I wasn’t looking for a church.
I wasn’t particularly looking for anything.
I was wandering around Bohol, bouncing between the island’s usual assortment of strange attractions, including the Chocolate Hills and those ridiculously adorable, permanently surprised-looking creatures at the Bohol Tarsier Sanctuary, when I drove past something considerably less adorable.
A nearly destroyed church.
Naturally, I stopped.
Because when you’re driving through the Philippines and encounter a centuries-old building that looks like the Earth recently punched it directly in the face, apparently the appropriate response is: Well, what the hell happened here?
And that question turned a completely random roadside stop into one of the more unexpectedly memorable things I found on Bohol.
DESTINATION: BOHOL EARTHQUAKE
GPS COORDINATES
9.6364, 124.0309
CLOSEST AIRPORT
CURRENT WEATHER
broken clouds (88F / 31C)
AIR QUALITY INDEX (AQI)
Air-quality data is currently unavailable.
OH. THE EARTHQUAKE.
I knew Bohol had experienced a major earthquake a few years earlier.
What I hadn’t fully appreciated was just how destructive it had been.
At 8:12 AM on October 15, 2013, a magnitude 7.1 earthquake struck Bohol. It was relatively shallow, originating roughly 19 kilometers beneath the surface, which is generally not the kind of geological statistic you want associated with wherever you’re currently standing.
More than 1.2 million people were affected.
More than 200 people were killed.
Hundreds more were injured.
Tens of thousands of buildings were damaged, thousands were completely destroyed, roads cracked, bridges failed, landslides tore across the landscape, and historic churches that had survived centuries suddenly discovered that the Earth does not give a shit about architectural heritage.
Then came the aftershocks.
Because apparently magnitude 7.1 wasn’t enough excitement for one week.
Bohol continued shaking long after the main earthquake, leaving communities dealing not only with destroyed buildings but the extremely uncomfortable realization that the ground beneath them couldn’t necessarily be trusted either.
Three years later, I had apparently wandered into part of the aftermath.
THEY WEREN’T ABANDONING IT
At first, I assumed I was looking at ruins.
And I love ruins.
There’s something fascinating about abandoned places because they’re basically humanity’s expiration dates made visible. We build something, declare it important, use it for decades or centuries, and eventually nature starts taking it back.
I’ve seen that story repeatedly around the world.
But this wasn’t abandoned.
They were rebuilding it.
Slowly.
Piece by piece.
The earthquake had torn through an essential part of this little community, and instead of simply leaving the remains behind, people were putting it back together.
That’s when this stopped being another interesting pile of broken rocks.
Because a church in a small community like this isn’t necessarily just a building.
It’s where people get married.
Where children are baptized.
Where families gather.
Where people mourn.
Where holidays are celebrated.
Where generations of the same families have walked through the same doors.
It’s part religion, part history, part meeting place and part community identity.
Then one morning the fucking ground moved.
And suddenly something that probably felt permanent wasn’t.
WE REALLY NEED TO DISCUSS HUMANITY’S DEFINITION OF “PERMANENT”
Travel has repeatedly taught me that humans have a wonderfully optimistic relationship with permanence.
We build cities beside oceans.
We build houses on fault lines.
We build towns underneath volcanoes.
We carve roads through mountains.
We construct enormous monuments and churches and skyscrapers and dams and then confidently behave as though we’ve finally gotten this whole planet thing under control.
Image (C) Google Maps
The planet occasionally responds.
That’s adorable.
I’ve seen another spectacular version of this in the Philippines at the Cagsawa Ruins, where the remains of an old church sit beneath the enormous and extremely active Mayon Volcano.
Cagsawa was devastated during Mayon’s catastrophic 1814 eruption.
The surviving bell tower is still there today.
Mayon is also still there.
Looking absolutely magnificent.
Which is perhaps nature’s most passive-aggressive way of making a point.
Bohol was telling essentially the same story, just through earthquakes instead of volcanoes.
Humans build.
Nature edits.
THE PLANET ISN’T TRYING TO DESTROY ANYTHING
That’s probably the most important thing I took away from this random little stop.
We describe earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, landslides, erosion and storms as natural disasters because we’re understandably viewing everything from the human side of the transaction.
Our buildings fall down.
Our roads disappear.
Our lives get disrupted.
Sometimes people die.
To us, it’s destruction.
To the Earth?
It’s Tuesday.
Image (C) Google maps
The planet isn’t destroying itself.
It’s changing itself.
Faults move.
Mountains rise.
Volcanoes create new land while destroying whatever happened to be sitting on the old land.
Rivers move.
Coastlines retreat.
Forests burn and return.
Continents move several centimeters every year whether we approve of the itinerary or not.
The Earth has been building, destroying and rebuilding itself for billions of years.
We’re simply the latest species arrogant enough to put property lines on it.
SO THEY STARTED REBUILDING
And that’s why watching this little community rebuild its church stuck with me.
They weren’t defeating nature.
Nobody defeats nature.
They weren’t making the building permanent either.
Nothing is.
They were simply rebuilding something that mattered to them.
Right now.
There’s something wonderfully human about that.
The Earth knocks something down.
We stare at the rubble.
Probably swear.
Then somebody grabs a shovel.
It’s the same cycle humans have repeated after earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, hurricanes, floods, fires and wars for thousands of years.
Build.
Destroy.
Rebuild.
Repeat.
And sometimes the destruction itself becomes the monument. That’s exactly what happened at Cagsawa, where the surviving church ruins now tell a story considerably larger than the building that originally stood there.
Here on Bohol, this community had apparently chosen another path.
Put it back.
I CAME FOR A BROKEN CHURCH
I probably spent less than an hour there.
No tour.
No ticket booth.
No carefully manufactured visitor experience.
No inspirational sign telling me to LIVE. LAUGH. REBUILD.
Just a damaged church, construction materials, a community slowly recovering from something that happened three years earlier, and me standing around taking pictures because I’d randomly pulled over wondering what the hell happened.
Those are sometimes my favorite travel experiences.
You go looking for something visually interesting and accidentally discover a story.
I’d already seen Bohol’s Chocolate Hills, where geology apparently discovered copy-and-paste and created more than 1,700 suspiciously similar hills.
I’d visited the Bohol Tarsier Sanctuary and stared at tiny primates that look like Pokémon experiencing a caffeine overdose.
Those are the places people come to Bohol expecting to see.
This wasn’t.
Yet years later, I still remember that broken church.
Not because it was spectacular.
Because it made something incredibly obvious impossible to ignore.
WE’RE JUST ALONG FOR THE RIDE
Human civilization loves monuments because they make us feel permanent.
We’re not.
The church wasn’t.
The community isn’t.
Bohol isn’t.
Even the Chocolate Hills aren’t.
Given enough time, everything we’re looking at today will become something else.
That’s not depressing.
I actually find it strangely comforting.
We’re living during an almost impossibly tiny snapshot of this planet’s history, and everything around us is temporarily occupying whatever shape it happens to have right now.
Mountains rise.
Mountains disappear.
Oceans open.
Continents collide.
Churches fall.
People rebuild them.
Then eventually something changes again.
The Earth builds.
The Earth destroys.
The Earth rebuilds.
And somewhere in the middle of all that geological insanity, humanity keeps showing up with bricks, concrete, optimism and absolutely no understanding of the word permanent.
We’re not running this place.
We’re just along for the fucking ride.
