Baguio before the storm

Just before we left on a calm Friday evening in October, PAGASA announced that a super typhoon was about to enter the Philippines. I was ready with my overnight bag and was about to call a cab to pick up my friend at her office; together, we were heading to a bus station in Cubao to spend a weekend in Baguio City. I sent a text message to my friend and asked her if we should continue with our trip, considering the very bleak weather report. My friend replied yes, because she is ready with her knapsack and the prospect of getting stranded in Baguio is not all that bad. Besides, the forecast for the storm to make landfall was not until Monday, when we should already be back in Manila. It was a memorable Baguio trip that I would have regretted if I had given in to my fear of the storm. Our bus left Cubao around 10:30 p.m. and by 4:00 a.m. we were already in Baguio City. We noticed that the familiar coolness of Baguio was not so intense, even in the gray light of dawn. We looked for a familiar breakfast joint near the bus station for a scalding bowl of lugaw but we could not find it. We decided to hail a cab and go directly to Casa Vallejo, where we had a reservation. Thank God there was someone awake at the front desk, and we were able to deposit our bags in our nice and cozy room. Before we slept, we walked to the nearby Session Road for coffee and breakfast in a 24-hour Chinese fast food chain.

Casa Vallejo is located along the upper Session Road, at the foot of the biggest mall in Baguio. Not that we are interested in malls, but if you are a mall rat, this is one good reason to stay in this old lodging house made of wood. It exudes the ambiance of old Baguio that I had often heard from my literary mentor, Cirilo F. Bautista, who spent the early years of his career as a teacher in the City of Pines. And speaking of pines, Casa Vallejo is surrounded by big, tall, and lovely pine trees. Casa Vallejo is more than a century old. It first opened in 1909 and has survived several typhoons and earthquakes, including the infamous temblor in 1992 that toppled several commercial buildings and hotels in Baguio City, so we felt safe staying there. While waiting for my friend to wake up, I visited Casa Vallejo’s restaurant called Hill Station, which opened only this year. According to a Facebook friend who is a journalist based in Baguio, this is the new place to see and be seen, and where the food is also good. And so I went there for my brunch. It is a beautiful restaurant indeed! From my table I have a view of the mountains filled with pine trees. On my table is a small glass overflowing with little white lilies that, according to the friendly waiter with a winsome smile, is called “astronella." I ordered a cheese burger and juice, telling myself I would only have a light meal because my friend and I were planning to pig out in a local Chinese restaurant along Harrison Road. But then I ordered dessert to neutralize the taste of onions in my mouth – a slice of carrot cake with cheese icing and a cup of brewed coffee which is always more delicious in Baguio. That was definitely not a “light" brunch, so I had to forgo lunch. In the afternoon, we walked past Burnham Park on our way to Café by the Ruins and were surprised to find the bust of Daniel Burnham, the American urban planner who designed Baguio a long time ago. It was located at the far end of the park towards the City Hall. We had never noticed it before, and to think we were regular Baguio visitors! At Café by the Ruins, I had my first taste of civet cat coffee. It tasted heavenly indeed. It is no wonder that my idol, the fictionist Rosario Cruz Lucero, is always frothing in the mouth when she talks about this coffee. I ordered banana turon with langka while my friend got a lemon chiffon cake served warm with mango cream sauce and wonderful slices of mango. After that we went back to Casa Vallejo and had a badly needed body massage in the adjacent North Haven Spa. We availed of the one hour and a half massage called “Tal-Talad-Tad" which, according to their brochure, is an indigenous body massage of the Mountain Province. Oh, we were such hedonists and gluttons in Baguio that weekend! The ultimate surprise of Casa Vallejo is the Mt. Cloud Bookshop. It is rather small but it is a very beautiful bookshop made of pinewood. The books are well-chosen and arranged in a browser-friendly way. In one of the two shelves on the second floor, we were happy to see the new edition of our friend’s book about the military before and after the first Edsa Revolution. I looked for the new collection of poetry Juan Luna’s Revolver by Luisa Igloria, a certified Baguio girl and a dear friend. Padmapani Perez, the owner of this bookshop that I wanted painfully to be my own, said copies from the U.S. will be arriving soon and she will inform me through Facebook about it. I shared the laughter of the flowers outside when we left the bookshop with my loot—a CD of the piano rendition of several familiar kundiman produced by the old Bookmark and a second-hand copy of The Best American Movie Writing 1998. I was in cloud nine indeed! Sunday morning at the breakfast table, there was a rush in the air at the thought of leaving Baguio and heading back to Manila. When I looked outside the window of Hill Station, the gentle rays of the sun were lovingly filtered by the pine needles. The waiter said the weather was the same when storms Ondoy and Pepeng came last year. In the morning there was sunshine. In the afternoon, there were landslides everywhere due to abnormally heavy rainfall. Environmentalist Lory Tan (of the whales and dolphins, and the old Bookmark, fame) dropped by our table to tell us about his newly discovered haven in Bohol and his delight in the fast growing trend of ecotourism everywhere. Like us, he and his family would be hurrying back to Manila within the day, away from the approaching storm. Two and a half hours past noon, our bus left for Manila just as the skies were starting to darken and a steady drizzle obliterated our fading view of Baguio. As the bus sped down, the stretch of Marcos highway was draped in dense fog. I clung to my basket full of fresh strawberries for my sisters. My friend and I slept throughout the trip with contented hearts, both body and soul well rested. The next day in the news, it was signal number three in Baguio. Trees and lampposts were toppled and there was no electricity in the whole city. I could only pray that the beautiful books in Mt. Cloud Bookshop were spared from the wrath of the tempest. – YA, GMANews.TV J.I.E. Teodoro was conceived by his mother from a poster of a mermaid and adobo chicken feet, which made him a sea lover and condemned him to a peripatetic life. He was born in a village along the Visayas coast that nurtured the poet in him. Currently, he lives in a small but colorful house near the legendary Pasig River.