check forest pockets for Gomphandra.  Instead, perhaps because all the family had come up, the van dropped us and a guide from DENR off on the road up the mountain, and then left to take other people shopping.  Even though we were heading up, things went downhill from there are far as I was concerned.  There was almost no forest in sight, just a little fringe along the side of the road, and we were heading to an elevation that was higher than the report I had for Gomphandra fuliginea.  Of course, it would take a lot to keep me from looking at plants, even if the habitat was inappropriate, and it wasn't long before I spotted an orange lily by the side of the road.  I use the term lily loosely - I have no idea which family it was actually in.  Liliaceae was split up, and I haven't learned all the new families.  Another distraction was the view of Baguio, which I found appalling.  Baguio is touted as a mountain paradise, a retreat from the heat of Manila, but the extensive sprawl and rampant construction that have led to extensive deforestation and horrible traffic congestion didn't seem remotely like paradise to me.

The forests of Mt. Santo Tomas were no exception to the deforestation and development trend.  They seemed to be mostly gone, though I hadn't yet seen the true extent of the destruction of the mossy forest that covered the mountain as recently as 10 years ago.  The rocks on the side of the road, though, were paradise for lichens and would have made any lichenologist happy.  Parts of the road never receive direct sunlight, and even though the mossy forest is gone, the mountain still receives the abundant moisture that supported a host of epiphytes.  I have seen few foliose or fruticose lichens in the Philippines - the lowland dipterocarp forests seem to specialize in crustose species, and where the forests are gone, coconut palms may provide the only suitable habitat for a few species.  However, the combination of exposed rocks and no trees overhead to drop leaf litter made for a perfect lichen habitat.  Instead of taking pictures of plants, I took pictures of lichens.  Most of them can't be identified to species without collection and laboratory tests, but the photos below show some of the diversity that I encountered.  The pink flowered legume (maybe a Desmodium?) grew on the opposite side of the road from the rock faces.

Of course, lichens aren't the only "plants" that appreciate bare rock and abundant moisture.  The rocks were also festooned with mosses, which I carefully avoided photographing because I knew I had even less chance of identifying them without a microscope and a technical key, and with some lovely red leafy liverworts.  As the road wound upward, we passed into an area that had fewer rocks and more bits of mossy forest remnants.  The guide asked me if I knew what one of the short trees was.  I recognized it as fig from its milky sap and stipule scars, and when I broke open one of the fruits, it showed the typical pattern of fig fruits, though the bright pink color was a surprise.  I had a good view of Baguio over the top of the fig tree, and what struck me was the layer of gray smog that hung over the city.  I was glad that we were well above it, where the air appeared to be a lot cleaner.  Back on the side of the mountain, a flash of white caught my eye, and after I had checked it out with my binoculars, I decided to go take a look.  I knew it wasn't a Gomphandra, but I was getting desperate to see some flowering plants.  I began climbing up a stream bed, and the guide insisted in going ahead of me with his machete.  The flower turned out to be the white calyx bracts of a Mussaenda (Rubiaceae), a species widely planted as an ornamental, but I saw some Gunnera in bud and took a picture of that instead.

My next interesting find was a Carex (Cyperaceae) with red fruit.  I have no idea which section it was in, but the seeds were trigonous and the red perigynia reminded me of the orange fruits of Carex aurea in New England.  I speculated that the fruits were probably edible, but David wasn't interested in trying them, and I decided to err on the side of caution.  We came to an area with more rocks, and though I resisted taking many more lichen pictures, I see fertile Usenea so infrequently that I took one last quick shot.  Further up the road, the guide spotted a lily with blue flowers.  I thought perhaps it was in Alliaceae, but the foliage had no smell.  We later saw another individual that had globse green capsules.  The leaves were at the end of a long trailing stem, and dried leaves from a previous season hung down just below the green leaves.  I stopped nearby to take a picture of a Marchantia with particularly nice gemmae cups.

As we came closer to the top of the mountain, a flash of red at the top of a small cliff caught my eye.  With delight, I saw that it was a Rhododendron (Ericaceae) and I dropped everything except my camera to scramble up and take a picture of it.  Asia has a large number of Rhododendron species, but so far I had only seen one, in Leyte.  Getting back down was a bit tricky, but I managed without causing damage to myself or the loose rocks of the cliff.  There was a good view of more Baguio sprawl, so I took another picture of the city before coming to the first Benguet pine along the road.  Pinus insularis is not a particulary large tree, but it reminded me of the some of the pine species that grow in the northeastern US.

A bit later I saw another plant that reminded me of home.  Though its flowers were yellow, it looked almost like the Anaphalis (Asteraceae) that's called pearly everlasting in New England.  A nearby rosette indicated that the species was probably a biennial.  We rounded a corner and started up the last stretch to the top of the mountain.  I guess I had hoped for trees at the top, but instead I saw houses and vegetable gardens.  A few trees grew along the road, including a flowering one that I thought might be in Celastraceae but that Dr. Fernando identified as a Symplocos.  The guide kept saying that the last time he had been up the mountain, in 2004, there had still been forest, but all I saw were cabbages and communication towers.

