By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

MY 15-year-old Lancer wasn’t the most earth-friendly vehicle around, what with worn valves, blown gaskets, a rusty exhaust and myriad other ills that caused it to leave a trail of oil spots and black exhaust in its wake. How it passed its emissions tests is still a mystery to me.

Anyway, when it finally gave up the ghost (after being totaled in a car wreck), I actually heaved a sigh of relief, like the owner of a decrepit old nag that was finally put out of its misery.

The year before, I had gotten myself a scooter. It was an LML, an Indian-made clone of the famous Italian Vespa PX150, identical in nearly every respect, down to the 150cc two-stroke engine.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE BRIT band Oasis had a pretty catchy song called “Little by Little,” and that encapsulates what I think about protecting the environment. There are many important and high-profile tasks to be accomplished by people around the world, but personal responsibility is often forgotten. After all, those folks are saving the whales and preventing global warming, so why me worry?

Yet I try my little bit everyday. Small steps, but a steady pace. The footprint humanity leaves on the planet is terrible enough (check out the supremely scary “The World Without Us” by Alan Wiesman if you don’t believe me), but every little bit can’t hurt. The commonsensical tips, like turning off the faucet when brushing your teeth, aren’t hard, just hard to remember.

Perhaps the most commonly forgotten step is recycling, and I don’t mean segregation. It really doesn’t make any sense when we’re asked to segregate biodegradable and non-biodegradable and then the folks in charge of garbage just mix them back together anyway. We feel like we’re doing something but it’s just a placebo. Make sure it stays segregated, and we have a deal.

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By Leica R. Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

I LOVE to shop and how I converted that to saving the earth is my story.

Like most people, I wantonly use and abuse the environment without considering the impact on future generations. Until I saw “Happy Feet” and realized that the bubble baths I was taking may be causing penguins to swim further out for food and endangering the world’s already fragile life cycle. So I tried to do my bit to lessen my carbon footprints by avoiding plastic anything, never littering and carpooling whenever possible. Those were cool things to do until I was able to find my own unique way to help the environment that involved my love of shopping.

I have always loved vintage fashion and have dreamt about opening my very own little boutique filled with items I loved and hopefully, others would love as well. That this would actually be an earth-friendly venture was the extra incentive I needed to make it happen.

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By Pennie Azarcon-Dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

SOME people have shrinks. Others take valium. The rest just sleep it off. Me? I take a ride on the LRT. Nothing can make you forget your blues quicker than the more immediate need to (puff-puff)… get (huff!) on that train! Quick now, before the buzzer sounds and the doors slam shut.

It helps that it’s fast, cheap and you don’t have to talk to the other riders. You’re just basically left to your thoughts, thinking about lunch maybe or that pair of shoes you saw in the mall last night. Except when a cell phone rings and as one, everybody starts groping inside their bag or patting their pants. Never fails to amuse me. Like Pavlov’s dog or a Marcel Marceau sketch.

Then the distraction begins. “Hello, Papa? Oo, pauwi na ko. Initin mo na yung ulam diyan. (Yes, I’m on my way home. Heat up the food.). Sometimes it’s less innocuous and you find yourself lost in translation — the Japayuki talking in nihonggo to someone in Japan, the sticky intonation hinting of romantic transactions. Or a couple fighting, strong whiffs of third party liaisons in the air. The mother pleading for a son to stay put, she’s almost there. Speculations rise. Puzzled looks, raised brows, the pursed lips of judgment.

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By Eric S. Caruncho, Staff Writer
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

PEOPLE now talk about martial law as a dark period in the distant past when our democratic rights were taken away from us by a repressive totalitarian regime. Soldiers came in the night to round up activists, opposition politicians and anyone who might pose a threat to the new order and threw them in jail. The free media was shut down, and the only information came from the regime’s mouthpieces in the controlled press.

I didn’t care about any of that, at least not at the time. Martial law’s impact on me was more direct, and more personal.

