Motorcycle tourism AND social exposure

motorcycle cruise is the best way to explore Baguio City if you have a limited time to do it.

Unfortunately, we don’t have rental bike services in this city yet (PLEASE, somebody correct me, I’ll be the happiest guy to be wrong about this) so you have to own one.

But just like with cars, as they say, it’s cheaper to have friends than to buy one. So if you can borrow a motorcycle from a trusting friend, you’ll be fine.

It doesn’t have to be a monster torque machine, either. Despite the hilly-ness, you can get around and reach any place in the city on a 125cc—in fact, even on a 50cc moped.

If anything, lighter bikes have the advantage of maneuverability—they’re more agile in traffic. I cannot squeeze my big bike in narrower gaps that ‘underbone’ scooters weave in and out of all day.

But the real fun begins when you hit the looser roads outside of the central business district (CBD). And I mean riding through the suburbs, passing different barangays.

I don’t want to oversell the experience--when you’re riding through the barangays you ARE riding through populated communities. Don’t expect any “National Geographic moments.”

But if you broaden your paradigm about tourism, you’ll discover that PEOPLE AND THEIR CULTURE are what make a place wonderful, not just their place’s panoramic sights.

So soak yourself in the ‘social exposure.’ Stop at neighborhood cornerstreet “sari-sari” stores and buy your bottled mineral water from them. They usually stock up on junk food as well, so you won’t have a hard time finding those oversalty nacho corn chips your doctor told you to stay away from.

In many roadside carinderias, you can gorge on REAL home-cooked meals—literally cooked at HOME, because the owner’s home is just right above or behind the eatery.

It is in these places where you can find authentic “pinikpikan” (stewed chicken killed by cruel means), “dinakdakan” (meat jerky in bite sizes cut from non-lean parts, braised in pig’s brain matter), “dinardaraan” or “dinuguan” in Tagalog (porkcuts in blood sauce), and “sisig”—a kind of extremely-spicy dish probably first invented for use in fraternity initiation rites.

The pork lomi bits (earlobes) are cut as finely as the jalopiño red pepper mixed in with it, so you can’t tell them apart. I suspect it’s really served to perk up the sales of soda drinks, because when you take a biteful it feels like you just swallowed the sun.

So in between gasping for air and gagging on your words, you just barely managed to beg for a glass of water, or Coke, or Pepsi…or raw sewer—whatever—just anything liquid and FAST, please!

But darn it, these doggone dishes are so delicious you’ll keep coming back for more. You won’t likely find these entrées on the menus of your favorite “fine-dining” restaurants—with the possible exception of the “sisig” maybe.

It has attained some degree of commercial success, but the fine-dining version is never as delectable, or as satisfying as the one you ate from a greasy spoon in the carinderia.

You’ll never believe how inexpensive these meals are, too. No, but you have to carry cash. You can’t whip out your plastic cards to pay for anything out here.

When exploring with my motorcycle and stopping by new places like this, a favorite thing I do is ask, “Kumusta naman ho kayo rito? Ano-anong balita?”

We Filipinos are born “marites” people that after just a half hour of banter with “Manang” carinderia owner, I know enough about the neighbors lives to write a dozen blackmailing letters.

THAT’S people tourism—and the less cynical way to think of it is that Filipino communities are really super-extended families. Neighbors know each others’ lives because they TELL their lives to one another—their woes, hopes, dreams and aspirations that the community's combined lives are one big intervention.

No wonder if anyone gets into trouble and needs help, all the neighbors run to him to give aid BEFORE even being asked. This is really the unexplained dynamics of “bayanihan.”

Then you got back on your motorcycle and moved on to the next barangay along the road, having made a couple or more new friends before you left.*

Rollerskating in Camp John Hay

ndoor rollerskating in Camp John Hay was almost a rite of passage when we were in high school.

My classmates and I from Baguio City High School (BCHS) would save up our daily allowance—don’t laugh now but back in 1979 you’d be a rich kid if you got FIVE PESOS a day pocket money from your thrifty parents—so we would have P25 pesos jingling in our pockets by Friday.

Even the school faculty jokingly called the last day of the week as “Fly-day” and they would dismiss our afternoon class sessions at 3pm, instead of 4:30.

Occasionally—and we loved them the universe for it—our teachers wouldn’t even meet us on Friday afternoons. Instead, they also scheduled their weekly “faculty meetings” on Friday afternoon—and those meetings were notoriously short.

As soon as they adjourned, these hardworking teachers too would scatter to the four winds. There would be no point in going back to the classroom anymore because we their students had long vanished.

Everybody looked forward to “Fly-day” to pay homage to that ancient adage “all work and no play makes Jane a dull girl.”

Before you scream “gender insensitivity!” understand that the expression expresses (that IS redadundant!) a factoid that only girls have the potential to BECOME dull. For them, it’s a transformation. For us boys, it’s a continuing condition, a congenital permanent trait. What normal boy did not act silly in high school, pray tell?

So Fridays for our generation was a blending of the genders—nice girls from Monday to Thursday morph into bad girls on Fridays, join the boys just being themselves and hie off to Camp John Hay to celebrate a shared juvenile decadence.

“Fly-day” is reserved for SERIOUS “bulakbol”—a weekly enjoyment of unbridled freedom, mindless truancy and juvenile mischief. It was a youthful joyous celebration of LIFE!

