Baguio and Katmandu in a new light

Having recently spent Christmas in Katmandu, I’ve begun to see Baguio in a different and more forgiving light.

For many years, I behaved like a betrayed lover and heaped all the scorn on the Philippines’ summer capital high up in the Cordilleras, which I knew so well as a child and as a young man. Disenchantment came in my middle years when I was ripe for savoring sweet memories of youth, only to find the place eviscerated by greed and politics and all but environmentally degraded beyond recognition.

I am not from Baguio and I was not born there. That may be the reason I had unilaterally invested the City of Pines with what I now know to be unrealistic and unfair expectations. I exaggerated Baguio’s beauty and charms, indeed made them impossibly golden in memory. I was gone from the Philippines for 17 long years and I guess the city got frozen in a time warp in my wild imagination.

When I came back, I was perfectly set up to be dismayed by the devastation and squalor that crept in while I was away. I vowed never to set foot there again, not wishing to break my heart a second time. This harsh judgment was aggravated, I must admit, by the equally sad fate of Malaybalay, my old hometown, which I had regarded as the other Baguio of my life and which also succumbed to the same kiss of death of Third World progress. Thus, I felt twice betrayed and twice as angry.

Like Baguio, Malaybalay lost most of its magnificent pine trees and its trademark all-day and all-night scent of pine. Both suffered at the grubby hands of political Neanderthals whose rank incompetence was only exceeded by corruption, mostly penny ante, simply because there’s not much to steal up in the mountains. They do real harm, however, by mowing down undefended forests and snuffing out the aura of nature’s perfection.

What can I do but grieve and protest in mortified silence? I boycotted Baguio as ardently as I wrote off my Mindanaoan past. Over the years, I would not hear of well-meaning friends trumpeting the rebirth of Baguio’s Camp John Hay as a high-end tourist enclave after the Americans left in the 1990s or Malaybalay hailed for its touristy Kaamulan Festival in the Imeldific “Kasaysayan ng Lahi” tradition. I could not be placated by what I felt were cynical half-measures and trying-hard consolations routinely dredged out for failed idyllic destinations.  

What role did Katmandu play in my belated change of mind about Baguio or Malaybalay not being as hopelessly lost as I had concluded all along?

Last December, on my third trip to the once-dreamy Himalayan kingdom, now a schizophrenic republic, I was jolted by the unrelenting urban ugliness that assaulted me as I exited from Tribhuvan airport and our sputtering mini-taxi crawled towards my favorite guest house in Thamel district, for decades the watering hole of hippies, trekkers and romantics from all corners of the world. 

I always knew Katmandu was dirty and chaotic and Thamel itself destined to lapse into the ultimate tourist trap of the Himalayas. But in past visits I ignored all unpleasant realities as the necessary price for being there. “Exotic” and “quaint” were euphemisms on everybody’s bucket list (or places to go before you die) and Katmandu, because of Mt. Everest majestically looming to the north, was certainly on the top of the list.

Nobody asked you to be there; it seemed priggish to make a big deal of the preexisting eyesores that had never been hidden or denied. You forgave everything in the kingdom in deference to its rich and ancient culture that’s as old as India and China and was at its glorious height when Europe and America were no more than howling wastelands. You can’t possibly ignore its sterling bragging rights, notably Gautama Buddha being born in Lumbini, south of Katmandu, and his imperishable imprint on the nation’s culture and far beyond.  

Of course, I was well aware that Nepal had gone through incredibly difficult times since my earlier visits in 1986 and 2001. There was the great trauma of the reigning royals massacred by one of their own black sheep, the impetus this regicide gave to the once-moribund Maoist insurgency in the hills, and the rebels’ electoral coming-out that resulted in the parliamentary deadlock that has since kept the country teetering on the cliff of unending political and economic turbulence.

Nothing brings this grim message across more than the 14-hour daily brownouts that everybody has to endure across the land. Unless you stay in the most expensive western hotels with 24-hour generators, you will literally freeze because the heaters don’t work, most sadistically in the coldest wee hours of the morning. You go to bed with winter clothes down to fur caps and boots. You seldom bathe because hot water is never assured.

Your Nepalese friends don’t have to be communists to spew out smoldering resentments against India, the geopolitical giant next door and the country’s most convenient whipping horse.

“The Indian vultures bought out our power plants years ago,” one irate lady told me, “and they sell our electricity to us at very high prices. We have to pay whatever they ask. Our only choice is to crawl in darkness and turn into ice mummies.”

Being landlocked, its back to underdeveloped Tibet and with all trade coming from and going to India via mountain highways that can be barricaded at the slightest pretext, it’s clear who calls the shots.  

More and more desperate for tourist dollars, every taxi driver, shopkeeper or street kid seems to be out to scalp tourists, although being Buddhists, they stop short of mugging or actually using force. You have to match wits and haggle furiously at the risk of being shamed for taking undue advantage of Nepalese poverty.

So much for paradise and what’s become of it. On my first trip in 1986, Cory Aquino had just taken power in Manila and everywhere I went, as far as the foothills of the Himalayas, people were saying the Philippines was the luckiest place on earth for its people to overthrow tyranny without bloodshed. Mind you, these hosannas coming from the heartland of Buddhism. It was a proud moment to be a Filipino, something I’ve never felt before or since.

In 2001, just before King Birendra’s bloody end, Nepal was a bit more messy, but still the preferred destination to neighboring Bhutan. The latter to this day opens its doors only to “quality tourists.” It has no need of mass tourism and those allowed in must pay top dollar to experience what’s promoted as “the rich man’s Nepal.” Bhutan stands out as the Buddhist Disneyland, supposedly untouched by human misery and the many nasty surprises of travel in today’s world.

I don’t want to say that Nepal today has lost its old magic, only that it has become more materialistic and less spiritual. It’s just buy and sell everywhere — pashminas, trinkets and all sorts of Buddhist gewgaws to death. What you find unacceptable in less-exotic places cannot now be avoided or ignored there — hopeless traffic jams that tie you down for hours, squatter shanties obscuring drop-dead views of the snow-capped Himalayas, in-your-face commercialism on every street, etc.

How do you cope with this litany of despair? Well, just reset expectations low enough and — voila! — you need not feel cheated or forsaken.

This may sound like cowardly surrender, but do we really have much of a choice?

Another way of putting it is that we tend to mellow with the years. The arrogance of youth cannot but bow to the wisdom of experience. You get your hard knocks along the way and the awful lesson comes across: the world owes you nothing. Nobody promised you a rose garden. You simply feel entitled to the good life and expect the world’s bounties to be dropped at your feet.

After 50, you have to say goodbye to this Master of the Universe syndrome or you’ll look and sound off-the-wall. You can be in blissful denial at 40. Yes, but not for long. At 60, you’re just old and ridiculous.

Baguio, I must say, has far less baggage to account for than Katmandu. It’s far younger by a few thousand years or so. It’s cultural or political traumas are nowhere as epic in scale. There had been ample warnings about its impending fall or descent into unpleasant decay. It begun life only in the 1900s as an American hill station, inspired by the British raj in India. How could its fate be any different from Simla, Darjeeling or Dharammsala?

After the collapse of the colonial order, how could India’s aspiring middle classes and surging masses be kept out of those lovely and orderly enclaves of privilege and status?

Even in the late 1960s, it was clear that