I was a high school senior in September of 1972, and adhered to that wing of the youth culture that supposedly subscribed to the unholy trinity of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll (well, two out of three ain’t bad). Like most of my peers, I wore my hair down to my shoulders. In fact, I hadn’t had a haircut in two years.

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By Leica Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

THE WILDEST thing I ever did with my hair was color it myself — not with the pretty packaged supermarket-bought hair color but with my own concoction of petroleum jelly and crushed metallic blue eye shadow. I was a “punk” and it seemed like the edgy thing to do at the time. Needless to say, the result was dead cool and sufficiently fierce as to earn me the rep of “punk princess.”

My signature spiky haphazardly shorn bluish tinged locks were my way of rebelling against the long black straight hair of the time. I was a controlled rebel because though I loved dancing until dawn and drinking alcohol, I kept that GPA up and never got into drugs, smoking or Mohawks. I will always remember the “shock” I caused among my pretty long straight haired classmates when I first arrived at the quadrangle with my cropped short. I enjoyed that moment immensely.

But the craziest hair moment I have had was not something I did to my own hair but to my friend Maru. She had beautiful wavy shoulder length hair which, during a mad moment of post break-up grief, she allowed me to chop up to scalp length with a pair of house scissors! She sported a couple of bald spots for months after that which, strangely enough, did not wreck our friendship but strengthened it.

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By Pennie Azarcon dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

UP UNTIL a year ago, I hated my hair. Fine and limp, it slumped on my scalp like a furry roadkill, two tweezers’ pull away from becoming extinct. Always a cause for despair, the scraggly strands initially tortured Nanay who had fancied herself her daughters’ keepers — at least when it came to their profligate hair. She was our childhood Delilah, the infidel who inveigled us with 50 centavos — a small fortune that bought a week’s worth of halo-halo at that time — just to have our locks chopped.

Long unruly hair is unsightly, she scolded, a nesting place for parasites. One of these days, she’d warn my third sister who was constantly scratching her particularly thick mop, “those lice would grow so fat they’d sprout wings and carry you off.” Actually, it was one prospect we had secretly looked forward to– a fantastical journey that would lift us out of our bahay-eskwela-simbahan (home-school-church) routine. But it never happened and soon enough, Nanay took another tack. Laying on the guilt for which all mothers are particularly skilled at, she nagged, Doesn’t it bother us that she was being pilloried by other people for being an unfit mother, one who couldn’t even keep her children’s tresses under control?

Well that worked, at least for some time.

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By Ruel S. De Vera, Associate Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

MY mother told me that, as a child, I had long curly locks, angelic hair. Growing up, the thin, wavy hair took second priority to the fact that I had a huge forehead. It was a point boys my age always made fun of, so I tended to overcompensate — by developing a strange combover to cover the forehead. As a result, my hair looked different depending on which side you looked at it. Worse, in puberty, I decided that I wanted to have a mustache, so I not only had an oddly sloping haircut, but also a mustache at 15, making me look for all the world like Jose Rizal.

In college, I got the itch to grow my hair. So I did. I had chin-length hair and would tie it up in the worst ponytail ever conceived. It was during that time that I developed new respect for girls, because I have no idea how they managed to keep all that hair in order. As much as I tended to fuss over my hair (despite appearances), I actually had a face that looked the same regardless of what hairdo I had.

So I kind of just threw caution to the wind and got a crazy haircut. It was an approximation of corn rows, but because I didn’t want to braid my hair (and not shampoo? Eech!) I just had the barber carve rows into my hair. Weird, I know. Together with some very odd facial hair and an earring, I felt street. What I should have felt was screech. “Iverson!” I heard that a lot. Of course, I had no idea that they were all making fun of me. The funny part was seeing friends visibly try to contain the disgust on their faces as they asked why in the world I decided to get my hair cut that way. “Because I can,” I answered honestly.

After that little follicle debacle, I went for the least fussy haircut possible: I simply had it all cut off. This almost-bald look really worked. I had it for years — to the point where, frankly, I got a bit bored.

