Pride boost for Filipinos

Manila – After conquering Mount Everest, Philippine adventurer Carina Dayondon is sailing to China aboard a wooden replica of an ancient boat in the hopes of boosting national pride in forgotten maritime prowess.

Dayondon, 39, is planning to sail from Manila to southern China early next year, recreating trade and migration voyages made before Spaniards colonised the Philippines in the 1500s.

In Manila Bay aboard one of the two boats that will make the journey, Dayondon said: “I’m excited because our team will be more inspired realising how good our forefathers were. We have to let people know we should be proud of being Filipino.”

Dayondon, a petite but muscular coast guard officer, created history in 2007 when she and two other countrypeople became the first Filipinas to summit Everest. Arturo Valdez, who led their Everest support team, is also heading the sailing mission and, similarly, sees the journey to China as a chance to inspire Filipinos.

“Like Mount Everest, I want this to be symbolic of what our people can accomplish,” the 69-year-old said.

The vessels are a copy of a “balangay”, which date back to 320 AD. “Early trade with China and Southeast Asia was made possible by watercraft,” Ligaya Lacsina, researcher at the National Museum’s maritime division, said. “Europeans during the colonial period were effusive in their praise of Southeast Asian boat-building skill. But somehow we’ve paid very little attention to this.”

Tribal boat-builders from the southern Philippines, where the boats originated, have made the replicas of the balangay using skills passed on down the generations. The boats, 18m-long by three metres wide, are made of hardwood planks, two sails, two rudders and a roofed area.

Their journey to Quanzhou will be about 1 000km and the crew are aiming to do it with as little modern technical help as possible. “We have no night-sailing capability so we can be run over by a supertanker. That’s my fear. The greatest difficulty of replicating an ancient voyage is modernity because there are new port protocols,” Valdez said.

Their trip is to commemorate a journey made about 600 years ago by a sultan from the southern island of Sulu, who went to China to pay tribute to Ming dynasty rulers, but died of an illness on his way home. –