Merico' two younger sons, plowing his rice field in the rainy season.

Merico was proud of his life, and that he could feed his family all year from the land he owned and the river that flowed by it.

He was also proud that his young kids could now steer the water buffalo unsupervised, and would follow in his footsteps.

Other members of the community were less enterprising and we always "begging their relatives for some rice" during the difficult times of the year.

The road to Cabayugan, after crossing the central mountain range and entering the coastal plain on the west side of the island.

One of the huge dipterocarp trees, called "apitong" locally.

The same tree taken early morning when it is often misty.

Large trees like this one with their angled branches are popular nesting trees for the giant homey bees

Arriving with some roofing materials for the new camp center in Sugud village in the early days.

While full of other natural resources, coconut leaves for roofing were hard to find. Cabayugan is still mostly forest.

A Cabayugan family and one of their better houses

The priestess at the time giving a prayer to the spirits to protect our group and the program.

The Tagbunan are very much Christianized, but in Cabayugan some still maintain their original beliefs and traditions

Trying to figure out the myriad maps and mapping things that were popular there at the time.

Limestone outcrops in Tagabinet, the first really eye-popping scenery just before you arrive in Cabayugan

Ijong Novero. expert tree-climber and romantic, with his new baby.

A shy young girl taken near Martafe

Junpe Tanaka. Junpe can take a lot of credit for the first program in Cabayugan, rousing the students I depended on him a lot to help pull it off.

Here he shows of his completed rattan basket.

Usuba sensei trying his luck at handicrafts with Gina, a young student from Puerto Princesa who joined us.

Bing Samelo and the elder Rodrigo in a better moment. In later years things were no well between either of them.

Doming the wild hunter and students aping a pose. Doming has just harvest this homey from inside a tree.

Punyong Franciso died shortly after this photo was taken. His sister later asked me for a print as it was the only one of two photos in existence of him. Both taken by me.

That request quite moved me at the time because I had never really thought of how important a photo of mine could be to someone else

To the community, it was an odd experience teaching basket-making to the students. To them it is something they learn at a very early age. We must have been the first adults we they had met who didn't have a clue how to perform what was to them "obvious".

Ijong Novero, demonstrating his tree-climbing twists and turns.

These people are excellent tree-climbers, and different trees need different techniques. Ijong is an expert with vines, and here is shifting from one tree to another along the entangled vines.

Dusong here is a professional collector (=poacher, because it is highly illegal) of the rare Philippine cockatoo. This endangered bird, for obvious reasons, nests inside a hole high up in mature dipterocarp trees like this one. These trees have straight trunks with no lower branches or vines that can be easily climbed.

A twisted and frayed length of rattan makes an excellent non-slip device to do the job.

The tents we used to stay in.

I was a bit new to this game and wanted something to keep malaria mosquitoes out at night, that would be comfortable enough for the students to stay in.

They were not terribly successful and I would never use them again.

By the way, nobody got malaria ever, in any of my programs, in spite of where we slept.

The students were really wildlife types, and enjoyed the variety of small things that abound in the forests of Palawan. (there is not much in the way of big stuff).

This is a flying lizard that strayed a bit too close to camp

And this is a run-of-the-mill chicken. A baby one that did not seem to well.

Back to mapping. The students got the hang of it and here are trying to explain what a topographical may is and how to use it.

The "chieftain" and his guitar, about the most common form of music in a place like Cabayugan there is no electricity to plug in a karaoke.

I remember the song being played was "My darling Clementine"

The strange case of the lizard that fell from the tree-tops.

This monitor lizard lost its footing high up in the tree and fell right into the middle of our group. There were about twenty of us and we were as surprised as the lizard.

We released it unharmed.

The wonderful and hard-working Vicki and her family. Hubby on the left, is was partly crippled and not very productive. They had eight children living in this one-room hut, which must have been no more than 15 square meters big.

A typical House in Cabayugan. In the background is a primary forest. before that is a mix of recovering forest and shifting cultivation.

Cabayugan was a pretty good example of sustainable forest use. Their slash and brun as always looks bad to those who don't understand it, but in reality is was wonderful example of people living in harmony with their forest.

Another house in Cabayugan. Notice the raised floor: the higher, the drier, and the more comfortable in the rainy season.

The tree here is also an "apitong", favored nesting tree for the Philippine cockatoo

There was a massive flowering "event" of the forest the first year we went to Cabayugan, something I did not know at the time only happened every few years.

The dipterocarps - especially this one called "apitong baboy" - is a favorite of the giant honey bees, which also were is great numbers that year, and there was a lot of honey to be harvested from the treetops.