Not just any kind of life—but life in the fast lane. And you can’t get any faster (without a car) than strapping on a pair of rollerskates.

Today Camp John Hay “Building No. 215” is no longer there, but it used to stand on top of the hill just off the fork of Sheridan Drive and Mile-Hi road, across a small traffic island—which is still there. It’s that little planter box with three pine trees growing in it near the main guardhouse on the driveway leading to the present-day Main Club.

Actually, Building No. 215 was not even properly a skating rink. It was an indoor regulation-size basketball court on the second floor, with a weightlifting-and-body-building gym on the ground floor.

There was ONE vending machine in the building that dispensed chocolate bars and soda in cans—a novelty at the time because soda IN CANS did not exist anywhere else in Baguio, back in the day! We locals came to grief with soda BOTTLES—only bottles (which have since been phased out).

There was no skating in the mornings because American G.I.s on “R-and-R” who preferred shooting hoops to hitting golf balls used the basketball court in the mornings to play “pick up” games among themselves.

This suited us just fine, because we still had classes in the mornings. But as soon as the school bell rang to signal lunch, we were off to Camp John Hay—which was a mere 15-minute walk from City High on a brisk pace.

We also made sure our lunch on Fridays consisted of sandwiches (not the “rich kind” but pandesal with Star margarine that you sprinkled a little sugar on) so we could eat while walking at the same time.

Sometimes we got to Camp John Hay so fast we were EARLY--there would still be the tail end of a pickup game happening in the hardcourt. Not for long though because we subtly heckled the players to wrap up their game. When the referee blew the final whistle, we rushed up the narrowish stairways leading up to the second floor where the “pro shop” was.

In fairness, the American base officials probably “get it”—that high schoolers in Baguio embrace the decidedly American skating culture, but didn’t have enough American dollars. So the skating rink was one of the few base facilities that accepted payment of rental fees in pesos.

It was fairly affordable to rent a pair of boot-type rollerskates at twelve pesos for NINETY minutes—not one hour. They gave us some allowance for trying on several pairs of rollerskates to test for fit, comfort and “cool looks.”

You cannot rent skates if you’re not wearing socks. And you cannot step onto the skating rink until you laced up properly, meaning you threaded that shoelace (which was a sturdy indestructible paracord, probably recycled from discarded US Army parachutes) through all 18 holes and tucked the lace ends in the side of your boots. You didn’t want to run over your own laces, or somebody else’s, and spool it into your axles.

Somebody at the entrance to the rink floor checked everything and made sure you did everything right because a huge sign by the bleachers declared the stern policy : “Think Safety At All Times. No Horseplaying Allowed.”

The irony about this strictness for safety is that we were not made to wear skating helmets. If you crashed, your skull made acquaintance with the hard parquet floor in a jarring introduction that made you wonder if the colorful stars you see are coming from the solitary disco light ball hanging on the ceiling.

That basketball court’s quick conversion into a skating dance hall in the afternoons was amazing. First off, Camp John Hay had the best sound system. They played songs from Casey Kasem’s “American Top 40” and when we were seniors in high school the hottest ticket in cinemas was “Xanadu.” So we skated all afternoon to that movie’s soundtrack, lots of danceable songs from Olivia Newton John and Donna Summer.

The skating rink’s sound system featured wonderful bass woofers that put out a low booming rhythm, a constant thump-thump-thump that masked the sound of our constant thud-thud-thud as we fell and crashed on our rollerskates all over that rink.

You never stopped dancing even when you’re sprawled on the floor though—actually gyrating in pain but keeping time with the music—and I think THAT is how “breakdancing” must have been invented.

Nobody took skating lessons, and nobody gave them. After lashing those rollerskates on to your feet in the pro shop, you walked a few meters to the rink entrance on deep cut-pile carpet where those eight little wheels on you feet didn’t roll so well. That made your awkward duck walk quite manageable and you really thought, “I’m skating! I’m skating! I’m doing it!”

But as soon as you stepped on the smooth surface of the skating rink, you instantly discovered how utterly frictionless those tiny wheels’ rollerbearings really are. Youthful memory is selective, it doesn’t record everything and now at 60 I don’t even remember how painful it was to fall a million times.

But really all there was to it was that pride, envy and chivalry are the best skating instructors. You can’t afford NOT to be gliding soon on those wheels if your friends Carlo, Renato, Alan and Albert are doing it. Not while your blushing crushes Elvie, Melissa, Vilma, Ollyn and the rest of the bad girls are watching!

There’s a trick to it though, one that hit two birds in one stone, in a manner of speaking. You skated up to pretty Nordeliza and told her, “Here, let me TEACH you how to skate!”

Yes, the nerve.

You get to hold her hands, both of them in fact, and other parts of her anatomy on occasion (that’s bird number one) and you’re really using her as a brace to keep your own balance. So she was actually helping YOU learn how to skate. The best part is when you crashed together, you still get to blame HER. It was all the girl could do to apologize for her clumsiness as a "student" and to reward your patience and heroism as her "teacher," you might get a sultry peck on the cheek. Bird number two!

By the time we were about to graduate, all of us could skate BACKWARDS. I could even jump and spin a turn and a half in midair—but never stick the landing, so I made jumping my last routine. That way as I picked my bruised ego off the floor I could mumble, “that’s all the skating for today, guys, I’m so tired I can’t even land a SIMPLE twist-and-a-half anymore!”

