The Pinatubo Story of Angeles City 2: Agyu Tamu!

 

FROM OUT of the depths of desolation and despair, a cry – faint at first, then resonant all across the city.

There rekindled some flicker of hope that the city can rise again, if only the people believed in themselves – that, yes: “We Can.”

Summoning storied People Power, Acting Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan led thousands of his constituents to the Abacan River to confront the gravest threat to their very existence: Lahar.

“Pala Ko, Buhay Mo,” the activity was named.

With picks and shovels, hoes and rakes – many with no implement other than their bare hands – the determined populace sandbagged the riverbanks with  bamboo stakes serving as improvised sheet piles in a bid to check further scouring by lahar. It was futile as pathetic an effort, with but ten minutes of lahar flow, not the slightest trace of the day’s work remained.

The determination of the community though gained international respect and recognition, their activity winning for the coordinating agency, the Angeles City “Kuliat” Jaycees, the Best Community Involvement Project in the 47^th World Jaycees Congress in Miami, Florida.

The can-do spirit at the Abacan River thence inspiring and spawning clean-up projects all around the city. Manufacturers joined their craftsmen and artisans in rebuilding their factories to revive productivity. Among the first was Cruz Wood Industries which resumed its manufacture and export of high-end furniture within 45 days after the eruptions.

At Fields Avenue, bar girls and bar owners themselves hosed mud from their dance floors, sprayed the ash off their neon billboards, and opened up even to zero customers if only to perk up the place. US veterans that opted to stay helped in the famous avenue’s clean-up.

The abandoned Clark golf course was literally dug up from several meters of sand and ash by the Angeles City golfers in a team-up with the PAF’s Clark Air Base Command. And made it playable in due time, the constant threat of ashfall providing additional degree of difficulty to their drives, pitches and putts.

So it is clichéd that familiarity breeds contempt. So it was with lahar, the dread and horror it initially brought lost with the advent of heavy rains: its scalding heat fizzled, its viscosity dissolved with the abundance of water.

Lived with lahar, the Angelenos did. And even profited from it. Where lahar flowed – at the Abacan River – enterprise flourished.

With the bridge totally destroyed, passenger vehicles loaded and offloaded commuters at each end of the gap. For them to go down the river and cross to the other side.

Makeshift ladders of all makes – steel, aluminum, bamboo, wood – and sizes were soon ranged against both bluffs of the river to ease the ascent and descent of the commuters – for a fee of course.

To cross the river, commuters had a choice of the “Pajero” – an improvised sedan chair, and the “Patrol” – the carabao-drawn farmer’s cart locally known as gareta. Again, for a fee.

The pumice stones belched from the volcano’s bowels became a principal source of livelihood, a backyard industry. Crushed to golf-ball size, the pumice was used in stone-washing denims. Handicrafts, ornaments, even art objects were fashioned out of pumice rock, among the more familiar were Japanese stone lanterns, ashtrays, religious images – the head of the crucified Christ, angels and cherubs – and miniature jeepneys.

Needless to say, sand quarrying became a principal source of income in the city.

With the sense of normalcy returning to the city, there arose the need to jumpstart the still-lethargic local economy. Thus newly-elected Mayor Edgardo Pamintuan and his confidant, the activist Alexander Cauguiran, brainstormed Tigtigan, Terakan King Dalan.

Grounded on the defining character of Angeles as an entertainment city, the Mardi Gras-like festivity – of street music and dancing, of food and drinks – ably delivered to the nation and to the world: “Happy Days are Here Again.”

A happy beginning

AS THE phoenix birthed itself from its own ashes, to rise, to soar to greater heights of glory, so did Angeles City.

Clark Air Base reborn as a freeport zone. Its airport well on its way to full transformation as the country’s premier international gateway.

Manufacturing abounding.

Foreign investments rising. The Koreans keep on coming. Fields Avenue upgrading.

The service industry – hotels, restaurants, entertainment – rebounding. New ones, like business process outsourcing, aborning.

Shopping malls sprouting.

Thousands of jobs opening.

Greater opportunity spelling prosperity. A promised land of plenty.

More than a happy ending to the Pinatubo story, this is yet a new beginning for Angeles City. 

(The capping essay in the book Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011) edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

 

The Pinatubo Story of Angeles City: It was the worst of times

 

JUNE 10, 1991. Angeles City awakened to its worst nightmare: the American dream was over.

Dashed was the hope – against hope – that GI Joe would stay, come what may. A belief borne by the new concrete wall around the base perimeter that had just been completed, the frenzied base housing construction seen as a sure sign of increased troop deployment, and the second runway built reportedly to serve as alternative landing site for the space shuttle Columbia. All coming to naught.

