Biking in Dapitan, living Rizal's dream

As an exile in Dapitan for four years, Dr. Jose Rizal appealed several times to his family in Luzon to send him a bicycle. “Please buy me a second-hand bicycle, neither very bad nor very good… for use in these very rough places,” he pleaded with his mother in one letter. “I do not want a deluxe bike but a sturdy one that can run in sand and on these bad roads.”

He advised his mother to seek the advice of his cousin Pepe Leyva, who was a champion cyclist in the early days of bicycle racing. (Pepe would die several years later fighting in the Philippine Revolution.)

Rizal wanted to shorten his daily commute on foot from his farm to the town where he reported to the local Spanish commander and attended to his patients. The bike never came, and Rizal never did experience biking around Dapitan. But I have.

He got a lot done in Dapitan but also left much unfinished business. Testing the bikeability of his adopted hometown was perhaps among the less significant of the tasks he never accomplished but, at least to me and judging from the eager tone in his letters, one of the more poignant ones. He didn’t just want a bike, he longed for one.

I was in Dapitan to shoot a documentary about what Rizal achieved there, essentially a vision for the burgeoning Filipino nation: a progressive school where adolescents were taught, in addition to math and languages, how to swim in the sea, hike in the forest, and grow food; a medical practice that didn’t turn down anyone and accepted payment in whatever form; and even a happy domestic life that defied condemnation by the church.

But amidst these well-known accomplishments, what smoldered in my memory was his bicycle deprivation. As a lifelong biker since the age of seven, I could feel that in a personal way.

So when the opportunity came to fly to Dapitan for work, I made sure there was time for a bike ride, as a way to honor our hero’s unfulfilled wish as well as to experience Dapitan in a timelessly sublime way – on two wheels, propelled by one’s own energy, and at a pace that gets you to your destination faster than walking yet still slow enough for you to appreciate the aroma of sidewalk barbeque, the kaleidoscope of street life, and the sounds of vendors. These are the pleasures that have been familiar to bikers since the dawn of the modern bicycle, which was just less than a decade old when Rizal pined for one. In his writings, as far as I know, he never mentioned riding a bike in any of his travels. But he must have since he knew he could use it in Dapitan and, besides, as he wrote in a letter to his family, it was one of the skills that he wanted to teach his pupils.

I didn’t need Rizal as a reason to bike in Dapitan, as I try to bike in nearly every place I visit. But turning a mundane act into a memorial ride rewards you with an emotion shared through the ages: you know that Rizal craved this, and you know why.

Since Rizal only wanted a second-hand bike, I found one for rent, for the sum of 50 pesos for the entire day. Accompanying me for much of my time in Dapitan was the young historian and fellow biker Albert Barretto, employed by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines and assigned as a Rizal researcher in Dapitan. Like his subject, Albert was a displaced Tagalog native of a small town in Luzon, in Albert’s case Gumaca, Quezon.

We began our ride at my inn, a renovated ancestral home called the Travel Bee Heritage Inn, which is just around the corner from the newly restored home of Mariano Hamoy, a good friend of Rizal and fellow Ateneo alumnus (a rarity then).

After an afternoon of attending to patients in the town, Rizal would visit Hamoy for a game of chess and conversation with an educated peer. They would eventually become partners in the town’s first abacca trading business, sending raw abacca from Mindanao to Luzon where Rizal’s brother-in-law would sell it to rope factories.

Hamoy’s great grandson Peter Hamoy and his wife Kat spent the better part of the pandemic restoring their ancestral home and turning it into a museum, where on display are two of Rizal’s old steamer trunks, given to Mariano just before Rizal left Dapitan for good; and the bed where Rizal, the only doctor in the town, delivered Peter’s grandfather. The floor made of handsome hardwoods from the surrounding forests was the same one that Rizal stepped on during his visits.

From the Hamoy house, we pedaled a few hundred meters on what are now smoothly paved roads to the town plaza, which still boasts numerous amenities associated with Rizal, starting with the grassy, shady plaza itself which he helped renovate, today still lined with the grizzled acacia trees that Rizal planted himself, according to a plaque by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines.

