Baguio Insider

Will the real lion please stand up? This large rock naturally-shaped like a lion’s head was the original landmark that greeted all visitors to Baguio City. The Lion’s Club commissioned in 1971 the sculpting of the much larger one made out of limestone a few meters past it.

Kennon Road remains the Baguio locals’ preferred access route to Baguio City. Not only is it a more familiar road, it’s also, in my opinion, way prettier than Marcos Highway. The route is shorter by about 15km, plus the bends are easier on your vehicle. Those cars outfitted with inclinometers can tell, for example, that when the road curves to the left, the road also tilts to the left, thus making it easier to navigate.

Much narrower than Marcos Highway, Kennon is the road less traveled these days. Of course folks still fear landslides and rock falls. For many years, visitors would call me and ask if Kennon was passable so that the first design of the Go Baguio! website included an update on the home page that said whether Kennon, Marcos, Naguilian or Halsema were open or closed. Nowadays, the Shell Select station at Rosario, La Union junction has an indicator as well. Personally, none of these dangers deter residents like me from passing this historic road. There’s a story at the end of this article that explains why.

On my first trip up to Baguio passing Kennon Road after the earthquake (1992, I think), I did not realize how much I had missed it — all the lush greenery and magnificent waterfalls (some of which your car would pass under). Pre-1990, as soon as one hit Twin Peaks (Camp2), one could already smell all the pine trees. But these days, the pine smell is gone, as well as much of the ground cover and trees in the areas that were mined like crazy by the Americans and Filipinos alike.

My preferred travel hours to Baguio are 10pm to 2am, to avoid all those annoying tricycles in Tarlac and Pangasinan, so when we drove up in the early morning last Saturday, we took it nice and slow, stopping to admire the scenery and take photos along the way. Since it has been raining off and on, Bued River has clean water flowing through it, with white caps passing through the stones. Across the river on Camp 1, you will see Klondikes, a relatively new resort with native huts, a pool and hot springs. Parking is on the Kennon side and the owner has constructed a bridge to reach the resort which is on the opposite side. I so look forward to visiting this resort one of these days and telling you all about it.

Kennon Road in August 2007 is smooth, with no potholes — all the repair work, it seems, having been recently concluded. In case you’re wondering why the communities there are called camps, it’s because these are mining camps set up one by one when both Kennon Road and Baguio City were being built by the Americans early in the 20th century. Camp1 and Twin Peaks (Camp 2) are, to this day, still very green but you will notice that Camps 3, 4, 5 are pretty barren. These areas were mined extensively so that you will see that the mountains have rock faces instead of trees and ground cover. In other words, the mountains here no longer have any minerals to hold the soil, which in turn, hold the roots of the trees.

Passing through Kennon Road, one will see waterfalls, the prettiest of which is called “Bridal Veil,’ at Twin Peaks, which starts from a height of about a hundred feet above the Bued River and drops straight down into a pool that you can swim in. This photo shows a partial view of the falls from Kennon Road. At Camp 1 your vehicle passes through 2 sheets of falls. Camps 3, 4 and 5 have falls both near the road and up in the mountains. Of course, when we go and visit Klondikes Hot Springs, we’ll probably complete the experience by going down and swimming by Bridal Veil, where Baguio girl Angel Aquino posed for those fantastic shots for Bride Magazine in 1997.

At Camp 6 you will see the Lion’s Head, which is now one of the popular images, welcoming visitors to Baguio, now with a view deck and souvenir stores around it, and last Saturday, even a little white pony for picture-taking purposes. My mom has always disliked the large, scary lion, commissioned by the Lion’s Club in 1971 to be carved from limestone and unveiled in 1972. She remembers the real Lion’s Head, which is a large rock that was impressive enough as a landmark, when there were no structures around it yet. Very few people notice it these days but I always do. In fact, when I drive up Kennon Road alone at night, I even avoid looking into the scary glow of the eyes and teeth of the Lion’s Club Lion.

