Do you know the way to Baguio?

By Al S. Mendoza

I WAS in Baguio only a while back and guess what I saw: A totally altered traffic in the City of Pines.

Has Mayor Bautista become a sudden fan of Bayani Fernando?

Fernando is that favorite bloke of Ate Glo – the favorite son of Marikina City whose penchant for roads and traffic is rivaled only by his obsession for everything pink.

Pink overpasses. Pink foot bridges. Pink public urinals. Pink bus/jeepney/taxi stops. Pink road railings.

Don’t be surprised if, one day, you suddenly find Metro Manila bathed in pink.

Name it, it’s pink. Pink is cadena de amor and so, give it to Fernando.

If rose is Erap’s favorite flower, cadena de amor is Fernando’s.

Thus, if soon you would see the name Fernando changed to ‘Pinknando’, don’t be surprised one bit.

Fernando has all the posts of overpasses at Edsa and Commonwealth Avenue planted to cadena de amor.  Concrete fences, too, on both major arteries of the Big City.

If he should soon have the length of both Edsa and Commonwealth Avenue painted in pink, don’t be surprised one bit, too.

He’s that obsessed with pink that it could come, happen, anytime. Wait till he finally runs for President in 2010.

What’s a cadena de amor again?

It’s that vine whose tiny flowers are pink. But what makes the cadena de amor utterly distinct from the rest of the flora and fauna family is, it loves to grow in cemeteries. It is almost a weed variety actually as it grows on its own. Self-supporting.  Like love, it is selfless, unselfish.

Cadena de amor is, roughly translated in English, chain of love.

The cemetery symbolizes chain of love?

If one’s tomb is wrapped in cadena de amor, love’s got to be in the air fo-rever?

Maybe. Could be. But that’s another story.

Back now to Baguio.

The rerouting scheme there appears too complicated that it is more of a bane than a boon to city folk and motorists alike.

Baguio has “grown small” due to unregulated influx of man and machine that a traffic system littered with one-way routes and U-Turn slots has baffled instead of simplified the ways of life in the country’s summer capital.

This was not the way the Americans envisioned the city when they built it decades back.

Whereas before, it was a breeze going to Session Road; today, you take pains searching your way into the city’s main artery.  It’s become a jigsaw puzzle looking for it that, before you know it, you are already either in Loakan Airport or Mine’s View Park.

What’s happening, Mayor?

I hardly recognize Baguio anymore.  I can’t enter it   with ease approaching from either Kennon Road or Marcos Highway. The maze of detours, do not enter signs, one-way planks, etc., has transformed my city of charms into a city of harms.

I do not object to a traffic scheme designed to ease road travel there. But please, let’s knock some sense into it first before we finally put the plan in motion?

Let’s not make our Baguio a guinea pig. Let’s treat it with love and fondness, the way our forefathers did.

(Readers may reach columnist at also147@yahoo.com. For past columns, click http://sundaypunch.prepys.com/archives/category/opinion/general-admission/ For reactions to this column, click “Send MESSAGES, OPINIONS, COMMENTS” on default page.)

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