Carlo, Renato, Alan and Albert all picked themselves up from their own wrecks and agreed loudly, “Me, too! Let’s go home!”

And THAT is how the real “Me, Too Movement” got started.

I think.*

Camp John Hay is the last sanctuary for endangered species

ne other undeclared role that Camp John Hay served was as an ecological preserve.

In 1987 what was thought to be the last mountain cloud rat (locally named “yutyut”) was caught off “Little Mermaid” garden, below Scout Hill by a groundskeeper who thought it looked like a giant shrew.

Believed to be almost extinct—certainly endangered—this species once menaced rice farmers and upland vegetable growers because like the indigenous highland deer (this one is probably extinct) it was exclusively herbivorous. Because there were rice or vegetable farms in Camp John Hay, the poor little rat managed to briefly thrive in it, until that unfortunate encounter with the groundskeeper who was just cleaning up after some messy picknickers. The creature succumbed to a well-timed whack with a rake.

Because of that undeserved notoriety—it turns out traditional vegetables were not exactly the main entrée in their diet—they fell victim to anti-rodent prejudice and were hunted to the point of near-extinction.

Recently, there have been numerous sightings, even captures, of yutyut in Bokod and Itogon which suggests that the species is probably staging a brave if unlikely comeback.

I have not heard of any conservation effort that has endeavored to secure any of these animals and put them into captive breeding programs—but that’s not saying a lot, really.

I have not heard of ANY wildlife study programs that is actively engaged in cataloguing local species of flora and fauna for purposes of mapping their habitats and preserving both organism (plant or animal) and environment.

Again, that should come as no shock. At the rate we are cutting down our pine trees, you would think there is actually a pine tree ERADICATION program being pursued by the government.

Everytime some developer unveils another billboard announcing the rise of another condominium project, people just shrug their shoulders now. How many trees did the DENR approve to be cut down again this time?

The classic official retort is that the developer is required to plant “a million seedlings” sometime somewhere to make up for the arboreal loss.

That’s just like saying of an abortion, “don’t worry, lots of women are still going to get pregnant. There’s really plenty more where THAT came from!”

They miss the point. Promises are made by fools like developers, but only God can make a tree.

In fact He DID. He not only made trees, He made them self-propagating—bearing seeds so they can make more trees after their own kind.

Which is the point we miss. When you cut down ONE pine tree, you are shutting down a whole propagation system that used to produce thousands of pine cones, each one in turn releasing hundreds of tiny winged seeds that travel long distances in the wind to find implantation in some welcoming patch of loam.

There are close to EIGHT BILLION people alive today, who all sprung from just one pair in the garden of Eden. Even after the Great Flood that decimated all of the human race save the family of Noah, his three sons and their wives, we still managed to climb up to 8 billion.

That shows you that to propagate millions, you only need to SPARE a handful. Conversely, to ensure that millions never get to see the light of day, you only need to kill off ONE. Just one.

So every time you cut down ONE pine tree, you just vanished one genealogical line that would have resulted in the progeny of millions of trees—somewhat like the “million” trees a developer is involuntarily made to commit to “produce.”

Put in another way, you’re asking a developer to do BETTER than God, producing a paltry “one million trees”—most of which will probably be sown only in the rich soil of press releases.

Even from the air, you could clearly see that Camp John Hay is one of the last relatively untouched patches of green in the entire city of Baguio.

Beneath that last surviving forest canopy, there thrives God knows how many uncatalogued species of critters clinging on by tooth and nail to that fast shrinking habitat.

My apologies to my pañeros and pañeras but even we, lawyers, are soon to be complicit in that habitat destruction. The proposed new Justice Hall will be located beside the Voice of America lot in Loakan Road. Unless engineers can design the building to levitate above ground, hundreds of pine trees will again have to be cut, sealing the doom of fauna living in this treeland.

I ran into one of these taken-for-granted wild species during one of our walkaround “mini trail hikes” around Camp John Hay just this weekend.

I asked Christine to hold out her hand to provide scale as I took a photo of a rare forest snail we found crawling just to the left of where we were trekking. Whereas a common garden snail could be about as big as your thumb, this one could fill your entire fistful.

Of course, instinct told the little critter I was a dangerous apex predator. So as soon as it sensed my shadow it took off at its best sprinting speed of about ten inches per hour. I tried to keep up to snap the photo you see.

“There’s another one!” Christine yelled. Apparently there were a few more scattered about on the ground around us, all making the frantic exodus to escape this couple of giant mammals wearing multiple layers of colored skin.

Shouldn’t somebody be gathering up these giant snails for study? Or just counting them to see if there’s even any hope in trying to keep them around until a more intelligent generation musters the fortitude to help them keep their God-given niche in this crowded planet.*

Happy memories of Mile-Hi in Camp John Hay

hile Christine and I were doing our regular “cardio” walkaround in Camp John Hay last weekend, I spied on a little sign near Scout Hill that indicated the direction to what it claimed to be the “historical core” of Camp John Hay.

I thought, “Could anything be more ABSURD than THAT?”

They have demolished practically ALL BUILDINGS in Camp John Hay that held any historical value, what “historical core” are they talking about?

Let’s go through some of those buildings that once TRULY existed in Camp John Hay’s history, and see how many of them you can remember.

NINETEENTH TEE. This was a simple cafeteria with a wraparound verandah facing the 18th fairway at the top of the hill where the Forest Lodge is today.

