A bummer summer for travel

Just when the Court thought that summer vacation would be moved by the government to an indefinite date which won’t be marked as a red-letter day for riots and revolutions, your magistrates were pleased to hear from Ate Glo that — barring any giant asteroids hurtling down from across the hemisphere — summer will push through as scheduled and that plotting one’s or somebody else’s vacation won’t be declared illegal for as long as it doesn’t involve a demand for ransom.

Finding these reasonable, Honey and Argee decreed that everybody should follow the Dick of Tourism and hie off to their dream destinations for some well-deserved rest and recreation. After all, summer is all about stretching every body, bone and muscle, and about cooling one’s hams after frenzied brain activity in school or at work. Nothing beats thawing away the stress and tension while sipping tall glasses of margarita or guzzling a caseload of beer, sensing the sensuous breeze beside your main squeeze.

Honey, for one, considered surfing beyond the Internet and beat the bloated travel budgets to Boracay. She later backed out after realizing the true meaning of "holiday economics" — it took her just one broken fingernail to discover the economy of pointing and clicking the browser to the hundred and one websites swimming with photos of and stories about Boracay.

Being a rabid environmentalist (I support the wild life!), Argee mapped a weeklong camp out in a thickly forested area in the boondocks of Cordillera to play out his adolescent fantasy of reveling like Rambo through the rumble and tumble of the jungle (While you’re at it, maybe you should also catch up with your distant cousins from another species who find thrill in swinging from tree to tree? — Honey).

Argee’s plan, however, was shot down by no less than by his irate mother who told him the sheer stupidity of trekking to the wilderness when all he has to do is veg out in his bedroom to experience the full chaos of a jungle environment. (For the more daring, visit Argee’s office to get the feel of an urban warzone setting. Just dial the toll-free number 1-800-MAYHEM — Allecks, Argee’s secretary.)

The heat is definitely on this summer and the travel bugs should be crawling out from every nook and cranny, but why do Argee and Honey — just like a growing number of killjoys — choose instead to slush in sloth, drum up the doldrums and hold out in their homes? Who’s not holiday-hungry when the fiesta season lives on for another memorable vacation? Blame and ban the following summer bummers that dumb and numb the Marco Polo spirit:

1. Home-TV Travel — A form of vicarious traveling in the new millenium, the idiot box has become the cheapest and fastest way to experience the sights and sounds of most tourist destinations at the safest and most convenient place on earth — your living room. With Lakbay TV, Che-Che Lazaro Presents, Discovery Channel and other tele-travelogues, you can globe-trot in less than an hour with your remote control as your boarding pass for a first-class flight to any destination in the world with the travel show host acting as your personal flight attendant. Thank the travel program’s editors; they might as well be the pilots during your flights of fancy — sparing you from the usual hassles at the immigration, the lost luggage and bad airline food. That’s not all; take comfort in the fact that you can always opt to travel alone, never get bumped off, won’t get hijacked and never leave the ground and still catch any flight — most especially if you’re hooked on cable. Heck, home-TV traveling is the jologs way to jetset!

2. Heat (Un)Waive(D) — At 36 degrees boiling point, why risk skin cancer or a heat stroke hitting the beach? Or even spend a month’s salary soaping up with whitening and skin lightening lotions? Bathing in the sun and frying yourself to a crisp need not involve queuing up in the Southern Luzon Expressway with half the Metro Manila population making a pilgrimage to the beach fronts of Laguna, Cavite and Batangas. Your backyard would do and you’d get a free mudpack treatment courtesy of the soot and grime that cloud the urban skyline.

For the more adventurous who’d love to venture beyond the beach line and sail out to sea and see whales perform neat tricks and sharks behave in the aquatic wilds, try the Senate and the House of Representatives for a similar spectacle.

3. Snow Faked. Baguio and Tagaytay may beckon but it’s a pain to fill your lungs with the same urban pollution, albeit air-cooled pollution. Baguio may have registered record lows in temperature in the last few months and its landscape may have once flaked with ice, but the tropical side of the Philippines got the better of the summer capital. As for Tagaytay, although it is more accessible to city slickers, the Court pines for the long-gone forest-y feel which once was trademark Tagaytay.

4. Dos Palmas, Dos Trajedias — Even though everybody who wants to be somebody dreams of welcoming daybreak by the window of a swanky cabana or sizzle on the white sands with the well-heeled and afterwards scuba dive with the country’s high and mighty in the marine paradise of Dos Palmas, the twin tragedies of the Abu Sayyaf abductions and the fateful demise of Rico Yan had a national impact on the people’s verve to vacation.

Dos Palmas, after all, has single-handedly symbolized the senselessness, folly and even misfortune of vacationing away from the confines of one’s home. The Abu Sayyaf fiasco alone reminded the populace that hardly anyone could consider vacationing as a worthwhile respite or escape away from the drudgeries of the urban toil. The horror of croaking in the middle of blissful snoring conjures every family-oriented Filipino’s nightmare of dying hundreds of miles away from the nurturing attention of one’s kin and kindred — while a loved one is vacationing in the arms of another, as was the case of poor Rico Yan (God bless his soul!).

5. Being Bummed Out — Abu Sayyaf notwithstanding, the unwillingness of many to travel stems from a pervading and pervasive fear engendered by the worsening peace-and -order situation in the country. Petrified by anxiety that highwaymen could easily shanghai your average pedestrian walking down the street, Filipinos nowadays are now more apprehensive about taking on extra risks — unless making the trip is absolutely necessary. After all, safety and peace of mind are the topmost priorities for leisure and pleasure-seeking Pinoy summer vacationers and tourists. If a journey of a thousand miles begins with a first step, more and more are considering donning Kevlar helmets and bullet-proof vests while taking two step backwards from any hint of ambuscades. There is no summer fun in dodging bullets!