Baguio City : Flowers, food and the scent of pine

Driving for more or less six hours from Manila or

somewhere nearby just to get to Baguio City for the

Baguio Flower Festival (BFF)in February is something that

we always look forward to.

One of the things that we love

about Baguio is its super cool

breeze. (Before the BFF took off

last February 17, the

temperature was quite a chilling

11°C.) But more than just the

weather, people enjoy a certain affinity with Baguio City

for various reasons – honeymoon, yearly vacations or

summer hiatus, food and nature-trip, and so on. Our

going upland has turned into some kind of a love affair to

nurture as time went on.

It must be the pine scent that we long to get a whiff of.

Once you’ re greeted with that familiar fresh scent along

the highway, you know you’re already in Baguio. What

about the misty sunrise that everybody simply loves to

watch? It was like we’ve never seen a sun rise before.

True, it’s a familiar scene at some beaches and bays, but

there’s something special about watching the sun rise

and shine in the highland.

And all those goodies! At the local market we can horde

those bottled halayang ube, strawberry jams and peanut

brittle as well as other fresh fruits and greens. Last year,

hubby Vic couldn’t believe his eyes when I bought a

bagful of oranges, the size of one being just smaller than

a tenpin bowling ball!

Blame it on the weather or the very Baguio environment

for counting the place as a gastronomic haven.

During the Flower Festival’s early years, Marian

Cathedral, a BFF pioneer formerly with Camp John Hay

and now a top executive at Caltex, would take the press

and the rest of the guests to the newest restaurant in

town.

That’s how we came to comb the eateries in Baguio.

She’d take us to kalapaw (meaning native hut) for

seafood and grill, Star Café for your early morning congee

and tea, Rose Bowl for another Chinese meal version,

Café by the Ruins where you can spot BenCab together

with other Baguio artists once in a while; and Club Safari

Lodge & Restaurant, where meals are always enjoyed

among the owner’s priceless collection of trophy animals

hunted in the ’70s – when it was still allowed to kill wild

animals for fun and game.

Baguio is now synonymous with the Flower Festival, and

vice-versa. You just can’t imagine one without the other.

Isn’t it Baguio the best place in the country where all kinds of

blooms thrive beautifully? Even the rare and imported varieties

flourish in Baguio’s climate.

During the most recent BFF, we managed to catch up with the last weekend of the

nineday affair and found out the very impressive score

from Gillian Cortes, executive vice-president for marketing

and public relations of the Camp John Hay Development

Corp (CJHDevCo).

“Seven years and on a sustainable level!” she said in an

upbeat mood over lunch at the Lone Star Steak House in

Camp John Hay.

As we compared notes when the BFF was still a toddler,

Gillian was so enthusiastic to recall the redeeming figures

of attendance, number of guests and side activities, the

wide variety of goods and products on display at the

Market Encounter in Camp John Hay and the pageantry of

it all – meaning the BFF has grown into a massive

proportion that it is now the signature tourism event in

Baguio, and the Cordillera Administrative Region (CAR) as

well, every year.

Special guests during the BFF were President Gloria

Macapagal Arroyo; Tourism Secretary Richard Gordon;

Housing Secretary Mike Defensor; chairman Rogelio L.

Singson of the Bases Conversion Development Authority

(BCDA); lawyer Damaso Bangaoet, executive vice

president of the John Hay Poro Point Development Corp.

(JPDC); Ernesto Puguon, vice-president of the Camp John

Hay Development Corp. (CJHDevCo); Nicholas Florio,

country chairman for Caltex; Valeriano Lugti,

vicepresident for Pepsi, to name a few.

For those who have been watching the BFF unfold – from

a budding episode to a yearly holiday – they can’t help

but be amazed at how far has the BFF gone. When the

festival was first held in 1994, even would-be sponsors,

except Smart Communications, were skeptical whether or

not the BFF would be calendared as a yearly event.

However, year after a year, people started looking

forward to the next BFF. It has become an annual goal of

the event organizers to show-off a bigger and better

festival.

Sponsors get to plug their products while subsidizing

various activities that made the BFF a sure hit –

cleanliness and barangay beautification, visual arts and

other creativity-related contests depicting the festival

and Baguio as a tourist allure, fluvial parade, evening

fireworks display and other taken-tothe-street activities.

The BFF played up, not just the highlands culture, but

primarily Baguio City as the country’s summer capital and

a leading rest and recreation center in the north.

Gillian was so proud at the turn out of the BFF’s Market

Encounter. And who wouldn’t be? The entrance ticket

alone raked in more than half a million in sales during the

nineday event. What more of the multitude of products

that were on display?

For non-locals, like us, everything about Baguio was a

bestseller – food, clothing accessories, shirts with Baguio

and BFF logos, hand-women tops and pull-overs,

blankets, home decors and other novelties, plants and

flowers and many more. The locals went gaga over things

from various places outside CAR that they can’t easily

get in Baguio.

But the Market Encounter’s real star, according to Gillian,

was the landscaping contest in Cordillera and Open

categories. Most of the gardens were inspired by the

highlanders’ culture and way of life – bul’ol (rice god)

wood carving, cartwheel, pond and mini waterfalls, water

buffalo horns, rice thresher, large cauldron, and a

handwoven Igorot cloth draped above the door.

All of the entries were creatively executed and the top

three winners in open category – Jose “Boy” Acosta,

Jovita Zaparita, Arnold Aromin. The two honorable

mentions were Peter Pinder and Vicky de Guzman.

For the Cordillera category, the top three winners were

Ruben Zaparita, Liza Acosta and Roberto Pahitong, who

received the same prizes. The two honorable mentions

were Larry Hacoco and Rufina Andres.

As Baguio City blooms into a 21st century destination,

people from all over will have more reasons to visit the

Pines City, especially in February.

Also in the works are several infrastructure developments

particularly inside CJH, which the CJHDevCo top brass

envision as a catalyst to transform Baguio City into a

meetings and conventions site and eco-tourism haven in

Northern Philippines.