It’s just a small two-storey building—well, technically it’s just one-storey because its upper floor is level with the road at the back of it which connected to the Main Club 500 meters away.

The floor beneath the road level housed a golf pro shop, with its “Wall of Fame” featuring small brass plates nailed to a particle board, engraved with the names of golfers who have scored a “hole-in-one” in any of Camp John Hay’s 18 holes. The shop also served as a display room for club trophies won by some local golf teams.

It’s also where you rented a “driver” (a golf club which hits the farthest, usually a “1-wood”) and a largish wire-basket of golf balls. You carried these to the driving range across the street where you whacked them downrange off Ordonio Drive, hooking and slicing all afternoon to your heart’s content.

The one thing I liked the most from this cafeteria was their “bowl of chili.” It became such a popular entreé that once every summer, Camp John Hay even held the Annual John Hay Chili Cook-off—drawing some of Baguio’s best undiscovered chefs pitting against each other’s “top secret” chili recipé.

MILE-HI RECREATION CENTER. For a while, the John Hay Management Corporation also tried to do their own bit of historical revisionism.

They renamed the old Base Main Headquarters as “Mile-Hi” but no one who is from Baguio believed them. They must have felt how badly it stung to be the laughingstock of Baguio residents, so they later renamed it “Camp Nike” but not after also unsuccessfully trying “John Hay Commissary”—acceptance of either name was a total flop.

You don’t switch names of places around just like that and think you can “rewrite” Camp John Hay’s history. Even today, only new Members think of the present-day “Main Club” as its faithful namesake, because REAL Baguio people know it’s sitting on the site of the OLD Mile-Hi.

The old, true Main Club is where The Manor now sits. The now-derelict Main Headquarter building that used to house the spankiest administration office in Baguio is an abandoned wagwag and ukay-ukay place, fronted by the only kind of “development” we are experts at: a food "tiangge" housed in a row of rickety tents elbowing at one another for space.

It’s a far cry from the OLD and REAL Mile-Hi (in its original site) which, from the 60s up to the early 80s, was a showcase of what a real “State-side” games arcade was supposed to look like, gathering several Western-style recreation facilities under one roof.

It featured 6 lanes of competition-grade Tenpin bowling alleys—when the only two other bowling alleys in downtown Baguio (Olympian Bowling Lanes and Strike-and-Spare, both in Upper Mabini street) only offered “duckpin” balls.

Back in the day, Mile-Hi was the only one that had an automated pin-setting machine designed by Brunswick. It swept the pins clear after each frame, or after each strike, eliminating the need for a human pinsetter.

The mechanism also retrieved your bowling ball and sent it back up the alley to you, through a pneumatic delivery tube that ran underneath the floor and spat the ball out in front of the player.

So, unlike in duckpin bowling which sent back six smaller balls to a waiting rack, the Brunswick machine allowed you to keep using the same ball for every shot.

In fact, the really serious players often owned and showed up with their own personalized bowling ball, with its three grab holes custom-drilled and spaced to conform to the dimensions of their bowling hand.

Even just standing around watching, I could never forget the muffled cracking sound of falling pins, and the low humming noise of that Brunswick machine in action.

As a little boy, I was so fascinated by that mechanism, I swear I could watch it all day.

There were also four tournament-size billiard tables with the best Aramith balls and several “house cue sticks” and “bridges” you can rent from the front desk.

Again the really serious players often showed up with their own custom-made two-piece cue sticks and played for discreet wagers.

But the true iconic thing about Mile-Hi was its lineup of pinball machines and authentic Vegas-style slot machines.

Tragically (for me and my poor boy peers), they only accepted REAL US coins, not tokens.

The slot machines only accepted quarters, which we rarely had more than two or three of—to say nothing of a cupful of them which is how much you needed if you really had to play for real stakes.

The idea, of course, was if you could punch just the right combination of buttons and pull that side lever with just the right amount of torque—those three fruit symbols on the spinning dials lined up together, showing 3 fruits of the same kind and—voila!—your cup runneth over! With REAL quarters!

A cupful of quarters, after you exchanged them for legal tender, could fetch up to ten dollars which, back in the 70s, would be about the equivalent of P5,000 pesos today.

It was a total thrilling experience of colorful lights and a cacophony of technomusic themes that filled the air with excitement.

Local “funhouses” like the one on the corner of Carantes Street beside Bob’s Dry Goods (now Tiong San Harrison) tried to mimic that atmosphere, and famously succeeded in turning many schoolboys like me into young delinquent class-cutting truants.

But it could never recreate that “Stateside” feel of Mile-Hi.

For all the energy you spent playing these machines, Mile-Hi’s cafeteria offered a quick and hearty “recharge” with humongous all-beef Big Boy burgers (I wonder if that’s where my friend JB Balinong got the idea for naming his burger joint near SLU’s Gate 3?), and Baguio’s first taste of the giant Slurpee before there was even the first 7-11 here.

Mile-Hi was such a total package that I suspect when people talk about Camp John Hay being the “crown jewel” of tourism entertainment, they’re probably thinking of Mile-Hi.

No wonder the promotional bumper stickers that the American base administrators had printed plenty of, and would give away to people, said simply: “I’d rather be on my way to Camp John Hay.”*

How Voice of America informed, entertained and educated Filipinos

he Philippines was under Spanish colonial rule for 327 years (1571-1898) and under American rule for just 47 years (1898-1946).