Last year, I decided to start growing my hair again, just a bit. My office mates were shocked. Many of them actually thought I was already bald. Seriously. In any case, I’m enjoying, for the first time in my life, having remarkably normal hair. There is, after all, no evidence of the strange hairdos I allegedly had in my youth (all the photographs have been destroyed and witnesses silenced), so I am perfectly content with my current hairdo. Besides, my wife likes it, and that’s good enough for me.

For more tangled tales and other hairy stories, check out the April 20 issue of the Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

By Leica R. Carpo, Publisher
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

AFRICA is a place that will change you. I could not sleep a wink on my first night because a herd of rhinos had decided to sleep underneath our tent and shook the poles of our makeshift home until almost 2 a.m. Although I was dead tired from 26 hours of continuous travel, visions of being some hungry animals’ dinner kept running through my head.

Going to Africa was never on my priority list of vacation places. I prefer to get my cultural fix from more civilized surroundings, like a medieval church or a European museum. I never even watch “Animal Planet,” but somehow I found myself in the middle of the Okavango Delta in Botswana, inside an enormous non-hunting game reserve in Africa and to my surprise, I found myself completely spellbound by the endless blue skies, the exotic wildlife and the constant thrill of the unexpected. This was a no-frills, no-holds-barred view of nature up close and personal. The Sistine chapel may have its charms but it pales compared to watching “the king of the jungle” close in on its prey with its pride of lionesses waiting to pounce nearby. The fierceness of it all was shocking, powerful and absolutely riveting.

Our safari trip consisted of waking up at 4 a.m. every morning for a hearty breakfast and jumping into an open Land Rover and cruising into the bush by 4:45 a.m. Despite the early hour, I found my eyes peeled alertly scanning the fields and hoping to catch a glimpse of predators closing in on their prey. Cameras at the ready, my safari group and I waited patiently often up to three hours on end for a sighting. Normally impatient, I found that there never was a dull moment in this watch. By 10 a.m. we were ready for tea, usually served outdoors and consisting of dried fruits, cookies and hot tea served in thermoses. Lunch followed at noon, often served by a picturesque lake or within sight of a panoramic view of the plains. By sunset we headed back to camp for an early dinner and were back in the jeeps ready for night drives by 9 p.m. We followed the animals’ daily regimen and ate and slept according to their body clock.

We were taught to observe the various paw prints to track the animals into there lair, how to distinguish predator from prey by the gleam in their eyes during night drives, and to listen to the various nature calls from birds to coyotes. The unforgiving food chain that marks everyday life in the African plains may seem harsh to “animal lovers” because “Bambi” is basically the main food group, but it’s a survival necessity for the lions who hunt them and the scavengers who benefit from the scraps.

From almost being capsized by a hippopotamus to being chased by a bunch of naughty monkeys, it seemed that everyday we were on safari was a real life adventure. Someday I vowed to return. In the meantime when the hustle and bustle of city life starts to grate on my nerves, the memory I carry of African blue skies never fails to ease my stress and brighten my day.

For more stories, check out the Sunday Inquirer Magazine’s Favorite Places issue this Sunday, April 13.

By Pennie Azarcon-dela Cruz, Executive Editor
Sunday Inquirer Magazine

SOMETIMES it’s not the place, but the people.

I remember how once, having arrived early in Durban, South Africa for an AIDS conference, I was told that my room was not ready so could I please wait in the lobby? With two hours to kill and a shimmering white beach just across, I asked the concierge if I could leave my baggage and take a stroll by the water’s edge. Almost in one voice in a pitch approaching panic, the front desk staff shook their heads. “Noooo! You can’t go to the beach alone. Wait till there are at least five of you.”

“But it’s just across, and it’s 9 in the morning,” I protested.

The concierge was adamant. “If you step out that door, we shall not be responsible for whatever happens to you,” he said in a clipped British accent that brooked no argument.

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