Baguio media to pick ‘lucky visitors’ anew on Holy Week

BAGUIO CITY—Some Holy Week visitors to the summer capital are in for extra perks.

Members of the Baguio Correspondents and Broadcasters Club (BCBC) will randomly select and “flag down” a passenger bus entering the city on April 6, Maundy Thursday, to pick this year’s “Lucky Summer Visitors (LSV).”

The media-sponsored tourism initiative resumes this Lenten season after being suspended in 2020 due to the pandemic.

According to BCBC president and radio reporter Joseph Cabanas, LSV has been helpful in promoting Baguio and Benguet province to first-time visitors.

Selected tourists will be given what the group described as a “red-carpet treatment” during their stay: They will be given free hotel accommodations and tours around Baguio and neighboring towns, plus packs of locally grown vegetables and fruits as farewell presents.

Depending on the donors, some past LSVs received morethan-the-usual gifts, according to Joel Arthur Tibaldo, a BCBC member who runs his own museum dedicated to the region’s lively community press, preserving milestone publications, photos and other mementos.

One photograph in the archive, for example, shows the late newsman Ramon Dacawi awarding gold nuggets to LSVs, courtesy of “his pocket mining friends,” Tibaldo said. Dacawi handed out such prizes more than once.

The last LSV event was held in 2019. Selected that year were Antipolo City car retail manager Jeremy Lozada and his 5-year-old son Justine; and Iran Mae Santiago, Cecil Piquet and Joan Mae Toca, who were employees of an Antipolo car financing company.

This year’s 61st LSV will again treat selected guests to a tour of popular spots in the Benguet towns of La Trinidad, Tuba and Atok, Cabanas said.

“BCBC is bringing LSV back after a three-year hiatus, and we are building it up from scratch,” he said, noting that the local governments and companies supporting the program had to scale down their sponsorships as they still had to recover from the pandemic.

Media camp

There is an inside joke among BCBC members that this summertime project serves as their act of Lenten penitence, Tibaldo said.

The project is a spinoff of the “Lucky 100,000th Visitor” initiative launched in 1975 by the late Baguio-based journalist and city councilor Narciso Padilla, said lawyer Joel Dizon, himself a former newsman.

A version of the project was organized by BCBC in 1978. The current iteration began in 1983 after BCBC held a Holy Week “media camp” at Burnham Park, said Dizon.

The camp, which is also being revived, serves as a venue for Baguio and Manila-based journalists to meet up since most publications don’t produce issues on Good Friday and Black Saturday.

The first lucky visitors under the current program were accounting firm secretary Beverly Benzonan and her family, said Dizon, who used to edit and write for the now defunct “Gold Ore” weekly newspaper that was published by the late Benjamin Salvosa, founder of what is now the University of the Cordilleras.

“It was a purely Gold Ore media camp in the beginning. We set it up right across the Gold Ore office along Harrison Road... to give guys like [acclaimed news photographer] Eric de Castro and other Manila photographers a place to chill during Holy Week,” Dizon recalled.

‘Bonfire and booze’

De Castro and the other journalists used to borrow Gold Ore’s darkroom to process their rolls of film as they worked for their respective Manila bureaus, he said.

“The term ‘media camp’ was coined by [the late Gold Ore editor Jose Nicolas] ‘Peppot’ Ilagan. The first camp director was me, and my job was to contact all of the Manila guys to tell them the camp’s location,” Dizon said.

Radio broadcaster Chris Bartolo, “who was a mean cook,” served then as the “camp grubmaster.”

According to Tibaldo, the weeklong “camp-outs, complete with a never-ending bonfire and booze,” had to relocate to Burnham Park because someone committed suicide in front of Gold Ore in the late 1980s.

Tibaldo served as camp director in 1994 when Inquirer correspondent Nathan Alcantara was BCBC president.

Renamed “Camp Peppot” after Ilagan passed away, the media camp has attracted celebrities, prominent politicians and even religious leaders like the late Baguio Bishop Carlito Cenzon, who helped entertain its “lucky guests,” he said.