The Dapitan plaza is a classically neat symmetry of open space and stately trees, still the center of town and chief gathering spot more than 125 years later. Rizal arrived in this remote colonial outpost at night in July 1892. The plaza was one of his first sights upon waking up. He made improving the plaza one of his earliest projects in exile, inspired by the numerous town squares he explored in Europe. He proposed to the local Spanish authority that they install street lamps, which were ordered from Luzon pronto and lit using coconut oil which Rizal recommended.

Today the plaza is a clean and still tastefully lighted public park, without a fastfood establishment in sight, and surrounded by two-story schools and district government buildings, some of which date from the 19th century. The most prominent structure is the church where Rizal used to worship while standing in the back. He had been excommunicated because of his controversial novels which the church had deemed anti-friar and thus, conforming to the logic of the time, anti-religion. The spot where he stood partially behind a thick post, perhaps to hide himself from the priest at the altar, is now marked by a plaque.

On the sunny afternoon of our ride, groups of teen-age students animated sections of the plaza with dance rehearsals and giggly repartee. I could imagine that if Rizal was envisioning the plaza more than a hundred years hence, this is exactly what he had in mind: a safe, well-maintained place where youths danced and bonded.

By far, the most exceptional part of the plaza is what perhaps only Rizal could have achieved at the time, a 900-square meter relief map of Mindanao made of earth and grass that was made to scale, remarkable for its accuracy in depicting the contours and terrain of what was then a vast and generally unknown frontier. Walking around it with a local, one learns that the towns, bays and jagged coastal edges are exactly where they should be on the map. In making the map, Rizal employed the formidable array of skills at his command: he was a trained land surveyor (his course of study at the Ateneo), he understood cartography, and he was a talented sculptor who probably saw this plot of land as just another medium for his surgical hands.

The map’s location right in front of the church is, on its face, astonishing since he was hated by religious authorities. But one also remembers that he retained the deep respect of individual priests who got to know him, in this case, Father Francisco Sanchez who assisted Rizal in constructing the map while trying in vain to convince his former student to retract what he wrote about friars. An admiring Father Sanchez most certainly enabled Rizal’s map to be built in the shadow of the church façade, even if it had no religious connotation whatsoever. There’s a perfect reason for locating it there, and it’s not only for the delicious gratification that Rizal probably felt.

Due to it size, one cannot see an overview of the map unless one climbs either of the two belfry towers of the church, which my documentary team and I did, an unexpectedly hazardous experience through guano-littered, claustrophobic spaces reeking of bat urine, and several flights up narrow wooden stairs that felt like they were ready to give way any time. Certainly, the belfry climb is far from being tourist-friendly (and is actually off limits to the public), but for documentarists eager for unusual but survivable challenges to share with viewers, we couldn’t ask for better conditions.

Once in the belfry itself, we were treated to the full majesty of one of Rizal’s least heralded achievements, but in my mind one of his most noble.

After writing difficult novels for an elite audience, living in Europe, and absorbing some of the most advanced ideas of the time, Rizal produced an ambitious but accessible project purely for the masses.

For if all he wanted was to make another map of Mindanao, he could have easily done it on a smaller scale or even on paper. But he clearly envisioned a map displayed permanently in a public space that could be understood by anyone, even those who were not literate but could still identify topographical features of their town and relate it to other places. And making it larger than any colonial map at the time gave Mindanao importance.

Completed soon after he arrived in Dapitan, this was Rizal’s statement that he wished to know the strange land where he was exiled, that he considered Mindanao part of the nation being born in his head, and that he wanted everyone in the community to feel part of that nation. I was told in fact that the original plan was to continue the map to include the Visayas and Luzon. Alas, this remained only a fond desire, much like the bike rides that never happened.

From the church, we pedaled around the plaza to the opposite corner where another group of college youths had gathered in front of Localhost, a recently opened café just off the plaza with various coffee and cheesecake options and a co-working space, the kind of trendy joint gentrifying many urban spaces. Still, it was a bit of a gamble to start a business during the pandemic, as the millennial owner, Jesrome Jamolod, acknowledged to me. “Gut instinct ko lang,” he replied sheepishly when asked if he had done a market study. His customers at the moment, the college students, had ridden their scooters from the larger, bustling Dipolog City, just a 30-minute ride away. Dapitan offered to the Gen Z crowd a quick getaway with some old-world charm. Rizal, himself a small entrepreneur who started his abacca trading business here on a similar hunch, would have approved.

