walking man
Yesterday I walked from Vizco’s to, then up Mount Santo Tomas, Kubayao, Tuba, Benguet. I spent two hours, fifty minutes to reach the top, as I knew exactly how to get there, unlike the first time, and I wanted to arrive before nightfall. I saw the city lights this time, as darkness fell while I admired the view from the summit. I didn’t take a camera, though.
This afternoon I walked miles in Tuding and Baguio City, including a tour of Mines View. Baguio City is jam-packed with tens of thousand of visitors. The population total -residents and tourists- may have reached 200,000. I’d intended to note on the weblog that the city has been so crowded, as we’d been warned that it would be, and that traffic going into the city has been very slow at times. I ride jeepneys into the city then later walk to home. We don’t have motor-tricycles here. Yesterday, after descending the mountain and returning on Marcos highway to downtown, I did ride a Tuding Express jeepney toward home rather than walk any further. Mines View Park and Good Shepherd Convent’s public compound were packed. Vehicular traffic from Leonard Wood Road to Mines View was at a standstill. I walked home past a long, long line of nearly motionless vehicles idling, burning fuels to pollute the air and coat the city with soot. I was amazed that tourists would sit in their cars and hired taxis for half an hour to travel the last 1000 meters to the Mines View overlook. One can’t park a car there; all spaces were occupied by then.
I wondered why taxi riders didn’t disembark and walk the remaining 1000 meters to their destination. Why pay money to sit in motionless taxis for half an hour, so close to the objective?
What can one do in Mines View Park, anyway? Browse the hundred stalls of handicrafts and junk, buy corn cobs, buy strawberries, ube jam, peanut butter, try to elbow one’s way to the ‘scenic overlook’ of a non-descript valley of rusting shacks, garbage and distant mineshafts, shop for a straw broom, look at mass-manufactured fake handicrafts, have wallets, cell phones and cameras stolen in the midst of the thick mobs, buy carved wood key fobs, buy oranges … The place was crowded, elbow-to-elbow with slow-moving tourists (and probably pickpockets). I just walked past everything and everyone on the way to home in Tuding.
