Please Fly Again

After several attempts to visit the Jumalon Butterfly Sanctuary, where the monsoon rains have always made them difficult, we finally got a good weather on a holiday to visit them last August 21. Its been decades since I've last set foot on this old place, a museum created by the island's leading lepidopterist Professor Julian Jumalon who had died since then. Its located in Macopa steet, Basak which is a short drive from the city.





I was expecting a lot of butterflies the way I use to remember them way back in my elementary days where my family use to live just a block away. Aside from flying kites during the summer in the public school across the street where we live which had always left me all burned out yet satisfied, I had a fond for catching huge butterfly species Triodes Radamanthus and Triodes Megallanus who I guess at that time happen to stray away from the sanctuary. I still remember those times when my father made me a net to catch them because I could not catch them with my bare hands. These in turn enable me to fight with other kids who happen to have nets too!




Today the sanctuary is old, neglected and kind of a place which happens to lack funding to maintain it the way it use to be. Except for the caretakers and a son of the professor, a guy in his fifties, whose health as I understood took more time now than maintaining the sanctuary, there were no visitors except us. We did arrived late in the afternoon a reason to suspect for the loneliness we felt. It was far from those days when throngs of visitors come in cars and buses extending way back into the tiny streets of our place. Now, you don't even know if someone is living inside.




There were butterflies to see a few and between. I saw a couple of those huge Tri which is really difficult to find nowadays. If not for the museum and a collection of species in the viewing room, the visit would have left a bad taste in my mouth. The sanctuary in Boracay was much better than this I said to myself but I guess I have to admit that this place would never be use to be after the professor died.





I hope someone could make this place whole again. Its regrettable to know that it has turned out the way it is now. Our journey to the place I know, I used to love was still in every way worth it despite the failed expectations because my daughter enjoyed it. I wish I could be like her, when the innocence takes precedence and simple joys comes from simple things, when memories are non existence to dampen the fun. But who knows, this place might bask again in its old glory, to fly again into the sunset.