Escaping from the city

In snooty European art house films, seemingly trivial images often carry deeper meanings. Bicycles, for instance, are not merely the flimsy, two-wheeled contraptions that these things truly are. Bicycles are vehicles, and thus seen to symbolize freedom. Or so a snooty beret-wearing, wine-inebriated critic is wont to say.

In this context, guess it’s not too difficult to figure out what a compact sport-ute called Escape would mean. The fact that this vehicle comes from the country that gave the planet Hollywood – and Planet Hollywood for that matter – may have a lot to do with this. No room for subtlety or subtexts here.

Except there is.

Ford’s latest product on our shores, the Escape, is the littlest sport-ute among the American car- and truckmaker’s local lineup. Going by names alone, its big brothers Explorer and Expedition already suggest higher doses of derring-do, if not fuel consumption. The Escape, on the other hand, promises an away-from-it-all brand of fun but sans the stacks of gas receipts. Plus, it fits in tight McDonald’s drive-thrus too, if one’s idea of getting away from it all is stepping out of the office for a drive around the block for a quick bite.

Fortunately, Ford Philippines had something more substantial in mind in the Getting Away department. To drive home the Escape’s point, Ford organized a ride and drive gig that took selected members of the motoring press far away from it all and especially a distance off from home. They took us to Davao City to drive to picturesque Eden Nature Park in Mount Apo.

Eden Nature Park is about 2000 feet or so up in the mountains, which means it may be sweltering in the city but rainforest rainy up there. The place is huge, with luxurious tropical cottages scattered about in the lush greenery. There are a lots of facilities to accommodate most everybody’s brand of adventure or fun; swimming, hiking, fishing, dining, picnicking–the works.

The place must also be a huge hit among the green thumb and tokwa-nibbling health food nut set. All around the park are various gardens crawling with either multi-colored flowers, exotic plants and trees, or organically grown vegetables. Eden produces and sells its own tomato, celery, vanilla and other finished food items made from organic herbs. There are fauna too. A number of peacocks can be seen mingling with tourists, while other animals like deer are kept in cages. And no, they do not serve organically grown tapa. We asked.

The drive going to Eden is a breeze, which is not a surprise really. After, all, we were aboard a half dozen spanking new Escapes, some of which were the top-model 4x4 XLT automatics while others were its manual tranny siblings. The vehicles tackled a variety of road and weather conditions. Smooth hot concrete on Davao City’s main thoroughfare; hot, potholed streets on the city outskirts; wet highways further out; slightly rough roads going up the mountain; and slippery, rollercoaster twisty gravel trails leading up to Eden. Through it all, the Escape remained stable, its handling quite predictable. Credit here goes to the vehicle’s large 16-inch wheels, impressively precise, quick steering responses, and Ford’s patented Control Trac II 4WD system. No amount of intentionally stupid theatrics managed to upset this baby. Which could mean less fun for rally driver wannabes but definitely good news for everybody else concerned.

On smooth, straight, boring roads where the only scenery to be had is you driving through town in an Escape, its heartening to know its not only you’re audience who’re getting all the fun. Inside the Escape are supportive fabric seats, which means getting your tush seared on a hot noonday is thankfully out of the picture, and an in-dash CD player with four speakers that can play six of your favorite CDs in succession. And whatever hell is going on outside, there are a lot of peace and quiet to be had in the Escape’s cabin, thanks to whatever it is that manufacturers put in their vehicles to achieve low noise, harshness and vibration levels. Rigid body construction, layer upon layer of sound-deadening materials, egg crates on the ceiling–who cares how it’s done anyway?

Breaking the silence is the, duh, the engine, which can get buzzy at higher revs. Also a downshift of the automatic transmission can create quite a ruckus you’d wonder what it is that suddenly stirred under the hood. A lot of it has probably got to do with the 130 horses in the 2.0-liter, four-cylinder ZETEC engine. Stampeding horses can be noisy, so try not rouse all 130 of them.

But to gripe about noisy horses is to miss the point. The trip to Eden takes no more than an hour from downtown Davao, give or take a few minutes. A similar drive we had in the Escape from the Ford plant in Sta. Rosa, Laguna to Tagaytay takes considerably less than that. Yet in both cases, one is literally transplanted from environments so mundane (think: the office) to places sublime. Tagayatay may not exactly be much, but compared to Sta. Rosa’s wide gaping spaces dotted with low buildings containing factories of some sort, Tagaytay is beautiful, especially (and ironically) in near zero visibility fog. Eden, on the other hand, is truly aptly named.

The Escape–and all automobiles for that matter–is about getting to places you want to go. The snooty art house cineastes are right. Vehicles symbolize freedom. And Ford scored big by calling its newest sport-ute Escape. Escape indeed.