So the joke goes we spent three centuries in cloistered convent, and less than retirement age in Hollywood.

And yet look at how we turned out as a people: the most Spanish-hating (we finally got rid of Español, the college subject in 1987) American-loving non-Caucasian race in the whole world.

Even if you just spoke ten words of English—just two or so more than Erap did—you could already be understood anywhere in these 7,100 islands that make up our archipelago.

For good and for bad, we have a totally Westernized culture that has permeated through the last ten generations, at least. You will not find too many of our youth in seminary or nunneries—but you won’t have to look too far to find countless of them with body piercings.

In my parents’ generation, who lived through the second world war and have vague recollections of “peace taym” just before that, their indoctrination into Americana was courtesy of “Victory Joe”—the triumphant American G.I. soldier who taught young Filipinos how to speak, read and write in English under the spreading mango tree, with an M1-Garand rifle slung over his shoulder.

For the rest of us, Americanization came by way of rock-and-roll music ushered in by Elvis Presley and the Beatles (who are actually British), Marlboro cigarette and Wrigley’s chewing gum (again, British).

But without “Victory Joe” running around the countryside anymore after the late 40s, what was the medium of perpetration for this happy decadent cultural influence?

Why, RADIO, of course!

It was the American Henry Herman, Sr. who set up the first AM radio station in Manila. KZKZ was a 50-watt transmitter that could throw a decent radio signal as far as Bulacan, already a marvelous feat for the day.

After KZKZ was destroyed during the war, it was the Americans still that put up the first AM broadcasting network to take its place after the Liberation in 1947.

KZAM also had a 50-watt transmitter no bigger than KZKZ had. But this time American engineers had come up with a better solution to extending the reach of radio by using “repeater antennas” or relay transceivers.

As the name’s coinage implies, transceivers both received and transmitted the radio signal, so that a dozen or so of these devices spread over a good interval could blanket a wide area, eliminating dead spots—which is what a true network is.

The best part is, the production staff from the Office of War Information, then by the United States Information Service (USIS), media arm of the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), only had to work in the central studio in Manila.

So throughout the later half of the 1900s, American-inspired radio gaga continually pumped Western values into our gathering consciousness.

This kind of culturalization infrastructure remained intact through all the years when Camp John Hay was being run by the Americans from the 50s all the way even past 1991 when the RP-US Military Bases Agreement was abrogated.

Many will recall the “Voice of America” (VOA) which broadcast programs like “Back to the Bible” in the 60s and 70s heard all over Baguio in my boyhood years.

But because the Philippine government could not allocate a commercial radio frequency to VOA (some constitutional issue behind this), initially VOA just produced content. And THEN Philippine public radio (Department, later Ministry of Public Information) could take care of broadcasting it. So we heard “Back to the Bible” episodes then on public radio DZEQ, intro’d by Linda Jularbal.

Some postulated that President Marcos (the father) didn’t want to encourage too much contemporary cultural freedom—because it led to independent thinking, that led to anti-Establishment criticism, which culminated in anti-government dissent, that was anathema to autocratic martial law rule.

This is why from 1972 until 1980, even importation of foreign films and music was tightly regulated. Of course, Malacañan p-r people would deftly spin this around and called it the golden age of Original Pilipino Music (OPM), which all radio stations were required to play three quarters of every broadcast hour.

Maybe it did local music and filmistry some good, maybe it didn’t. But if we go by how Pinoy entertainment art—especially film and cinematography never managed to transcend the concept barrier beyond the love triangle (or so-called “love teams”) and women yelling at each other and slapping each other’s faces, I’d say the isolation probably did more harm than good by stagnating the art.

As always, the wily Americans found a loophole. Only “terrestrial” radio frequency signals were allocated by the NTC.

If you direct your transmission upward to broadcast satellites orbiting above, and bounced it back down to earth using very short amplitude waves—shortwave signals—technically you’re not stepping on any State-owned and controlled bandwidth.

So VOA retooled its transmitters to carry only shortwave signals—which had one disadvantage, however. Few Filipinos owned transistor radios that could receive shortwave signals. Even fewer understood what shortwave frequencies are for, often associating them only with annoying Chinese broadcasts no one could understand.

Fortunately, cable television and home satellite receivers came in vogue in the early 90s and, especially, TV’s equivalent of the shortwave signal: VHF (very high frequency) and UHF (ultra-high frequency) signal carriers.

These all still relied on signals travelling through a network of relay repeaters, which began from the main retransmitter at the VOA lot on the southern edge of Camp John Hay (which had since been dismantled) relaying the signal to the main distribution relay station on Mount Santo Tomas and to Wallace Point in San Fernando, La Union.

I remember putting up my own 30-foot antenna in my backyard (don’t be too impressed, it’s just a tall pole supported by 3 guywires) on the top end of which I mounted a rotatable VHF-UHF antenna array that I bought from my friend Conrad of Uptown Electronics in front of SLU—for less than P1,000.

Then I could get Far East Network Philippines (FEN-Phil) which, back in the day, everybody just called the “Camp John Hay TV Channel.”

It was glorious redemption from having nothing to watch but boring garbage on RPN 9, GMA 7, IBC 13 and PTV-4—the only four TV channels you could watch during the “golden age” with their heavily government-censored content (mostly the women-emoting-yelling-crying-slapping-soap-opera stuff)

Instead, we were able to follow the saga of the LA Lakers versus Boston Celtics (this was in the pre-Michael Jordan era) NBA rivalry and witness the dawn of the 24/7 cable news with the birth of CNN.