Before stunned eyes passed the very end of the city’s economic being: By car, bus, truck, American servicemen and their dependents started their exodus from Clark – jamming the North Luzon Expressway in a three-mile-long convoy – to Subic where US warships and troop transports awaited them for the long journey home.

Their departure from Clark was for the Americans a less than stoic acceptance of the impending repudiation by the Philippine Senate of the bases treaty – to ultimately come in September – than a hurried, harried flight from certain catastrophe.

June 11. “16,000 evacuated from Clark” bannered the Stars and Stripes, with the subhead: “Major eruption feared from Mount Pinatubo volcano.”

The rumblings of the hitherto hardly known volcano starting to get frequenter and stronger by the hour.

June 12. Philippine Independence Day. For the first time in 90 years, Angeles City was thoroughly free of a foreign occupation force. The meaning of the day though was utterly lost to Mayor Antonio Abad Santos whose speech before the city hall alternated between carping – “overacting,” he called the American abandonment of the base, and comforting – that the greater number of Angelenos need not panic, being outside Pinatubo’s immediate 10-kilometer radius that was initially tagged as danger zone.

Thunderous explosions cut Abad Santos in mid-speech, a giant plume of ash shot up 20 kilometers into the sky, immediately followed a rain of hot ash and pumice stones. It was 8:51 in the morning.

Panic – people froze in their track, eyes in the sky and mouth agape, shocked and awed by nature’s might.

Then pandemonium – the rush for home, hither and thither like headless chickens, amid the cacophony of frightened shrieks, nervous prayers, screeching tires, and blaring horns.

With the acrid smell of sulphur wafting in the ash-laden air, masks – surgical and industrial – ran out in the city’s drug and hardware stores. The surplus biochemical masks from Desert Storm which found their way to the PX stalls of Dau and Nepo Mart had been snagged, wholesale, by some very enterprising profiteer much earlier.

Braving the cloud of ash, President Cory Aquino flew by helicopter to Clark to see the situation first hand, and dropped by the Angeles City High School where the eruption’s very first evacuees of 2,000, mostly Aeta tribesmen, have taken refuge.

“This could only be the beginning.” So warned Dr. Raymundo S. Punongbayan, director of the Philippine Institute of Volcanology and Seismology (Phivolcs) of the June 12 eruptions.

June 13. Phivolcs recorded more eruptions, the volcano gushing greater clouds of ash and gases 25 kilometers into the sky. “Phenomenal eruptions,” Punongbayan called them, and declared: “This is already the Big Bang. I can’t see any other eruption that will exceed this.”

June 14. Dark clouds blanketed the city, ominously dimming the garish neon lights of Balibago.

June 15. A much Bigger Bang that proved Punongbayan’s declaration deadly wrong.

The Great Eruption that turned bright day – starting at 8:15 in the morning – to darkest night. The roll of thunder, the flash of lightning, the rain of ash and stones, and the tremors of the ground foreboding the very end of days.

The city’s secondary economic lifeline – next only to Clark Air Base – furniture and handicraft manufacturing totally collapsed, literally, from the weight of ashfall: Factories – roofs, beams, posts, and walls – crashing down on machines, equipment, supplies and finished products.

Collapsed too, as many houses in the city, was the roof of the Philippine Rabbit Bus terminal downtown, killing two waiting passengers and injuring scores of others. Later in the day, the city’s very icon of the finest Chinese cuisine – Shanghai De Luxe Restaurant – burned to the ground after its roof collapsed on the liquefied petroleum gas tanks in its kitchen.

By 2 in the afternoon, steaming mudflows – soon to enter the lexicon as the terrifying “lahar” – sprang from the foot of Pinatubo, rampaged through the Abacan River, destroying, in succession, Friendship Bridge that led to Clark, Hensonville Spillway, Abacan Bridge, where MacArthur Highway traversed, and Pandan Bridge that led to Magalang town. Scouring the riverbank and gobbling up houses and buildings, including the remnants of the collapsed Angeles City General Hospital.

It was the city’s first taste of the devastating power of lahar – a horrific byword sending people to higher ground at the slightest drop of rain.

West of the city, the lahar-swollen Mancatian River swallowed its eponymous bridge cutting off Angeles City from Porac town. Mudflows overtopped the Sapang Balen Creek and spread steadily across the city proper. The public market and commercial area of San Nicolas and the business district, indeed the very heart of the city, Sto. Rosario where city hall, the “big church,” the enclaves of the rich, as well as the city’s and Central Luzon’s biggest private school, Holy Angel College were all sited, all inundated by steaming mud.

