MANILA, Philippines – The 21st day of a sea adventure aboard the “balangay” (precolonial boat) turned into an impromptu rescue mission as the intrepid crew rolled into a remote island off Romblon Monday and came upon an old woman on the brink of death.

On the island of Maestro de Campo, the balangay expedition members saved 68-year-old Aurora Tomining, who was suffering from a heart condition coupled with pneumonia, team leader Art Valdez said in a phone call to the Inquirer.

“She was in very critical condition when we came. There was no hospital on the island, and the last time a doctor was here was one year ago,” he said.

An emergency rescue operation was launched with the help of Capt. Ferdinand Velasco and his crew aboard Coast Guard search-and-rescue vessel no. 3502, Valdez said.

“She had to be flown in by helicopter to Manila. I heard she was already in Manila (by Tuesday),” he said.

The balangay crew, composed of members of the first Philippine expedition team to Mt Everest, the same group who successfully climbed the world’s highest peak in 2006, had arrived in the town of Concepcion on the island at noon Monday.

Valdez said the group, with the help of the mayor, Lemuel Cipriano, organized a medical mission to help out the island inhabitants through free medical consultation with Dr. Ted Esguerra, a member of the balangay crew.

It was during the medical mission that Esguerra came across Tomingin, who had been bedridden and in terrible condition, Valdez said.

“It was fortunate that we came at just the right time,” he said. “It was all Dr. Ted Esguerra’s doing. He had been up all night and he attended to more than 100 patients.”

Valdez said Tomingin’s case was precisely the whole point of the voyage - to create connections with Filipino people from across the islands, and to be able to help and educate them along the way.

“This is the kind of thing that we had set out to do,” he said.

The balangay crew intend to take the migration route of the Austronesian-speaking people of ages ago and have been making their way around the vast ocean the way the ancients did - by observing the direction of migrating birds, the location of the sun and the stars, and cloud and wave patterns.

Crew members included a hardy bunch of mountaineers, sailors from the Philippine Coast Guard, and Badjao tribesmen, who steered the balangay along the Luzon coastline and had so far made stopovers at ports in Cavite, Batangas and Oriental Mindoro.

Earlier this month, the balangay adventure nearly came to an abrupt end after it was swept by raging flood waters off Cavite at a waypoint in Ternate town.

The balangay had to return to Sangley Point where the crew waited for the rough waters to calm down.

The core crew members are Valdez, Janet Belarmino-Sardena, Carina Dayondon, Leo Oracion, Erwin Emata, Noelle Wenceslao, Dr. Ted Esguerra, Fred Jamili and Dr. Voltaire Velasco.

The first phase will cover 2,136 nautical miles (3,960 kilometers) and 73 ports from Manila to Siluag Island, Tawi Tawi. In all, the balangay will sail for 120 days (plus 24 days of Christmas break) under normal weather conditions.

Based on the schedule, the first phase will end on Feb. 26, 2010.

In building the balangay, Valdez had tapped members of the Badjao ethnic group, a semi-nomadic seafaring tribe from Sibutu and Sitangkay in Tawi-Tawi, to craft the boat, whose planks were fashioned from a type of wood locally known as “lupanga” and its bow from “ubyubi”.

The 15 X 3 meter wooden boat (roughly the length of four cars lined side-by-side) was patterned after a Butuan boat displayed in the National Museum, which was carbon-dated to 1250 A.D.

The first recovered balangay was excavated in Butuan City, Agusan del Norte, in 1978 and based on carbon-dating, is said to have been built in 320 A.D. The plank-type, edge-pegged naval design was a common feature of ancient boats in the Southeast, according to historians.

Although they intend to sail as faithfully as possible to the ancient ways, Valdez and his group would not do away with technology entirely, such as cell phones.

After Philippine waters, the adventure will move to phase 2 û Southeast Asia. The balangay will travel the seas to Malaysia (Sabah), Brunei, Indonesia (Kalimantan), Singapore, Malaysia (Peninsular), Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China, and Taiwan. Based on the timetable, phase 2 will be from March to July 2010.
If the quest is successful, the balangay will move on to Madagascar off Africa in 2011.