From the center of town, it was a relaxed two-kilometer ride on flat terrain to Dapitan’s wooded outskirts. Rounding a slightly inclined curve in the road leads to the mecca of this pilgrimage: the restored Talisay Farm of Jose Rizal, a cluster of nipa-roofed huts of various sizes built to the specifications recorded by Rizal himself and remembered by his students who lobbied for this recreation. It’s a seaside sanctuary canopied by trees bound by forested slopes to the east and lapped by the gentle waves of Dapitan Bay to the west. Rizal couldn’t have chosen a better spot, accessible to the center of town yet with the vibe of a secluded retreat. It was here that Rizal achieved an assortment of his dreams: he established a school that was the most progressive for its time; he became a naturalist who studied his incipient country’s rich environment; he operated on his cataract-afflicted mother who stayed with him for a few months; and he even settled down with the woman he loved, Josephine Bracken, the 18-year-old Irish companion of a visiting patient.

The built-up space is just two hectares, occupying a tongue of level land between sea and mountain, part of the 16 hectares that Rizal bought when he won the Manila lottery in 1892, shortly after he arrived in Dapitan, a surreal twist in history. One imagines what he wouldn’t have achieved without this incredible stroke of luck. He probably would have been stuck in a district government building in the poblacion with a constant guard, without the space to think while staring at the ocean’s edge. He would not have been able to set up a school, and to explore the grand diversity of the forest behind his farm and discover new species. Would he have even dared to live with a woman he could not marry if they were constantly within view of prying eyes?

The farm is now the site of the Rizal national shrine and a popular destination for both locals who simply want a shady oceanside stroll and tourists hungry for Rizaliana in all of its forms, from his pajamas and work desk carved by the master sculptor himself to the famous towering  baluno tree that Rizal supposedly wanted to name his farm after (the name for the place, Talisay, preceded Rizal’s purchase). Admission is free, courtesy of the National Historical Commission of the Philippines which manages the place.

Nestled on a slope above the shrine is the settlement of a religious group that outsiders refer to as Rizalistas. They set up their community just outside Rizal’s forested property, which appears to be well-preserved. There were no signs of cut trees and any other form of desecration.

Rizal’s property was confiscated by the Spanish government after his conviction and execution. Today the Philippine government owns and manages the land, which from my hike through the forest appears to be in excellent condition, with clear water gurgling in its streams, tall trees shading the trails, and a soothing silence making one easily imagine Rizal the doctor prescribing walks in the woods as a healing therapy the way some enlightened physicians today regard “forest bathing.”

The distance to the Rizal shrine from the town is a breeze on a bike, so I could see why Rizal would want one: in the scorching Dapitan sun, the walk could drench your camisa in the days before deodorant. And in an emergency, such as the day Rizal was suddenly called to deliver his buddy Mariano Hamoy’s baby, time was of the essence.

But even with a bike, Rizal would still have had to wait for a small boat they called a “baruto” to cross the narrow river channel near its mouth to the bay. Today, it’s a quick crossing on the Bagting Bridge.

With a population less than 90,000, Dapitan is one of the smaller cities in the Philippines, with little visible evidence of urban blight. Biking along both leafy residential streets and noisy commercial thoroughfares, I was struck by how clean the neighborhoods were, including the less off. There are no tall buildings and no stoplights, but also no homeless and no piles of garbage. I didn’t see any mansions or lavish displays of wealth. One of the main local employers is the academe, including the Jose Rizal Memorial State University.

I’ve often heard residents in other places proudly say that this or that franchise brand or mall has arrived in their community, as if that were the standard for progress. But the beginnings of mass  commercialization also mean that traffic, pollution, and crime are not far behind. Dapitan still has an opportunity to show that progress in a fast-changing world could alternatively mean a community’s ability to maintain its best traits while providing for its citizens. Dapitan’s unique place in history challenges the community to be a model for the rest of the nation.

Rizal in his four years here wanted to live according to his principles and put in practice all that he had learned, setting an example and creating models for nearly everything that he was involved in.

It was in this idyllic place that Rizal lived out the last four years of his life, still a young man in his mid 30s but one who had already accomplished his life’s work. He made Dapitan his laboratory for his many ideas for the nation he was imagining.

That included envisioning the bicycle as a form of transport in his adopted hometown. He died without that thrill. But after experiencing the joy and efficiency of biking around Dapitan, I can confirm that Rizal, again, had the right idea.