I arrived in Manila yesterday afternoon. Too soon to check in to my hotel but not early enough to go out and see much. Not with the traffic in Manilla! I left my hotel this morning and boarded the bus to Baguio City where I’ll be staying for the next two weeks, teaching at the Lutheran Theological Seminary.
Leaving behind the mad crush of cars and people in Manila, the road to Baguio is not big but affords an amazing view of a landscape that is both undergoing massive change while at the same time remaining much as it probably has for decades or centuries or perhaps longer. Manila is a burst of modernity, an explosion of possibility and opportunity swirling around change while yet anchored to an aging infrastructure.
But the countryside, although evolving as well, has a timeless, ageless quality to it as well. I’m sure I’m romanticizing it to some degree, as any outsider is apt to do from a convenient distance, separated from reality by a glass window that appears transparent and yet demarcates reality from the comfortable, air-conditioned artificial environment I ride in, where a recent Hollywood blockbuster plays on a screen a few rows ahead of me and passengers are treated to a complimentary bottle of water and a small sweetbread to tide us over on the 5-hour journey.
It is startling beautiful.
The long, broad vistas almost instantly transform as we make a single turn off the highway after nearly four hours of driving. The engine whines as we begin snaking our way up a two-lane highway through the mountains towards the City of Pines, Baguio. A different sort of beauty takes over as my ears pop with the rapidly increasing elevation.
The small highway is choked with large trucks hauling all manner of materials and debris up and down, slowing progress. At one point we round a slightly widened bend in the switchbacks to discover a massive truck stalled in the middle of the road, it’s load of broken cement rubble partially excreted onto the ground behind it. Our bus driver – an amazingly talented judge of distance and space – pulls far to the right to pass, inches from the small guardrail that physics deems incapable of stopping us were we to topple. On the other side of the stalled vehicle other cars tiptoe past. Occasionally there are breaks in the foliage and vistas appear, stark in their emptiness just as momentarily the crushing presence of all manner of flora and fauna up to the edge of the highway was stark.
Finally we enter the outskirts of Baguio. It takes another 30 minutes or more to weave through the traffic at just after 6pm on a Saturday evening. When I step out of the bus the air is markedly cooler than the sweltering lowlands of Manila. At least it’s a beautiful place to spend two weeks if I can’t be with my family!
Thank you for safe travel prayers. Both via air and land, God is good and I can’t wait to receive his gifts in Word and Sacrament tomorrow morning!
The Nelson Family Indonesia 