It was paradoxical that on August 21, 1983, when Ninoy Aquino was assassinated, many Filipinos didn’t even know about it for hours, some even well into the next day.

But those of us who had FEN-Philippines, within minutes from the gunshot itself, were already watching ABC’s Ken Kashiwahara illustrating with a dummy how the bullet’s downward trajectory into Ninoy’s nape suggested he was gunned down by a gunman standing on the stairwell and not by fallguy Rolando Galman standing on the ground.

Western media propagates some degree of cultural decadence, I grant you that. But for the most part, it has also “cracked the shell” of the martial law-imposed Philippine isolation, eventually leading to the spread of the “freedom bug” that is really what brought about the democratic space we now enjoy—and take for granted.

So stop sounding like the “rise and fall of ABS-CBN” is the whole story of cultural democratization in contemporary Philippine society.

If you ask me, foisting a man wearing a pink wig as the role model for Filipino children to follow is more decadent influence than we never ever saw on FEN.

And what of Willie’s “cry-on-cue-with-your-most-horrible-sob-story” before a nationwide audience for cash formula—ugh! don’t get me started.*

How Camp John Hay lost its original green-ness

here were a lot of ‘back stories’ surrounding the complete withdrawal of US forces from the former American military bases in Subic, Clark and Camp John Hay that never made it the front page of newspapers, both national and local.

Mostly, the suppression of those stories was the handiwork of p-r operators, some say funded by the CIA, to keep US approval ratings among Filipinos high even as the US government was actually doing its best to make sure the Philippines regretted kicking them out.

The Philippine Senate rejected any extension of the RP-US Military Bases Agreement on September 16, 1991. We served notice to the US government on December 6, 1991 that it had to complete the withdrawal of all US troops within one year.

Smarting from that virtual rebuff, the Americans completed their pullout a full month ahead of schedule on November 24, 1992.

In fact, the withdrawal was almost perfunctory. The cataclysmic eruption of Mount Pinatubo earlier on June 15, 1991—the biggest volcanic eruption of the century—had buried Clark Air Base in Pampanga so deep in lahar it could no longer safely operate as an airfield for high-maintenance tactical aircraft.

Nearby Subic Naval base in Zambales was less affected but also suffered severely diminished operational capability.

The Mount Pinatubo eruption had negligible effect on the facilities of Camp John Hay in Baguio. However, it robbed this rest and recreational facility of its chief clientele: US servicemen stationed on these two frontline combat support bases who were on leisure furlough and were regularly shuttled to Camp John Hay to play golf and sample Baguio’s bustling nightlife. If Subic and Clark closed down, Camp John Hay would lose its raison d'etre, it's very reason for being.

I covered the turnover of Camp John Hay for the Gold Ore in the 90s. It wasn’t just one occasion, but a long drawn-out season of physical dismantling and ‘deactivation’

Yes, the American flag was ceremonially lowered for the last time from that giant flagpole in front of the Main Club (now the Manor), there was that.

But for several more weeks before and after that ceremony, US civil engineering specialists (called “Seabees”) dismantled and hauled off everything removable from Camp John Hay including (literally!) all the kitchen sinks.

It is claimed that the US left behind $1.3-billion worth of assets when they pulled out from these bases. If that’s true, most of that must have comprised of those drydock repair facilities in their Subic naval port—because I certainly didn’t see that much left in Camp John Hay.

In the last days of Camp John Hay under American control, I took a long stroll along Sheridan Drive, the longest road in the base that extended from “Checkpoint Charlie” (which was the US servicemen’s code for the Main Gate) all the way up to 19th Tee, where the Forest Lodge is today.

(Let me digress a little: I don’t know how they did it, but Sheridan Drive was totally obliterated from the map. That is criminal. Sheridan Drive is reflected in the oldest maps of Baguio City, and to completely erase a public NATIONAL road would have required an act of Congress, of which there was none.)

Lugging two cameras with me, my aim was to preserve the last images of a “before turnover” Camp John Hay that I can compare with “after turnover” images later.

This was 1991—shortly before the era of DSLR’s and digital imaging. So I was shooting with color slide film (Kodak Ektachrome) on the Gold Ore’s Nikon FE2 camera, and some ordinary Agfacolor “negative” film on my personal Minolta X370.

The shots were beautiful, showing the fairways of the “front nine” tees, between the Halfway House, which was just a short ways above “Checkpoint Charlie” and Mile-Hi, where the present Main Club is now.

Then I shot the “back nine” tees, which was from Mile-Hi, crossing over to just across where “Tsokolate de Batirol” is—that notorious par 5 “dog leg” hole—then pivoting clockwise back towards 19th Tee.

The Ektachromes were spectacular—the greens were vibrant, the tall pine trees glistening when the beams of sunlight shone through their thickly-needled boughs.

Back in the day, I turned in my Kodak Ektachromes to my friend Ramon Ang (of Mountain Studio) who sent my rolls down to Manila for processing. Baguio studios could process “C-41” negatives—the kind that allowed you to print “positive” copies on ordinary photopaper.

But color slides required a different process “E-6” that can only be done by color labs in Manila.

So while “one-hour photo” was all the rage back then for ordinary film, for color slides the turnaround was 2 weeks.

