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Road Trip
The Legacy lives on
For us, Holy Week is a reminder of our Catholic legacy. For a Subaru owner, it's also a good chance to drive his old Legacy alongside the new model
Words by Brian Afuang; Photography by Angelo Perez and Jaykee Q. Evangelista
Try as you might, you can't do much about it. Because no matter what religious belief you hold or not hold, we're Filipinos, and as such, we have around four centuries of Spanish Catholic faith hard-wired into our system. Which means when Holy Week's Maundy Thursday arrives, all we can do is hie off and hit seven churches in succession. The Visita Iglesia, it's called, and it's a legacy passed on to us by the fat friars, coño.
Proof of this religious helplessness is that however ecumenical we may be here in Top Gear, we still hatched a plan to participate in this time-honored tradition of the supposedly pious. But Top Gear being Top Gear, there should be some kind of twist in our observance, and what we came up with was to take along two generations of a Subaru car for the trip. The first was a model offered in the Philippines in the late '90s and the other the current-generation model that's sold by present Subaru distributor Motor Image Pilipinas. The cars? My personal 1999 Legacy wagon and its 2006 version. Old meets new...the Legacy lives on. Geddit?
We know the metaphor is cheesy, but it's this kind of asininity that we live for.
So there we were gathered that Thursday morning. The plan was to loop the towns that ring Laguna de Bay, which is actually a lake and not a bay as our Spanish masters had mistakenly thought. Following our flight plan, we were to go to Antipolo and Morong in Rizal, then cross the Sierra Madre to Pakil, Paete, Pagsanjan, Santa Cruz and Pila in Laguna. As an added treat for me, I'd get to visit my father's hometown of Paete, something I used to regularly do on my childhood Holy Weeks. This legacy thing just kept getting thicker.
Parked at the EDSA showroom of Subaru were the two Legacys. The 2006 model, for backgrounder, is powered by a 2.0-liter, twincam, 16-valve horizontally-opposed, four-cylinder, 163-horsepower engine, the first part of Subaru's mantra that's followed by the symmetrical all-wheel-drive spiel. The car turns by means of rack-and-pinion steering; has MacPherson struts in front and multilinks at the rear; brakes by means of discs at all four corners; and rolls on 17-inch wheels wrapped in 215/45 tires.
For its part, my 1999 Legacy is the high-roof second-generation wagon model (codenamed internally as BG) that was sold worldwide from 1993 to 1997, but continued to be offered in the Philippines until 1999. Like virtually every modern Subaru, the car has a flat-four engine. While also producing two liters, this engine is the older version of the one that powers the new Legacy.
First stop was the famous Antipolo church, that gleaming shrine where Catholics get their cars blessed. No surprise there, really, as it's home to the Nuestra Señora de la Paz y Buen Viaje, that last word being Spanish for 'voyage'. Arriving in Antipolo from Acapulco, Mexico, in 1626, legend has it this statue of the Virgin Mary was lost several times, and was always found afterwards beside a Tipolo tree. The resident Jesuits at the time then decided to build the church on this site, which to this day houses the itinerant religious artifact.
Too bad we didn't get to see it.
That's because Antipolo is a pilgrimage site, and you can bet the town—and especially the area surrounding the church—is filled to bursting on Maundy Thursday. Which meant parking was next to miraculous, so we decided passing by the church already counted as a visit. One down.
Next destination was the quaint, lakeshore town of Morong, whose church is an ugly pile of moss-covered stone with some painted woodwork thrown in. I'm sure it comes across as charming—even glorious—to some folks, but whatever the case, nobody can say it lacks character or history, as it does appear to precede the Antipolo church by a century. Either that or it's just decrepit, I don't know.
Anyway, at that point, it was two churches down and it was lunchtime already. So off for some grub we went.
As most everybody knows, part of the Holy Week religious legacy calls for abstinence, and at a homely roadside carinderia in Pililia, we exercised restraint by ordering crispy hito, fried dalag, kare-kare and lechon kawali. We also indulged Vernon's hankering for steaming bulalo.
Being Maundy Thursday, we—the sensitive souls that we were—respected the sensibilities of the Catholic brethren among us by not looking at them directly in the eye as we sank our teeth into scrumptious morsels of liempo dipped in sweetish liver sauce, or as we sucked on the fatty, gooey innards of a bulalo.
With lunch out of the way, we buckled down to work once more. The twisty mountain roads that snake through the provinces of Rizal and Laguna are among the best places to partake of post-prandial driving delights, and tackling these behind the wheels of a pair of vehicles that boast a legacy (there's that word again) of reptilian grip courtesy of all-wheel drive technology, can only make things more hedonistic.
The mountains then spat us out onto flat terrain that was planted with rice in wet season. Peeling off the main road, we hit the narrow streets of Pakil that led to its historical church.
A sleepy town, Pakil is known for native embroidery and hats and bags that are fashioned from dried foliage—these wares sold in makeshift stores in the church's courtyard.
From Pakil, we proceeded to its neighboring town of Paete, which, compared to Pakil, is a livelier place festooned with colorful papier-mâché horses, woodcarvings and tricycles.
With Paete known the world over for its intricate woodcarvings (the name 'Paete' is derived from paet, Tagalog for chisel), it's hardly surprising the town's church is a veritable showcase of Paeteños' folkloric artistry. The various religious statues—some of which have mechanized parts so these can move and are mounted on wheeled carts—are garaged in the church following Holy Wednesday night's procession—wonderfully crafted wood pieces all.
Next stop was Pagsanjan, several towns from Paete, whose church, unlike most of the centuries-old ones we had gone to, is painted white, making it look more like a movie prop than one that has seen its fair share of Philippine history.
This includes bearing witness to a cinematic moment, of the Hollywood variety even. You see, Pagsanjan was the setting of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. So sometime in the '70s, the town housed Hollywood stars and a trio of Playboy Playmates. No, I'm not making that last thing up.
From there, we headed next to Laguna's capital of Santa Cruz, which meant the town was a lot less bucolic than any we'd been to. Its church, meanwhile...well, the less said about it, the better.
It was nightfall when we left Santa Cruz, and we had visited six churches by then. We had also driven over some varied road and traffic conditions and partaken of glorious roadside carinderia fare, church courtyard delicacies and 7-11 munchies. But there was one more destination left to complete this Visita Iglesia road trip—the Pila church.
While the first six churches we visited were lighted by the golden Amorsolo-esque summer sun, Pila was illuminated by strategically placed lighting by the time we reached it, lending it an entirely different flavor.
The fact that it's situated in the middle of a spacious park that's surrounded by the town's most affluent centuries-old houses, further separated it from the rest in the sense that Pila's town plaza appeared to have benefited from Spanish urban planning—and the mold is preserved to this day.
An impressively lovely town Pila truly is, although the marijuana smoke that wafted over from a bunch of kids not far from where we stood in the church's parking lot, might have something to do to heighten the imagery.
Which was just as well, really. We were feeling mighty fine anyhow, content in both spirit and gut, soul and body for continuing a legacy passed on to us by our forefathers—in cars named Legacy at that.
Wow, pare, trip...
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Top Gear Philippines - July 2007
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