OF LIES & WONDERS

When I was in grade school my books and teachers, as mouthpieces of my government, made me proud - and they did it through a lie. In a convincingly honest voice they told me the Banawe Rice Terraces - rice paddies carved from the side of the mountains in the northern island of Luzon, the Philippines - was the 8th wonder of the world.

No need to say that that grade school moment was so long ago, light years removed from the Internet, and the pupils of our netforsaken age looked at books and teachers as portals whose words were our own version of Wikipedia.

And so I carried that lie - that pride - with me in my nurturing years when love of country was love almost second to none. I thought with so many greats sites in any given country, and with so many countries in the world, it was unfathomable that the 8th most wondrous spot in the world, in all of history, was found in my country.
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Of course you and I know that a lie is a lie, and the pronouncement that the Banawe Terraces is the 8th wonder of the world is a fat stinking lie. In fact it was so fat and so stinking that I took the shame personally for not being wise enough to realize that the world only think in sevens (seventh heaven, seven seas, ikapitong bundok), and that those seven wonders were of the ancient kind - so ancient that six of these seven had long ceased to exist when some young, imaginative minds may have pointed to those mountains in Luzon and boasted, Hmmm, I wonder if we could carve those mountains and make them like stairway to the skies.
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Stairway to the skies. Years ago a Department of Tourism guy went to Miami to sell Philippines 2000's tourist spots, one of which was the venerable Banawe Rice Terraces. The idea of the presentation was to show slides of, and give interesting facts and figures about, the country's tourist spots. For Banawe Rice Terraces, the facts given were that 1) it was considered the 8th wonder of the world; and 2) if the paddies were put one on top of the other, they could very well reach the skies.

I was mortified. If number 1 was a lie, number 2 was a joke.
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The Banawe Rice Terraces are indeed beautiful. And even if I have not seen it in person, I have read and heard enough truths about it to give my own opinion that they are certainly one of the most beautiful sites man had ever seen. Of all the international heritage sites, the Banawe Rice Terraces stand out because they serve a life purpose - where the others provide food for the soul, the Terraces provide food for the mouth as well.

My American friend J, an eco-tourist who had been around the world, went to see the Terraces years ago and was overwhelmed by what he saw and learned. He was so fascinated how the geniuses who initially carved these paddies - most probably by hand - could adopt and develop a perfect system of irrigation to allow for a good flow of water and feed the seeds and stems that became the country's premier staple, rice. And to think they were standing there long before agriculture became a formal discipline.
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Today, in Lisbon, the world will have a new set of seven wonders. After months of voting in this global competition to select a new set to replace the ancient set (the Pyramids of Giza are the only ones remaining, and will be automatically part of the list). My own choices were The Great Wall of China, Taj Mahal in India, Machu Picchu in Peru, Petra in Jordan, Angkor Wat in Cambodia, and the Pyramids of Egypt. That would be six. Seventh should be the Banawe Rice Terraces, but of course we won't find the name in the official list because the people at the Department of Tourism did not make a good push for it nomination as they were probably content with its ranking as the 8th wonder of the world.