There, a long-established tale belied: As the elevation of Angeles City is levelled with the very spire of the Metropolitan Cathedral in San Fernando, any flooding in the city would mean the capital town under at least 30 feet of water.

On Doomsday itself, no flooding was recorded in San Fernando.

With supplications to the Almighty drowned by the rumble of the volcano, with the onslaught of mudflows and the rain of ash unabating, it was hegira for the Angelenos.

All the roads leading south of the city were filled with dazed and dazzled refugees, on foot, in cars, on buses, on truck: seeking relative safety in the homes of relatives and friends, finding temporary shelters in evacuation centers, the first of which was Amoranto Stadium in Quezon City provided for by Mayor Brigido Simon, Jr., a Kapampangan himself, who also brought buses to the very ramp of the Angeles exit of the North Luzon Expressway to ferry more evacuees.

Buried in ashes, reduced to a virtual ghost town, Angeles City and its twin base town, which also bore the initial brunt of the eruptions, made easy picking for the moralists’ sermon of the wrath of God heaped upon Sodom and Gomorrah. The host cities to the US military bases long known as deeply mired in decadence and debauchery.

But erased from the face of earth like the biblical sin cities, Angeles City refused to be. (From the book Agyu Tamu: Turning Tragedy into Triumph (2011) edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

 

 

Remembering Pinatubo

  

“E KO magmalun, mibangun ya ing Pampanga.”

The exhortation of Governor Bren Z. Guiao for his people to end their collective grief, rise from despair, and believe in a renascent Pampanga brought the first ray of hope in the wake of the Mount Pinatubo eruptions.

It was the faintest flicker of hope though, the Kapampangan trapped in the most desperate straits: damned in a wasteland of buried homes and broken dreams, doomed in a landscape of death and desolation.

Beyond PR savvy – of which Guiao was a guru – the slogan was founded on the governor’s unwavering faith in the Kapampangan character: of grit and resiliency, that have served him well in rising from every adversity, be it socio-politico-economic, as in the agrarian unrest, the Marcos dictatorship and the communist rebellion; or natural, as in the floods that perennially devastated the croplands and aqua farms of the province and damaged its infrastructure…

Sharing that strong faith were motley groups of men and women crisscrossing the economic, political and religious divide to find common cause in the salvation of Pampanga. Their advocacy most manifest in the antecedent “save” to their movements.

Thus, it came to pass, when the national government all but gave the actual order for the forcible evacuation of the province, in its pragmatic rationalization on the futility of fighting nature, the “save movements” mobilized the population in vehement opposition to any scheme of abandoning Pampanga and relocating its people.

More horrifying than the physical devastation of the province by the eruptions and the subsequent lahar rampages was the irretrievable loss of the Kapampangan soul that a hegira would most certainly bring about.

“There was a lot of sentiment underneath it all, an attachment to the old hometown, its past, its people, the memories, and everything it stood for.” Thus wrote a noted columnist of the motivation of the Kapampangan to stand his ground – literally on murky, shifting volcanic sand – and fight with all his might for his very life.

This is the pith of the Pinatubo story: a tragedy transcended by the triumph of the indomitable Kapampangan spirit. (Foreword of Pinatubo: Triumph of the Kapampangan Spirit (2008), Edited by Bong Z. Lacson)

 

Ceboom sidebar - Cacao Mix: Art, passion, sustainability

                             

A DANCE: The graceful, sinuous movement of the hands, as though of apsaras; the cadence at each pound of a wooden pestle on a stone mortar, its musical accompaniment. Whence rises sweet, sweet aroma tantalizing the olfactory sense.

Art, passion, and sensation blended in – would you believe? – the making of tablea. Aye, that ball of roasted, ground-up cacao beans which, mixed with hot water, makes the all-too Filipino sikwate chocolate drink. But only in the hands of Cebu’s Chocolate Queen – Ms. Raquel T. Choa.

The Chocolate Chamber (TCC) Café at Robinsons Galleria, Cebu City makes the perfect stage for Ms. Choa’s magnificent rendition of the making of tablea, performed al fresco before visiting VIPs, dignitaries, business groups, media – as in the case of Clark- and Pampanga-based journos last June 4 – and every mallgoer who happens to be by.     

The sampling of the end product – sikwate – in dainty cups is pure ambrosia.   

“The chocolate journey of a thousand miles begins with one cacao step.” So, the TCC blurb imparts. Modesty, mayhaps, held it back from saying: Raquel Choa is the face that launched that journey. Putting Cebu cacao in the world’s chocolate map.  

