Baguio Insider

Baguio Botanical Garden is a 30-second walk from where I live. Its main entrance is on Leonard Wood Road and it is located beside Teacher’s Camp. Botanical Garden is so large that its back side extends all the way to South Drive. About 1km to the east of Burnham Park and 1km west of Mine View Park, it is the one place absolutely filled with the tallest pine trees. In fact, it is there that our Parks Service nurtures pine tree seedlings and other indigenous plants for the constant greening of Baguio. (more…)

You may have noticed, from my previous posts, how serious this blog has been the past few weeks. This is not as originally intended.

I had wanted to post my Baguio photo collection here one by one, and tell you more about why this is “my virtual heaven on earth.” How I wish I could, like Connie, regale site visitors with snippets of daily family life, or my travels, or what I cooked for breakfast. What happens is, I tend to put all the wonderful things about Baguio in the Go Baguio! website and all the serious stuff here. Also, I have been voluntarily and happily “stuck” at Atenara House for weeks due to our many wonderful guests and I really haven’t been able to edit my photos, or go out and take some more, or actually enjoy Baguio except within the confines of my wonderful house.

The great thing about Atenara is that it has ALL the typical “Baguio” features: a garden filled with pine trees, large rooms, spacious lounging areas, a great fireplace in a really good neighborhood. It’s so large and there’s just so much to do everyday that I do not feel the need to leave it at all!

Photos of Atenara may be found in our web album. A friend of Connie’s and mine, Ida La’O exclaimed once that my photos do not do the place justice. It is actually prettier “in person.” The camera is just unable to take the whole place in.

Living in Baguio, in general, and at the Atenara, in particular, is like being on vacation everyday!

But I digress…

What I really wanted to say is that, in the next few posts, I intend to tell you more about my experiences living in Baguio, the restaurants I eat in, our wonderful “pasalubong” items, and Baguio’s little secrets. Of course I have been threatening to write articles like “The Truth Behind the Meningococcemia Scare” and “If I were Mayor of Baguio…” but you’ll just have to be a little more patient.

Maybe I just had to get the flyover, Korean and airconditioning “issues” out of the way first so I can move on to the lighter side of life. Baguio is my home. I was a Manila girl without province to go home to. And many, many years ago, I decided that Baguio was to be it. This is where I am happy, concretization notwithstanding (here I go again!).

Hahaha!

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Photo Caption:

Let me start my Baguio Photo Collection with the best photo I have ever taken in my life. I took this a few years ago at Inn Rocio on Kisad Road. I used to live at Burnhamview Condominium in front of it and take my breakfast at the inn everyday. On one beautiful morning, I saw this bee contemplating the best-looking sunflower of the bunch and kept saying to him, “Huwag kang gagalaw (do not move)!” And he obliged me by staying there long enough for me to catch the perfect wild sunflower photo against the backdrop of pine trees and a typical bright blue Baguio sky!

The rush to secure suitable lodging accommodations for Holy Week 2007 is on!

I don’t understand why, since Baguio is most popular during Holy Week, that folks wait until the last minute to book hotel rooms and transient houses. By last minute, I mean one month before. That’s just too late already. The wise ones reserve as early as December or January.

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by Anna Lisa C. Araneta

Baguio has never been a stranger to foreign nationals visiting and living here. In fact, it was “Little America,” a mining and recreation town built by the Americans in the early 20th century. It was only after the 1990 earthquake and US Bases turnover in 1991 that Baguio has turned very Filipino. And not native Cordillera — it has turned more Ilocano, not only in dialect but more in terms of attitude.

In its heyday in the 1980s, Baguio would see busloads of American, Japanese and Chinese tourists, all armed with the latest cameras, taking package tours that included playing at the Hyatt Terraces Casino, horseback riding at Wright Park, shopping at Mines View Park, and golf at Camp John Hay.

After Baguio was devasted, foreign tourists stopped coming and the lowlanders migrated to Baguio in droves to study in our “naturally airconditioned” schools, most of which do not require an entrance exam to enter, just tuition money.

Now Baguio sees more foreign nationals than ever before and they come mostly from one country — South Korea.

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