Recently in Baguio Category

ONE placard read: "Reduce. Reuse. Recycle". Another one said: "Save water, save the trees." Dressed in orange and green, one group in last weekend's Panagbenga, or Baguio's annual Flower Festival, "accessorized" their costumes with these messages. Panagbenga is the best and the worst time to be in Baguio--the city already overcrowded as it is with college students from all over, call centers that lure job-seekers from nearby provinces (which gave rise to nightspots like Nevada Square) and yes, Korean tourists. During the parade, I chatted with Jen Gapasin of the Green City Baguio Coalition, who said her group took advantage of the festival in getting their message across--about their plea to make Baguio "green" again. Many years ago, a former mentor (from a previous job) once told me about this place called Sagada that he described this way: it was how Baguio looked like before it became a bustling city. And so I went to Sagada and saw how it pristine and green it was then--though it became less and less so during succeeding visits after seeing many parked SUVs. So what now Baguio? I have fond childhood memories of spending summer vacations there with cousins who lived along Loakan Airport. After spending covering the parade tucked inside a sea of people, I was dying to get out of the downtown area. So I took my family to John Hay, the one place I could think of then to get away from the crowd. But as I was driving on Loakan Road, I noticed that there are less pine trees now and that they looked a lot "green" before. How about being more specific and come up with a slogan like: "Save the pine trees?"

By Anna Valmero INQUIRER.net BAGUIO CITY, Philippines—More than being the summer capital of the Philippines, one façade of Baguio that tourists must experience is the bursting colors of culture, history and heritage that it aims to preserve. During my last trip to Baguio with the INQUIRER.net VDO team, we took the road less traveled. Instead of filling our itinerary with the usual parks and places to visit, we went to discover the unknown at the historic Diplomat Hotel.
The hotel is located at the Diplomat Hill, about 20 minutes from Session Road. Long abandoned and said to be a haunted place, the hotel's remaining structure—the cross on top of the entrance hallway, the three-floor architecture, some parts of which are wooden floors, staircases and two fountains within the building -- is a beauty in daylight and a mystery at night. The hotel's history begins in 1911 when the Province of the Dominican Order voted to build a vacation house on their 17-hectare property in Baguio. Construction began in 1913 and inauguration happened two years after. Afterward, it became a school but low enrollment reverted the building back to be a vacation house cum sanitarium. During the World War II, the hotel housed refugees but was later claimed by the Japanese Army who bombed the building. According to stories passed down by word of mouth, priests and nuns were beheaded by the Japanese soldiers in the ground floor and several of the rooms on the second floor. The babies, some say, were killed in the fountain area. After the war, reconstruction followed and it was acquired by Diplomat Hotels Inc. in 1973. Not long after, the hotel ceased operations, some say due to the death of a major stockholder while others say tourists who stayed at the hotel did not last more than a night and heard or saw beheaded ghosts. To unravel the mystery of the unknown, our team trooped to the hotel in mid-October.
With flashlights and cameras and three spirit questors as guides, we toured the place, floor by floor and entered several rooms. We entered the second floor via a staircase near the blooming flower garden, said to be tended by the unseen beings. Up until the top of the building where the cross is located, we are guided by three spirit questors -- Dion Fernandez, Me An Billones and Maria Elena Catajan, who gave us information about how they "sense" beings in each room via tarot cards. Outside, we were told that someone who lives in the building has been following us since we stepped inside the abandoned hotel. A tarot card showing a man of royalty was drawn four times from the suite. This was the reason one of his companion felt very tired after the tour, the questors said. As the spirit questors were brought back to the town proper, we were left outside the building. Before leaving, the questors advised us to stay outside the building. Three guards passed by us to do their routine inspection after a few minutes. To be productive, two people in our team recorded what they felt while inside the abandoned hotel. After some time, we heard tin roofs clattering loudly like someone was banging the metal in a nearby distance from us. During the first sound, we looked at each other silently asking each one if we heard the noise which seemed to come from the guard house several meters away from us. By the second and third time, we recorded the sound on camera only to find out in the morning that the tin roofs are piled semi-neatly on the veranda of the hotel, after the third floor. When