For those from Luzon or perhaps from Bicol, due to distance, this place could be the place to have a family outing. If your van is not in condition one would always rent a car, presuming of course that you have a considerable amount of Money. It’s called “Las Casas Fillipinas de Acuzar“. This is not outside our country as FB pictures would suggest. It’s located in the vicinity of Bagac, Bataan.  

That is why, if there is no invitation, or a good host like we had – the parish of Batac – and when you are from the Visayas or Mindanao and divine providence is always wanting, forget it. 

This place is quite expensive for an ordinary middle income Filipino family maybe perhaps due to power maintainance, every indoor places are air conditioned. The heat of Bataan is not always desirable, especially that their forests are diminishing and the place is near the beach facing China Sea. An overnight could be desirable where you could have coolness in the evening and leave before lunch.

I must say however, that there is an obvious “out-of-reality” atmosphere, an escapist ambiance. Well, you could say: is this not the very purpose of “outing”? In a sense, yes. Yet the buildings, the seeming natural pool which unsuccesfully pretends to look like a natural brook, the river, are all man-made. Not only that, the houses wish to appear as original are all”kidnapped” or “smuggled” from all over the Philippines. Moreover, the reconstructed buildings have so much new materials, more than the purported original ones. This makes them look like replicas, though the original do not anymore exist. Court cases arose from the place they were taken from, for the local province and some local governments wished that it would be their own historical site. It’s unfortunate that these historical houses are not anymore where they are supposed to be, since history is always linked to the place, time and people. 

But money speaks. Billions were spent or paid to realize this distortion and now it became all private property. Tourism business here seems to use and presents unrealistically a cosmetic Cultural identity. For me it is all like disneyland, i.e., unreal and escapist, under the guise of cultural exposure. What a pity, that the people who invested a lot in preserving culture and in doing so, initiated a process of destroying culture itself in its every essence, and detaching it from the people and the place where culture first of all starts from. It is like a body without a soul. It is just an artificial expensive ghost village without the life of a community devoid of the people from which it started. They are completely absent. 

Perhaps its primary intention is to spend massive excessive company excess profits, in order to gain more money, utilizing a certain cultural ignorance or even destruction of our culture, with the intention of preserving it not in a deserving museum, but in a dehumanizing cultural strategy, where money is more important than people and its cultural heritage itself. Here, truly money speaks loudly, and ransom money will come mostly from tourists, though they could never bring back what was taken.

Well, I could say that for Batac and its surrounding population, it created a source of employment through the influx of local and foreign tourists. I have to confess, that the staff are well trained, polite, well dressed and trained well. Tour guides are adept and friendly. I admire all the staff. In fact, while changing for a short dip on the pool due to the heat, I dropped unknowingly my wallet to I don’t know where. Fortunately, someone called on my my cell phone asking me my name and told me they found my wallet. I have to sign when I retrieved it in one of their reception centers. I did, since nothing was missing. Maybe they were dissappointed, there is practically nothing inside except from my ID and a credit card which i use to buy my maintenance medications, if I have no cash. Here I salute the staff the majority of those are young and educated. They must have been from the nearby communities which tries to work honestly and who received good values from their parents, perhaps reinforced by company policies.  In those communities, there is more life, culture, respect, honesty. Thanks to them and I am happy for these people, not the buildings, of course!

After a not-so-cheap lunch and a short rest we have to go back to Tagaytay, via all the traffic of the SLEX and NLEX which took us four hours. Before leaving, at the exit gate, our bus was asked to stop for a while: a guard went up and called my name. I thought I have done something wrong, not until the guard asked me if I have really received my damn wallet. 

The only lesson I got from that outing: Write your cell phone numbers in your wallet and a sense of gratitude from its staff.