Beyond that established name, Ms. Choa has moved further with her founding of the Cacao de Filipinas Fellowship toward that singular mission to sustain the cacao value chain in Cebu – all “for the love of Creator, Country, Cacao.”

Ms. Choa explains the non-profit organization’s goal as embodied in a simple statement that has the making of an article of faith: “It’s all in the B-E-A-N-S.”   

Bridging cacao stakeholders. Empowering farmers. Achieving excellence in cacao production. Nurturing nature and the community. Sustaining cacao value chain.

To which we all raised a toast of tasty sikwate – Cheers!  -- Bong Z. Lacson

Ceboom, anew

 

PANORAMA OF DEVELOPMENT. SM Seaside City-Cebu (left) gets direct access to Mactan Island via the city’s newest icon, the Cebu-Cordova Link Expressway (right). Photo by Bong Lacson  

ALMOST THREE years of pandemic grounding – last flight to Kaohsiung in December 2019 yet – turned me into a travel tyro all over again. You know that “promdi” feel upon setting foot on an airport for the first time: of excitement and trepidation, of awe at the swirl of the surrounding – this time all the more magnified by the magnificence of the CRK New Terminal. Truly, awed.

Only, to be jolted to the harsh reality that we – passengers of Cebu Pacific’s flight 5J157 to Cebu that early morning of June 3 – could not avail ourselves of the “welcoming and inclusive spaces…at the heart of CRK” as promised by then-BCDA chief Vince Dizon in one of the pre-opening media sorties at the airport, “where we embrace a positive atmosphere and treat everyone with utmost respect.”

Yes, herded as we were at the waiting area of Gate 9, prevented from crossing over to the aforementioned spaces, depriving us of the promised “sense of place” evoked with a view of majestic Mount Arayat at sunrise while lounging on those sinuous sofas of rattan and wood crafted by Betis artisans.    

Reduced to marveling at the ceiling “reminiscent of the Zambales mountains” rendered in wavy massive glued laminated timber, instantly drawn to the Marvel Cinematic Universe was I to post on FB a photo captioned: “CRK. So world-class that even Spiderman came over and left his web.” Or maybe CRK is just planning a

Halloween theme this early, hence the accumulation of clouds of cobwebs at the rafters.

All pre-flight bitterness turned all-too sweet upon boarding 5J157, starting with the sunny disposition and welcoming smiles of the flight attendants, to the fine service onboard.

And yes, my past – both remotely and immediately pre-pandemic – experiences with the airline hold: CebPac is never on time, it is always ahead of time. Be it in Narita or Chek Lap Kok, Itami or Suvarnabhumi, Macao or Changi, in Davao, Iloilo, and Cebu, but of course.

It’s the nth time I came to the Queen City of the South, but the feeling was no different from my first in the 1980s. In Cebu, never did I succumb to that been-there-done-that ennui of the jaded traveler.  

Foregoing the usual must-see sites of Magellan’s Cross and the Basilica Minore del Sto. Niño de Cebu, Fort San Pedro and the Mactan Shrine, the 17^th century Yap-San Diego Ancestral House and the Osmena Residence, our itinerary, courtesy of the Department of Tourism-Region 7, took us to the city’s newest destination – its highlands. Yea, Cebu is not all beaches and cultural heritage, it has mountains too.

The Highlands

                                        Buwakan ni Alejandra. Photo courtesy of Borj Meneses

Taking the pre-eminent spot is Buwakan ni Alejandra, a 700-square-meter expanse of rolling hills blanketed with plants and flowers – “buwak” in Cebuano, hence the name – of all hues found in the LGBTQ+ kaleidoscopic flag, and more. The garden lies along the Cebu Transcentral Highway, about an hour from the city center.

Second is the Adlawon Vacation Farm in its eponymous mountain barangay that offers staycation of “buhay probinsya” right within the bounds of the metropolis. 

Unfortunately, ours was not even a stay overnight but a quick look-feel of 15 hectares of forest green of mighty mahogany and majestic acacia trees, a sprinkling of other forest and fruit-bearing trees, flower gardens and vegetable patches, as well as plant nurseries and animal pens. The Lodge is the main structure at the farm, housing guest and function rooms, a library and lounge, an entertainment center and a viewing deck. A Chapel of the Resurrection stands at the farm too.

                                 

                                      Adlawon Vacation Farm. Photo courtesy of Borj Meneses

 The “buhay probinsya” vibe found in the Payag, the Visayan version of the traditional Filipino bahay kubo, and the Farmers Market, a “talipapa” of produce straight from AVF’s vegetable patches and trellises.

All-organic, all farm-sourced was the sumptuous lunch served us at the Kusina Luche by hands-on owners Atty. Danilo Ortiz and Dra. Melinda Ortiz themselves.

