Polangui: The Hunt for the Kurakding

“Oh good, we’re going to Bicol,” Neal fired back to me via e-mail as I informed him of our travel plans to photograph and research material for this book. “I want to hunt for the kurakding. I hear it’s quite difficult to find.” Kurakding is a wild mushroom that grows on the rotting bark of trees found at the foot of volcanoes and mountains. It is only available in the local markets if the people who live around mountainous areas forage for it. At that point, we did not even know that much. We asked our hosts in every part of Bicol that we traveled to, but all we got were shrugs or non-answers. We knew it existed, but in the world of the Philippines, reality is defined by different rules. If you are used to the precision of responses for directions and data that one normally expects in the West, you need to make serious adjustments in perspective once you get to this part of the world. Here, body language, long memories, immediacy of recognition, and richness of natural resources make the need for precise definitions, names and genuses of flora, fauna, and in this case, wild and intermittent fungi, unnecessary.