Balik Bukid

Image from Dreamstime.

Last end of October my family and I went to Agbanawag, Nueva Ecija to visit my wife's dad's rice filed. "Bukid" we call it here. It's a great expanse of land tilled for palay. In Nueva Ecija, the "rice granary" or "rice bowl" of the Philippines, you often see nothing on the landscape but bukid.

There's lack of info on the etymology of the word bukid on Google. I wonder why the Fijan, Indonesian and Malay words for bukid all mean "hill" when in fact the Tagalog term bukid means a field. Here's what I think:

Rice fields are often back-dropped with mountain ranges or hills. So probably, long ago, when they pointed to a mountain in the Philippines, it included the rice fields. That's how it probably started.

Anyway, we went back to bukid living from October 30 to November 1. And I mean real bukid living. Being originally from Manila, we were practically balik-bukid folks that time.

The scene immediately in front of
the house where we stayed.

We stayed right in the middle of the vast and seemingly unending rice fields. My wife's late dad built a concrete house there for spending vacations in. It was an exciting adventure. Aside from a short vacation, we went there to check some things out.

Want to know hotel prices in the locality you're planning to visit? Click here.

Have you slept in the middle of a rice field before? With no neighbors around except trees, frogs, rats (the edible kind that eats nothing but palay), locusts, snakes, bats and different types of birds? I couldn't wait to see the place at night time.

Bamboo bridge

And yes, I tried to look at the nearby fishpond as well, enjoying the makeshift bamboo bridge now and then. If you haven't tried crossing narrow bamboo bridges before, well, I think you should.

The cool winds blowing down from the distant Sierra Madre mountain range (see picture above) kept on from morning to night. The quietude was eerie yet pleasant, for a change. We were tired of city noise so bird and insect chirps at night were very welcome. No TV, too. Can you imagine that? We just talked as a family.

At night, the whole place was enveloped in black, except for some small glowing dots which were lights from houses in the distance. We walked around along the long lonely road casting a beam of light from our powerful flashlight here and there.

I had my jacket on. It was cold.

The place looked very peaceful at night, except for some scenes that reminded us of some zombie movies we've seen. We went back to the house with total blackness behind our backs and which seemed to be after us, wanting to swallow us.

We had simple supper of mostly vegetables, cooked the way the natives of the locality cooked them---with preserved fish sauce---plus grilled fish cooked over an open fire. Later, after washing the dishes we went to bed, being extra sensitive to our surroundings. But with God in your midst, what's to be bothered about? We had a good sleep.