The top wasn't what one would expect from a mossy forest habitat.  The road was hot and dusty, and the rock outcrops had no lichens growing on them.  The only interesting plant I saw was a yellow mint or scroph that was growing all by itself out of one of the barren outcrops.  We kept walking, and eventually I spotted an area on a slope that looked as if it might still have a bit of mossy forest.  The main question was how to reach it.  The road cut above it, and we couldn't see a path that led to it.  The mountain slopes were covered with more gardens and abandoned agricultural fields.  We cut down through them for a while, but were prevented from reaching the area by a steep drop-off.  We headed back up hill and eventually managed to reach a path that appeared to lead down to the area.  I saw some trees, including a very common one with few stout branches and red stellate hairs on its leaves.  When I found one in flower, I took a picture, which Dr. Fernando later identified as a Clethra.  The slopes opposite us were a mix of pine forest and abandoned fields.  According to our guide, much of Baguio had burned during the El Niño years in the 1990s, and the pine forest was only maintained through regular fires.  The pine forest is also protected, though we found evidence of illegal logging.  The mossy forest, which is the natural community at that elevation and which supports far more diversity, is not protected.

We spent more time following the path down before I decided we might have a better chance of reaching the forest fragment if we headed up a dry river bed that seemed to parallel it.  I saw a few more small trees in flower, including one that was very common, with small axillary racemes of white flowers and toothed leaves.  However, we couldn't seem to get close to the forest fragment.  There was just no good way to reach it, and eventually, mindful of the time it would take to hike back and the exertion required to climb back up to the road, we decided to turn around and head back.  Had I been on my own, I would have bush-whacked to reach the fragment, but I wasn't about to leave David behind and it would have been unreasonable for me to drag him with me over questionable terrain on what seemed like a fruitless search for Gomphandra.

On our way out, I once again proved the adage that you always see different plants when you retrace your steps.  A lovely white shrub with punctate leaves was most likely an Ardisia or some other member of Myrsinaceae.  I saw a shrub with bright red fruit along the edge of the dry river, and for some reason I thought I had seen it in a book and that it was in Urticaceae.  Later when I checked my books, I couldn't find anything like it.  After we passed back into the abandoned fields, I spotted a scrambling Galium (Rubiaceae) that I had completely missed on the way down.  I took one last photo of the mossy forest fragment that we never reached, and then turned my attention to the same weedy sunflower we'd see all around Baguio.  It may have been a weed, but its inflorescences were simply gorgeous.

At last, we reached the road that cut across the top of the mountain.  We paused for a water break and I noticed a large spot of blood on my pant leg.  When I pulled it up, I saw a shining pool of blood on the outside of my sock and knew immediately that I had been bitten by a leech.  I had picked one off David's shirt earlier, but apparently one had also made its way up my leg and through my sock.  It was long gone by the time I discovered the bit, proving that leech bites are painless - I never felt a thing.  I did my best to mop up the mess and slapped a band-aid over the spot, but it continued to bleed for the next several hours, and two month later, the bite is still a clearly visible red spot on my leg.  We started walking briskly, but I had to stop when I spotted a bunch of white lilies.  Again, I use the term lily loosely.  While I was admiring the flowers, fog started rolling up the mountain side and over the edge of the road.  We still had some light when we passed the summit vegetable gardens and started down the mountain.  A patch of Arenaria (Caryophyllaceae) that had been shut on our way up had opened during the afternoon, so I managed to get a photo of the flowers.

The last part of the hike down wasn't much fun.  The fog closed in steadily until almost nothing was visible.  I saw one patch of hillside where the mossy forest had been fairly recently cut and burned to make way for more gardens.  The picture of the road below shows the fringe of forest that remains right above it, but as soon as the hill side crests, the land has been cleared for agriculture.  I took my last picture of an Asiatic day flower (Commelinaceae).  The van picked us up, and we went back to the hostel.

Our plan was to have dinner and then start the drive back to Los Baños.  Again, I thought I would probably just get in the way in the kitchen, but it was hours before dinner was ready.  David and I passed the time by reading and working out a menu for our wedding.  After dinner, we packed and then loaded into the van.  It was no mean feat - besides having to fit in David, me, and our luggage, the family had bought bags and bags of vegetables, and every leftover bit of food and groceries we had bought in Baguio had to be squeezed in.  I had wanted to buy some souvenirs from Baguio, but we never had a chance to go shopping for them.  It's probably just as well - I don't think we could have fit much more into the van.  We made one rest stop on the drive back, and I woke up when we passed through the tolls before Calamba.  It was about 2 a.m. when we finally got home.

All in all, I really liked Banaue and heartily disliked Baguio.  If I can, I'll go back to both places, trying to find Gomphandra again.  I don't look forward to revisiting the Baguio area, but Gomphandra fuliginea hasn't been collected since 1907, and I would like to know if it still grows in patches of mossy forest.  If not, it might well be extinct.  Baguio is a very different place than it was when Elmer hiked through its canyons and over its mountain tops in search of plants.  I think I would have greatly preferred the 1907 version.

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Last updated: February 3, 2007