For those who don't know, Banaue is famous for its rice terraces, which i'll blog about later. But the lesser known thing about Banaue is that it was the home of the Ifugao tribe, who were (gasp) headhunters!!!
According to one of the men that we found there, they stopped head hunting in the 1950's because they became Christian (those damn Christians ruin EVERYTHING hahah). But Dave was reading something that said that in the 70's, an Ifugao man was run over by a bus and when the government didn't do anything about it, the tribes people went after the bus driver and beheaded him. Nice.
Anyway, so when we were in Banaue, we went to go and see the tribal huts. We got a tricycle guy to show us around. Tricycles in the Philippines are made for Filipino sized people...which we are not. Dave had to ride behind the driver...
and Martine and I squished inside the passenger cab.
This is an Ifugao hut. The man who maintains it says that it was his grandfathers.
all sorts of animal skulls around the huts, human heads too, but i can't find that picture.
shrunken human heads...hahaha, they're monkeys. i hope.
the huts were raised, as you can tell.
this particular hut houses a lot of artifacts that they sell to collectors. Kinda sad that they'd do that, but these people need money.
Tigertooth necklace.
That headpiece is made of wood and snake spine, and the armbands were made of bones too. The ifugao men gave this headpiece to their wives during the dances. They would sometimes wear it too.
Dave day dreaming about being a ninja. The man told me that the sword Dave is holding was an actual weapon used to behead people. eek!
This man told me that the tradition of the Ifugao people is to put their dead out in the mountains for 3 years then after those 3 years, collect their remains. He showed us his grandfathers bones. See below. And everytime they open up the material and show the bones they have to make a sacrifice of a chicken (which the unsuspecting tourist has to pay for, although he did offer to cook it up for us and have us all eat with him which I wasn't in the mood for so I said no).
Very adventurous day. Our hotel, didn't have any stars. We had a pet lizard on our wall, he was cute.
1 comment:
that was cool. i wouldn't do the cave though. too scary. i'm afraid of the dark since you only have to depend on the gas lantern.
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