When I got my slides back, I proudly showed them to my editor-in-chief Peppot Ilagan (I was still associate editor then) who gave me his signature sour look, “WHEN did you shoot these?”

“Two weeks ago,” I said.

“That is NOT what it looks like now,” he retorted.

“What do yòu mean—that’s impossible—I was meaning to take my ‘after turnover’ shots maybe 2, 3 or even 5 years from now yet. But TWO WEEKS?? How can things change that fast?”

“Why would I lie to you?” Peppot said gruffly, “why don’t you go back there and see for yourself. This time just shoot ordinary film.”

I loaded the Nikon with an Agfacolor 200 roll and grabbed a cab. As soon as I jumped out of the cab at the main gate (taxis weren’t allowed to enter Camp John Hay back then), I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The whole Camp John Hay golf course was a landscape of dried yellow and dying brown! What the hell happened? I shot the full roll, and reloaded two more film canisters after that.

It was a Monday, and we didn’t “bed the paper” until Friday. So after I got the prints from Mountain Studio “non-rush” I showed them to Peppot again Friday morning.

He took a look at the brown landscape images and said to me, again in his usual growling mood, “WHEN did you shoot these?”

“Last Monday THIS WEEK!” I said.

“That is NOT what it looks like now.”

I wanted to slug Peppot for trying to make a fool out of me, I thought. It was all I could do to keep from snatching that unlit cigarette he always had in his mouth, “WHAT DO YOU MEAN?? These pictures are just four days old! Did the grass regenerate as soon as I turned my back?!”

“Why would I lie to you?” Peppot said, impersonating himself, as he sat back in his swivel chair like he was enjoying every moment of my annoyance.

“Why don’t you go back there and see for yourself. This time, I don’t care what kind of film you shoot,” he said.

Against my better judgment, or maybe just to humor the guy, I grabbed the Nikon again and jumped on another cab, “John Hay!” I yelled.

As soon as I got off at Checkpoint Charlie again, I couldn’t believe my eyes.

The whole Camp John Hay golf course was greener than a meadow in springtime!

I dragged myself back to the Gold Ore office in Harrison Road, Peppot broke out in guffaw as I staggered through our huge swinging glass front door with a confused look in my face.

“I swear to heaven, Pepps, it WAS GREEN two weeks ago, BROWN four days ago, and GREEN today! What the hell is going on??”

Peppot finally lit that cigarette, took a couple of puffs before settling back in his swivel chair, “Well, since you don’t smoke pot like the rest of us senior media guys, I think we can safely assume you’re not hallucinating.”

“I know!” I said, “but how can double transformation happen like that, practically right before my very eyes, and I even captured evidence of everything on film—lots of film! And yet everything keeps turning out exactly as you said.”

“Why would I lie to you?” Peppot said for the third time, but this time with quiet empathy.

“Stick to the story, Joel,” Peppot said seriously, “you stumbled on to something nobody wants to talk about. Lose the camera. I did not train you to become a photographer. I trained Erik de Castro to become a photographer.”

(Erik de Castro, the Gold Ore’s photographer from 1979 to 1983, under Peppot Ilagan, went on to become Reuters chief photographer until his retirement 5 years ago)

“You, on the other hand, I trained you to become a journalist. A journalist WRITES journals, not shoot photographs. A camera will not help you discover the truth. You asking the right questions from the right people and processing the answers you get—THAT is what will enable you to find out the truth.”

A couple of weeks later, I had the story. From several sources inside the base, I learned that the Americans had sprayed the whole golf course with defoliant. Feeding into the same normal sprinkler system that was already in place, they used a milder formulation of some chemical most likely not too different from the “Agent Orange” they used to defoliate vast tracts of lush vegetation in the Vietnamese countryside, in an effort to expose the vegetation-concealed Ho Chi Minh trail.

This turned the grass yellowish to brown. But apparrently, the unsporting Americans did not want the morphing to be too obvious. They wanted it to stretch over a considerable period.

So a contractor was hired to spray the whole golf course with green vegetable dye, using several passes of sprayers loaded on golf carts. I took pictures (defying Peppot again) of some white golf carts with obvious green oversprays on their side panelings. The idea, evidently, was to ensure that the grass deteriorated at a slow but irreversible pace, but beyond any effort to save it. This was supposed to make the Filipinos rue the day we booted out Uncle Sam, by making us think if we can’t even keep grass alive, how can we “re-develop” Camp John Hay properly.

If only they had known—we REALLY did not need any help proving that we can’t develop Camp John Hay properly. Just look at it now.

When the BCDA took over control of Camp John Hay, their bewildered groundskeepers couldn’t understand why “green” grass instantly turned into mulch when you stepped on it. They took to resodding the grass in several square blocks at a time, but the new grass just seemed to wilt up within days. Nothing they did could coax the new grass to take root.

How could it? The soil itself was laced with plant poison, watering and even moderate rains did not wash it away. It only blended it more with the soil causing it to seep deeper and wider—finally reaching the complex root systems of the surrounding stands of pine trees. Try counting how many dead and dying pine trees there are in Camp John Hay today.

When I turned in my manuscript, Peppot read it and said, “We can’t print this. Too many anonymous sourcings.”

“But only the local personalities, it’s a cultural thing. We Filipinos are only brave incognito, come on, Pepps!” I tried to defend my story, “but you can see I named all the American officials, everyone that Angel identified,” I said, namedropping a mutual friend who we both suspected to be a CIA “double agent.”

