WHEN I was a kid, the trip to Baguio on four wheels was all of four to five hours. Today, a hundred years later, it’s still five to six hours, all those expressways, NLEX, SCTEX, TPLEX notwithstanding – with the accompanying tolls to pay at the traffic-stopping toll plazas – as if there were no time-saving infrastructures to speak of.
Last Dec. 27, we followed the suggestion of DPWH to use the new Tubao-Agoo-San Pascual road, a 40 km drive accomplished in 60 minutes. The route brought us to the entrance of Baguio City 70 minutes sooner than the second car that had left Quezon City with us at exactly the same time, just because the second driver had chosen to use Marcos Highway. The fly in the ointment was that there were too many sharp curves on the Tubao-Agoo zigzag road. Next time, it will be “Marcos (highway) pa rin”!
What else is new? If the people of Baguio don’t watch out, they will soon see what they will not want to see: their mountain defaced by billboards as big and ugly and plentiful as those on EDSA. “Welcome to Baguio City,” “Welcome to Abanao Market,” proclaim the biggest of them in the company of those advertising a brand of soy sauce and an insurance company. For the sake of the now extinct pine trees, Benguet must know that the best way to welcome visitors is to keep the mountains green and natural, without the facsimiles of the most photogenic human beings.
Back home on New Year’s Eve, the weather was the talk of the town. What the heck, climate change has been around even before Ondoy and Yolanda, so why did we allow Usman to inflict so much damage, so much tragedy? In my childhood, December was meant for merriment and tender memories, it cast a spell of mild and gentle days and nights signifying the end of typhoons and floods, as if the alphabet had been exhausted after 20 or more names by the time December tiptoed in through a gaily decorated door.
Two characters in the Born Loser comic strip are talking. “Do you miss the good old days?” asks one. His friend replies, “I do, but that’s because I wasn’t old in the good old days.”
