Tips for footloose Flips

If you’ve been following this column for even just the past year, you would have noticed what footloose Filipinos my wife Beng and I are, ready to take off for parts unknown at the drop of a hat. We did that again a couple of weekends ago, taking the early-morning bus to Baguio, and this time my excuse (as it usually is) was that I was completing another book project, and needed the mountain scenery for that final push.

The incentive worked; the draft got finished in good time, with a little help from my kind of comfort food (a big bag of lanzones and nilagang mais). But even more encouraging was the thoroughly relaxing environment of the lodgings that we had chosen for this particular trip — the newly renovated Casa Vallejo on Session Road.

I’d gone there for dinner with some writer friends during our annual summer workshop last April, intrigued by the news that the old Baguio landmark (indeed as old as Baguio itself, the original structure having gone up in 1909) had been taken over and thoroughly refurbished by new owners. Our immediate destination then was the adjoining restaurant, called Hill Station, set up and managed by Mitos Yñiguez. I waxed ecstatic over the crispy duck flakes and the lamb chops (I know, I should eat more cabbage), but I was also charmed by the hotel itself, which looked positively smarter than when we had seen it last, years ago; I peeked into a room and noted the ceiling fan, the round, old-fashioned bedside alarm clock — and the flatscreen TV. I had to come back, I told myself.

So finally, I did, with Beng and her sketchbooks in tow, and it proved to be the kind of weekend you’ll want to keep doing over and over again. Casa Vallejo lived up to the promise of that first and passing glance — the rooms were more than adequate, with bright, white linen, a neatly tiled toilet, and a view of pine-crested mountains. When we went there, in late September, off-season rates were in effect, so rooms could be had (and there were 24 of them) for between P1,500 and P3,000 each — a bargain, even by Tagaytay standards. For the incurable surfer, there’s free Wi-fi all throughout the place.

MyTravelPhilippines has street-level guides to top Philippine attractions.

The bonuses were Hill Station (Beng raved over the linguine with sundried tomatoes and the green Thai chicken curry; I had the duck flakes again), the coffeeshop below (which also sells select goodies for taking home), a spa next door, and the Mt Cloud bookshop, run by poet Padma Perez. Dinner at Hill Station isn’t cheap, but neither, you’ll see, are the ingredients and the obvious care that go into the food. The décor is simple but impeccably tasteful, with comfortable nooks for coffee and a newspaper — or Facebook, as the case may be. (And if you hanker for something more pedestrian, like I do more often than I should, there are two hole-in-wall bulalo stands just a few feet away from the hotel, serving no-frills bulalo for less than P100 a meal.)

Next time you think of going up, give Casa Vallejo a try — you can check out the place and make a reservation online like I did at www.casavallejobaguio.com, or write them at info@casavallejobaguio.com.

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Speaking of travel, I’ve long been a fan and user of digital travel tools. (Two free, mutliplatform travel apps that I can recommend right off the bat — especially for those who go abroad often enough — are WorldMate, which gives you local times, local weather, currency conversions, etc. and reminds you of your flights, and Metro, which guides you through the subways and mass transport systems of dozens of cities worldwide, including Manila.)

I’ve also long believed that we Pinoys don’t do enough domestic tourism, so I was happy to come across an app for the iPhone that makes local travel easier to plan and to do. MyTravel Philippines is a program that, first of all, locates where you are, then gives you maps of important and interesting tourist destinations in your area and beyond, in ever widening circles; you could, of course, just go straight to a menu of possible or preferred destinations.

Choosing “Baguio,” for example, will yield a list of hotels and tourist spots (though Casa Vallejo isn’t one of them, yet); tapping on a name will yield addresses, phone numbers, websites, and even a button to make a direct call. Some sites — say, the Bibak Museum — will yield a brief description of what the place has to offer, and a map to help you get there. In other words, it’s a tourist guidebook to the whole country, literally at your fingertips.

What’s equally interesting is the story behind the app. It was developed by two UP alumni, Rupert de Guzman and Caloy Libosada, who met in UP years ago to develop a travel website. Rupert studied geodetic engineering and was an expert at mapping, and Caloy was teaching at the Asian Institute of Tourism and had authored a raft of books on Philippine tourism, so it was a match made in heaven.

Professional opportunities soon led Rupert to China and then to Australia, where he now lives with his family and works for an asset-protection company. By night, Rupert continued pecking away at his dream of designing a mobile travel app, so he corresponded with Caloy over Skype and Facebook, and soon MyTravelPhilippines was born. It has since ranked consistently among the top five free travel apps in the Philippine AppStore.

Why the iPhone (and, by extension, the iPad and the iPod Touch that run on the same OS)? Because, Caloy says, they read that there were now over 100 million users of these devices worldwide, and they saw it as a tremendous opportunity to market not just the app, but the Philippines.

MyTravel Philippines has two versions — a free one, for which you need a wifi connection to download the data, and a paid, offline one, which stores the data on your phone. (For $2.99, the cost of a merienda, I say it’s a steal.) Says Rupert: “MyTravelPhilippines Offline is 100 percent Internet-free. I chucked the whole dataset of OSM or OpenStreetMap for the Philippines into the database. It also includes user-generated content such as photos, attractions and hotels, which users can upload via the website. We plan on creating quarterly updates of the app to sync it with the online version. The online version is always Internet-connected but totally free. So you can experience the app even before buying it. Some 10,000 users downloaded the free version on the first month of its launch.”

Adds Caloy: “I should be saying that we are doing great now. But honestly, it’s been a constant struggle to convince the Philippine tourism sector and even the DOT people on the potential of the app. The constant reply I get is that they don’t own an iPhone. I’ve been having a hard time explaining that it’s not about them owning an iPhone or a similar device, but about the travel markets that own the device and will finally get the chance to see the tourist attractions of this country.”

If you have an iPhone, you can download MyTravelPhilippines from the AppStore, or, for more information, you can visit www.mytravelphilippines.com.

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E-mail me at penmanila@yahoo.com and visit my blog at www.penmanila.net.