the guards passed by again to get back to their station, we asked them if they heard any sound of someone banging tin roofs. They said 'No' and left. Back to the plan: we camped inside the abandoned building as we intended to stay overnight to record on camera observations from 12 midnight to 6 a.m. There were no spirit questors to guide us at this time. As advised by the questors, we camped at the ground floor and set up our candles and standby cameras near one fountain -- said to be the area where most of the spiritual beings congregate. We took turns sleeping on the mats while those awake recorded on camera the observations they had of the building and the surroundings each hour. Someone in the team who stayed awake from midnight to 6 a.m. said there was a time he saw through his peripheral vision something white passed by on his right side. Others noted noises of footsteps on the wooden floor, oddly likely when all of us are either sitting or lying on the floor. Something that remained a mystery to us until today is the recording of our interview with the questors done near the cross. Up in the tranquillity there, we saw the city lights of Baguio and heard only the soft, chilly breeze of the night air. When we played back the recording in the area, there were static noises of different songs -- the sound more amplified than the voices of either the questors or the interviewer from our group. Yes, there are several radio stations in Baguio but we did not play any radio sound during the interview. Plus, the boom mic which we used to record the audio from the interview is a unidirectional microphone with no transmitter or receiver, thus the unsolved case of how those different static sounds being recorded during the interview. When dawn started, we got up and stayed a bit around the hotel. From outside, the hotel's grandeur remains and the empty halls -- which could cause imagination to run wild at night—are but empty windows to the past and eyes to the future left unknown to us. Next time you visit Baguio or any other place, try to go the road less traveled. Discover what lies ahead in the dark and see beyond what a place usually offers. Meanwhile, somewhere in Cavite where the lake attracts both locals and tourists, lies a dormant house that has not seen human inhabitants for quite a while. The reason: People who stay there claim to hear strange sounds at night, coming from the second-floor room. INQUIRER.net multimedia reporter Marjorie Gorospe and the VDO team of INQUIRER.net seek to find the truth behind this abandoned house which, through time, has been overrun by flora. The VDO team spends a night at this house and waits for anything outside the ordinary.

By Candice Montenegro, Contributor INQUIRER.net I'M not very fond of horses (or animals for that matter), so horseback riding isn’t usually part of my Baguio itinerary. However, on my recent trip to Baguio, I figured that I had to try it just for the sake of saying that I went horseback riding, so I did just that. I found myself in Shalan ni Kabadjo, a small horseback riding place inside Camp John Hay, where we were staying. It was small, unlike other famous horseback riding spots like Wright Park. A small sign hung on a post showing their rates -- P350 for an hour and P200 for half an hour. Benjamin Ngo-Ay, the manager of Shalan, was nice enough to show me around and tell me about their riding path. He said that Shalan gets a lot of customers during the summer (especially around April) and over the holidays. Here's a video I took. Shalan has sixteen trainers who come in everyday to have their horses rented out. These trainers rely on Shalan for their everyday income. Since they all need to earn a living, they make sure that every trainer gets an equal chance to rent out their horses in a day. During lean months, some trainers bring their horses elsewhere while the rest split the money they earned for the day. He also shared that horseback riding is not as lucrative as it once was. Fewer visitors try it out (usually foreigners are the ones who do). He said that some trainers were forced to sell their horses and just find another job. But others like himself stuck it out and stayed in the business just because they love it. “Hindi ko iiwanan ito,” he said. “Napag-aral ko ang mga anak ko dahil dito.” I originally did not want to stay long, but Manong Ben’s stories made me stay. While he guided his horse Kopiko around the riding path, he told me amusing stories about Baguio, his family, and even some chismis about a local celebritiy who went riding in Shalan once. When you hear about horseback riding, you naturally think about the horses. Not a lot of people see the trainers who work hard to take care of their horses and earn a living. After hearing Manong Ben’s stories, I’ve found new respect for horse trainers like him. My horseback riding experience was not even about the horses anymore; it was about the people and their stories. I’m still not fond of horses, but I told Manong Ben that I’d drop by again the next time I’m in Baguio, that is if he’s still there. “Naku iha, siguradong nandito pa ako,” he said.