The large Lion’s Head changes color pretty often to “make it more attractive to tourists.” So sometimes its mane is black, gray, orange, gold or yellow. I am including a photo of it here only to boast about the bluest Baguio skies and to show you the white pony. Honestly, it is not an image of Baguio that I relish, although the view of the Zigzag from here is pretty great, too.

There is a right turn to Loakan Road from Kennon, and one will pass the airport, the export processing zone, and go through a few more kilometers of beautifully paved roads until one reaches the Camp John Hay main gate. To get home, I exit at the Baguio Country Club gate and turn towards Leonard Wood. This allows me view pine trees and great natural beauty all around, avoiding the congested residential and commercial areas like Camp 7 and 8 and that awful, unnecessary Baguio BGH flyover.

Finally, let me tell you a story:

After the earthquake, My two best friends, Anne Marie ‘Nanette’ Logarta and Marites ‘Tes’ Rana, and I were on a road trip to Baguio. I had not told them that it was my first time to drive up by myself. Knowing that Marcos Highway was undergoing massive repairs, we had an uneventful 12 minutes until our way was blocked by a 2-storey boulder in Camp 3. Engineers arrived and promptly blasted it away and pushed the debris off the cliffs to Bued River. There were 2 more boulders after that, less than 10km from each other. The second one was disposed of in the same manner as the first, although the third was a little more problematic because it was on a path so narrow in Camp 5 or 6 (we were so close to Baguio already by then!) that the engineers said would take much more maneuvering to get rid of it. So the girls and I finally had to turn back and pass Marcos Highway, which was all dug up, instead.

Of course, as I recount this tale, it sounds so simple but what it really was, was an extra 4 hours added to our trip, from 7-11pm, where chicharon and balut vendors would magically appear with cold bottled water and juice in tetrapacks for our nourishment. My midnight, as we were climbing Marcos Highway, we espied the Halfway House by Alfredo’s catering van going down searching for us. I had left my house in Manila at 10am, picked up the girls, waited for Tes to finish a job interview and were on the road to Baguio at 3pm. So, as far as my family and staff were concerned, were were taking too long to get to Baguio. Those were the days when mobile phones came in large bags. So a search party by midnight was in order.

We were the first to reach each of the three boulders. Had we gone any faster or slower, we could have been crushed by one of them. Moral of the story: If it’s your boulder, it’s your boulder.

Epilogue: The same Mercedes Benz the girls and I were riding in during the 3-boulder experience made a trip down to Manila a year or two later, with only our company driver in it. Jovito was a veteran driver in his late 40s who drove for us for decades without a single accident. What happened was that the curves on Marcos highway were not designed to bend or tilt, so two tires one one side blew out, sending the car careening towards the cliffs. Jovito was saved by a solitary tree, the Benz suffered irreparable damage.

Thus, I do not fear Kennon Road. In fact, I love it! The road is very well designed and easy to use. It gets me home faster.

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CURRENT TOLL RATES FOR KENNON ROAD

There is a toll fee of Php15.00 for sedans, whereas Marcos Highway is completely free to use. I believe the toll charged goes, not for maintenance and repair, but merely to pay for the salaries of the people in the area who are tasked to ‘manage’ Kennon road in case there are repairs being done and some spots are one way.

About a year ago, toll fees for motorcycles were — ta-da — Php.25! Cheaper than the paper the toll tickets are printed on. I’m so glad this has been raised to Php5.00.

Buses and trucks are, technically, not allowed to pass Kennon Road because they’re too wide for the narrow roads, but some hard headed provincial buses like Autobus insist on passing there and they are not told to turn back by the toll gate people at Camp 1 or Camp 5. In fact there is a toll fee rate for these menaces of about Php25.00. Maybe this should be raised to Php100.00 to dissuade them from passing there.

Trucks cannot be altogether disallowed because some of them go to the river to quarry, but a lot of Fruit & Vegetable dealers pass there, too. They do exercise better road courtesy than a lot of the private vehicles from out of town, who may not know that the rule is that those coming up have right of way over those coming down.

Imagine how nice the Philippines would be if laws were enforced.