“You found out the truth. You’ve done your job,” Peppot said.

“But isn’t finding out the truth only HALF the goal? What about telling the story about the truth?” I asked.

“Finding out the truth has no deadline,” Peppot said, “and neither does telling the story.”

“So what do I do now?” I said flabbergasted.

“Stay ready to tell the story…THIRTY YEARS from now.”

It was 1991.*

A silent environmental damage is slowly creeping up on Baguio folks

hen we were young Boy Scouts in Baguio Central School in the 70s, my schoolmates and I looked forward to October Scouting Month with much anticipation and excitement.

Only once a year do we ever get to see what Camp John Hay looks like from INSIDE. Only during Scouting Month do we get to pitch our heavy canvas surplus army pup tents in Camp Conchu. That’s in Scout Barrio, on the edge of Camp John Hay’s southern perimeter.

We pitched camp and crawled into our sleeping bags at night just outside the base. But during the daytime, we ran all our scouting activities inside the base.

We frolicked among the tall pine trees lining the different hiking trails, or just simply lay around the verdant grass, watching out for “low-flying golf balls” as numerous signs warned us.

It was truly a privilege because it wasn’t until late 1976 that John Hay opened to the general public.

Prior to that, you had to know someone, who knew someone, who knows the American base commander to get a special gate pass in order to enter. Otherwise, it was a recreation facility exclusive only for US servicemen on “R-and-R.”

That’s why we joked—but BELIEVED the joke—that getting inside Camp John Hay was the closest thing to actually being in the Unites States.

You felt the big difference as soon as you get past the main gate. Literally, there were only FOUR (4) plant species you found growing in Camp John Hay: pine trees, gumamela, native grass (on the fairways) and Bermuda grass (on the putting greens).

Of course, the plantboxes around the Bell Ampitheater was a myriad of colors from several flowering species. But that’s the exception.

In its general topography, Camp John Hay was a surreal landscape that totally screamed Americana, feeding off of our already deeply-ingrained colonial mentality.

We were mesmerized at seeing so many tall white people in crisp US service personnel uniforms scurrying about, speaking English very fast with a twangy slang.

Our crappy pesos were useless. The vending machines, the kind you could never see anywhere else in Baguio back in the day, only accepted dollars: quarters, nickels, dimes and cents.

We saved up for October Jamboree the whole rest of the year, so that we could exchange our hard-earned pesos at the blackmarket for a few precious dollars.

For what? So we could drop some quarters into those bloody vending machines, to coax it to dispense us a few of those original, authentic “Sunkist” orange juices that came in this pyramid-shaped packaging.

The tallest, most majestic pine trees anywhere in Baguio were to be found in Camp John Hay—because nobody cut them down for lumber.

All structures—from administrative buildings to the individual cottages—were rendered in uniform white sidings and green roofings. Their live hedges were neatly-trimmed gumamela bushes that were meticulously maintained in their round orb configurations.

After the US bases were returned to Philippine control beginning in 1991, a succession (or amalgam) of government agencies and corporations—Bases Conversion Development Authority (BCDA), John Hay-Poro Point Development Corporation (JHAPDC), John Hay Management Corporation (JHMC) and the private lessee FILINVEST—announced the core concept of their “redesign and rehabilitation” of Camp John Hay.

It was an assault to my fond childhood memories of the old “American John Hay” revolving around the stupidest idea ever: “adding more color” to the John Hay landscape, by “diversifying and flora and fauna” or some other pretentious technocratic gobbledygook like that.

That meant introducing reedy bamboo grooves along the roadsides, interspersing fast-growing alnos trees, golden bush and other tree species in between pine tree stands, laying out new rows of marigold, gladiolas, lantana, and other lowland hedge varities—a nauseating sea of clashing flower blooms with a pallete of colors so wild it can put a box of Crayolas to shame.

Look at Camp John Hay today and it looks like any other barangay with an uncoordinated neighborhood gardening policy. It has lost its mythical look of Americana—and I don’t care how patriotic or nationalistic you are.

The sad fact is, no matter where we send our “development concept” experts to train abroad, when they come home, they still plan a tourist resort by overcladding it with features copied from the Philippine jeepney with all its garish embellishments.

Taste, class, artistic maturity and design sophistication are just not our forte, sad to admit. Up to now, I still want to puke everytime I look at that ubiquitous Lion Head on Kennon Road.

I hope to God someday somebody gets elected mayor or congressman of Baguio who didn't flunk Humanities in freshman college. I hope he or she orders all that Davies paint sandblasted off of that iconic monument, to bring it back to NATURAL STONE color and texture. All outdoor monuments all over Europe, North America, London, Athens, Rome--you name it--people in these cultural and art capitals of the world DON'T PAINT their public sculptures. You don't paint sculptures, period.

Yet in so many ways, Camp John Hay, arguably at one time the crown jewel among Baguio's tourist spots, has fallen to the same pattern of decline. By overdecorating it, and then losing steam in the arduous task of maintaining its overcooked cosmetic makeup, Camp John Hay is now barely even a shell of its old self.

Nowadays, the place is pathetic--it just seems to thrive on neglect. It's a foreboding of what every other park in Baguio will eventually end up looking when the "project money" dries up.

Because the REAL charm elements, that’s what they overlooked: the pine trees and the grass.*