Killing what you eat. is something the TCE college was keen to teach its students at the time, something we no longer do, but is still quite common in developing countries.

I still think it is a good experience for young Japanese, who only ever see meat in several layers of plastic packaging

Jungle disco. Actually we are playing a game "chasing the tail of the snake".

No electricity and the kerosene lamps held above heads provide lighting, and the battery from the jeepney was removed and wired up to a tape recorder to get the music going.

Punyong, shortly before he died. This picture was the one I framed and gave to his sister

Ted Baltazar, the man who surveyed and drew up the boundaries of the communal lands for the government, making a point with a map hand drawn by the community to show where their resources are.

I just like photo.

A poor monitor lizard caught by some children in a snare and brought to camp to show us, writhing and twisting its head in apparent pain.

"Bayawak" as these animals are called, are considered delicious, though we never tried one.

Fred Mapano, of the same Department as Ted Baltazar, down to give a more conventional, classroom style lecture on the world of Mapping. Lots of arm-waving and chalk on the blackboard.

Bing, and "Chieftain", Chris and Gabril in an earlier moment when all seemed to be well.

Dopong Rodrigo,

The moment of death for "a-chan", the pig we bought and expected to kill and eat the first night, but ended up delaying the event a week. By this time the students had unfortunately given her a name

The first group to Cabayugan in 1998. There were 28 in all and we stayed for over a month.

The road to Cabayugan from Puerto Princesa. I think we are stopping here for repairs.

Dominador "Doming" Alibia with a freshly harvested honeycomb. This is from the giant honey bee and usually involves climbing high up a very tall tree.

Practicing while trying to remember a Tagbanua dance. Traditional culture is not doing that well in the Philippines and is dying out faster than in other countries I have seen in southeast Asia.

Even in wild and remote Cabayugan, the most popular entertainment is pop music at a karaoke bar (known as a "singalong").

Watching and listening to Atchan's" last screaming moments as the blood drains from the cut made to her throat.

Asami admiring her just-completed bamboo basket. These things took about a day for us to make. Locals can make half a dozen in that time

Joy-riding the jeepney along the 2-kilometer old logging track from Sugud to the main road.

Not as dangerous as it looks: we are driving at a walking pace and once on the main road all off and inside for the rest of the trip.

Usuba sensei, for whom Cabayugan still has a special significance.

One of the huge millipedes that crawl around the forest floor. They are especially common in the rainy season

Nature-watching in the forests. Palawan is not known for visible wildlife. The soils are not rich and the forests are fairy poor in resources, compared to other parts of the Philippines.

A pile of harvested - rattan poles. Three pesos each to the Tagbanua who is desperate enough and tough enough to endure the horrors of harvesting this stuff from its thorny casing and wasp-infected tree it has entangled itself in.

This whole rattan thing was unfortunate and one of the several veins of corruption that ran through the whole community land claim of Cabayugan.

At the outset I was unaware that the real reason certain people were keen to promote community rights Cabayugan and invited us to make a project there was for no other reason to get their own hands on the resources in the area. The idea was to shift ownership from the concessionaire to a pliant community, whose poverty could be used to strip the resources cheaply.

These same people turned against us once we found out the rattan story and made it clear that we not there as rattan traders, and that we could not get involved at all in this sort of thing.

Things got progressively nasty until we could no longer go to Cabayugan. The real losers, as always, was the community.

Gabril Sofranes was not a Tagbanua. Originally from Manila, he came down with the logging companies in his twenties and was apparently a hugely built and violent man. That violence got him in trouble, and he ended up doing a 15-year sentence in Palawan's famous prison farm. There he calmed down, learnt how to do framing and handicrafts, something that would help him fit into society when released from prison.

Here he is showing off his rattan hammocks.

He was not exactly able to fit into urban society, and found peace and comfort in Cabayugan with the Tagbanua community.

He has had tuberculosis and his physique is only a shadow of what it was in his youth. Gabril nevertheless was now a village policeman and a trusted member of the society he lives in.

There were several other graduates of Palawan's excellent prison farm, the Iwahig Penal Colony, living in Cabayugan, and from what I heard they are also well-adjusted members of the community. The system obviously works

Ijong Novero earning himself some money as a rice planter for one of the better off land-owning farmers in Cabayugan. Ijong the Romantic was never known for being enterprising and lived from hand to mouth year in year out. His "bolo", the machete that all people use here, lasted three years before the blade wore out. This I was told was nothing to be proud of because a bolo would normally only last about one year if the owner was doing a respectable amount of work

Puppies and piglets sleeping together under Tomas Francisco's house in Martafe.

The mountains of the St Pauls National Park as seen from the big rice fields of Cabayugan .