a savage archipelago
when don mentioned a few months ago that survivor would be filming in caramoan, i immediately felt excited. although part of me was skeptical, i felt that caramoan qualified, in many various ways, as a place to shoot a season of the wildly popular reality show. i have been to caramoan, and i felt an uncanny connection to the place, which was a throwback to the underdeveloped hinterlands of the 60s, where rice paddies could anytime become the areas of the frequent clashes between the military and revolutionary forces. the islands in the peninsula facing the pacific ocean were also a little eerie: unions of jagged limestone and pristine white sand beaches. a little later, i also found out that GMA-7 is going to have auditions for survivor philippines, and i asked whether this was what would take place in caramoan. so it turns out that survivor-france has been there for nearly 30 days, effectively closing gota beach to the public.