By Vincent Cabreza Inquirer Northern Luzon Bureau BAGUIO CITY--The summer capital's signature fog lends atmosphere to old stories about its wandering ghosts, and that always means profit for local businesses. Frequent visitors from Manila still look for the now closed "Spirits Disco" the moment they arrive for the long All Saints' Day weekend, believing they can finally glimpse the facility's elusive specter. But they will more likely encounter street dancers wearing garish monster masks and makeup outside one of the homegrown Tiong San Bazaar buildings here. Werewolves and vampires, who moonwalk to Michael Jackson's song "Thriller," have been a good formula because they have raised the bazaar's weekend sales by 20 percent since 1990, says store manager Junelyn Dasargo. And like all good business practices, the dancers have been exported to the bazaar's La Trinidad branch in Benguet, which Dasargo helps manage. She says Baguio businesses do not just dress up their shops for Halloween as malls often do, "they thrive on the stories, too." Urban legend What has become profitable for Baguio businesses is the fact that the urban legend about the "white lady" here has become part of the country's memories about Baguio, say officials of the Baguio Chamber of Commerce and Industry (BCCI). Instead of driving tourists away, the "white lady," who is said to haunt a road that leads to Camp John Hay and the Philippine Military Academy, invites adventurous visitors to a midnight haunt and a snack or drink downtown, says Jacquelyn Acoba Ver, 70, BCCI assistant board secretary. These stories are rarely forgotten because they are often stuff reinvented over the Internet or reenacted in films, she says. Holiday economics Officially, the brisk tourism Baguio generates because of the "horror stories" is the best example of how Malacañang's "holiday economics works," says Carlos Honorio Estepa, board director of the Philippine Tourism Authority (PTA). "People will always spend more time on holiday if the holiday is longer. Japan has recognized this theory," he says. But Estepa acknowledges that Baguio fog has given the city a marketing dimension no other town can beat. He says fog is the same reason why marriage counselors and wedding planners still recommend Baguio for weddings. "The fog and the chill may mean romantic weddings, but it also means a fantastic adventure for this generation who still see Baguio ghost stories flashed on television this time of the year," he says. Baguio business has had a quiet partnership with "its ghosts since the 1950s," Acoba Ver says. Quiet partnership Most of the popular Baguio ghost stories date back to the 1950s and the 1960s, and are often tied to wanderings spirits of Japanese or Filipino soldiers who died at the end of World War II. Baguio was designed and built by the American colonial government, but Halloween was never openly celebrated here, except inside Camp John Hay, Estepa says. Halloween in the 1970s were often initiated by American servicemen and American expatriates, who ended up partying by themselves downtown, he says. But Baguio ghost stories thrive because even traders are compelled "to live with their ghosts, and it has not affected their businesses at all," Acoba Ver says. "Teachers Camp [which is celebrating its centennial in 2008] has been the subject of various ghost stories. The camp rents out dormitory rooms to teachers and students -- and I live there as a teacher. Yet, students still camp there today even if the ghost stories persist. They come expecting a fright-filled evening and end up in each other's embrace," she says. Vallejo Hotel, an old American-style building near the Baguio Cathedral, inspired many ghost stories in its heyday because of the architecture. "But people still booked rooms there [until it closed seven years ago]. Stories passed down to Manila folk involve visitors feeling an invisible presence nudge their hand or their back. But like many Baguio horror stories, these spirits are harmless, never malevolent," Acoba Ver says. Made up stories Many other ghost stories attributed to other stores were made up, but traders used those to their advantage, she says. She says "Spirits" was created by businessman Alex Mina in the 1980s, and it became popular because of stories shared by customers that the disco house hosted "a presence." "People came looking for the ghost. I never felt anything at the time. But young people came again and again, so it became popular," she says. Tiong San Bazaar also had no ghost stories to rely on. But it was conscious about the city's haunting reputation, so Joseph Cabarle, the bazaar's marketing expert in Baguio, convinced store clerks and attendants to volunteer as the store's Halloween dance troupe, says Dasargo. The dance troupe helped sell the store's inventory of masks (priced at P200 to P300 apiece) but it soon noticed a considerable rise in sales between Oct. 28 and Nov. 2, she says. The troupe has altered its cast, but continues to dance at the store front on Harrison Road here each year, Dasargo says. The volunteers are not paid extra for the chore, "but they love doing it because it helps their promotional prospects and it helps management pick out the talented workers," she says.