Really wished we had stayed overnight, if only to witness the farm’s claims of spectacular sunsets and magical moonrises.

Speaking of Dreamland, Summit Galeria Cebu more than fits the bill. The Sinulog Premier Room where I nested for two nights provided not your usual starred-hotel amenities but customized luxuries – a king bed, finest linens, ultra-soft non-allergenic pillows, a living room tastefully decorated with art pieces.

 

                               Sinulog Premier Room at Summit Galleria. Photo by Bong Lacson

Why, Summit Galleria Cebu even indulged the mallrat in me with a direct access to Robinsons Galleria, and most pleasurably at that, via Café Summit, the hotel’s all-day restaurant serving diverse dishes ranging from the classic to the exotic. A letdown though – no “danggit” for breakfast in the two mornings I was there.

Food trip

At the mall, we indulged in a feast of the senses of sight, smell and taste at The Chocolate Chamber Café, with Cebu’s Chocolate Queen herself, Ms. Raquel Choa, raising to the level of performance art the preparation of “tablea” into a “sikwate” for all of us to drink. So remarkable was her performance that it merited a separate short feature published as a sidebar story.  

 

                                                Tablea. Photo courtesy of Borj Meneses

A food trip this coming to Cebu did turn out, indeed. Contrary to my wont in my usual travels, I did not have to dispense with my innate Capampangan culinary conceit this time to enjoy whatever the table offered.

Dinner at all-day buffet CAFÉ bai with its multiple live cooking stations dishing out the best of East and West cuisines was no simple gastronomic experience but a gluttonous excess. Made superbly wonderful by the presence of bai Hotel’s GM Alfred Reyes, a dear friend dating back to his days at Widus Hotel in Clark. The night view of Mandaue City from the hotel’s Twilight Roofdeck Lounge + Bar capped the evening’s delight.

 

Mandaue City nightscape from bai Hotel’s Twilight Roofdeck Lounge + Bar. Photo by Bong Lacson

Next night’s dinner at the Marco Polo Plaza Cebu made an almost perfect duplication. The evening tryst though starting not ending with cocktails at Blu Bar & Grill overlooking the city with GM Roel Constantino. A brief look-see at selected rooms and facilities of the hotel led to a feast at the Café Marco – easily proving its claim as “Cebu City’s favorite international buffet.” Native grilled salmon head, in all its tasty simplicity, easily became my favorite dish there though.

 

                                  Buffet station at Café Marco, Marco Polo Plaza Cebu. Photo by Bong Lacson

 Regional, read: Southern Chinese and Southeast Asian, culinary delights we had our fill too with lunch at Xin Tian Di (New heaven and earth, in Chinese), one of three restaurants – Il Primo Steakhouse and Fina, the other two – currently operating at Nustar Resort and Casino located at South Road Properties. Mott 32, that award-winning Chinese restaurant is coming to Nustar soon.  

We were given a sneak peek of the complex’s Fili, the five-star brand of Robinsons Hotels Resorts, now nearing completion. Two other hotels are in various stages of construction at the same site of Nustar Resort and Casino, the flagship project of Universal Hotels and Resorts, a privately owned corporation of the Gokongwei Group focused on gaming and integrated resort developments across the Philippines, so the collaterals say.

 

           Cebu’s premier 5-star integrated resort. Photo by Bong Lacson

 So how big is Cebu’s premier five-star integrated resort?  

Charles Lim, president of our host Selrahco PR, easily pulled our legs when, on the way to Nustar, he referenced it as “a small version” of the Clark Freeport’s flagship Hann Casino Resort. Nustar is Hann four times, with more to spare.

Luxury defined

While Nustar, still a work in progress, is blurbed as “redefining luxury,” I experienced the full meaning of the word at the Crimson Resort and Spa-Mactan. A private beach, arguably the most magnificent infinity pool in the whole of Cebu, cocktails at the Azure Beach Club right at the water’s edge, food, glorious food at the Enye restaurant, a deluxe garden villa all my own – if only for a night – ah, the pesante took a bite, albeit a small one, of the life exclusive to the rich and famous.

                              Crimson Resort and Spa Mactan. Photo by Bong Lacson

 A wonder too how the resort hardly showed any remnant of the battering inflicted upon it and the rest of the city by Supertyphoon Odette only last December.   

Recovered, even renewed, from disasters meteorological and pestilential. Yes, both boon and boom are back in the city. So delighted to take this first foray into post-pandemic travel nowhere else but Cebu.

(Cebu Pacific flies Cebu-Clark-Cebu daily from the CRK)