Feeling Hawaii - WHY AND WHY NOT by Nelson A. Navarro

"Feeling L.A." is to Makati’s Rockwell Center as "Feeling Hawaii" is to Tagaytay Highlands. These are two of the few places in the land where you can have it both ways – being in but also out of the gruesome Philippine reality at the same time. Although geographically you’re mired in this Third World nation, in terms of cosmopolitan ambience and creature comforts you might as well be living it up under the Stars and Stripes Forever.

Rockwell is where you now get your quick fix of civilization during the busy work week or when you’re stuck in the city for the weekend. Unlike the Glorietta or Shangri-La malls, this just-opened enclave of privilege is blissfully inaccessible to the MRT and bus crowd. Unless, of course, you factor in unwanted types from Makati’s Rembo-Pembo slums who, much to the horror of the Lopezes, are served by jeepney lines that chug along the ugly riverside highway that skirts Rockwell just 200 meters away.

No such down market intrusions are conceivable in the remote expanses of the Highlands, which is some 65 kilometers south of Metro Manila and, moreover, farther out from the helter-skelter ugliness of Tagaytay City. Turning left as you come up the highway from Dasmariñas or the one from Sta. Rosa, you go well past the Development Academy of the Philippines complex and the hoi polloi picnic grove right across the street.

The Highlands is where you run away for the day or more – far from the madding crowd, deep into the loving embrace of unspoiled Mother Nature and blessed with the stress-free lifestyle of the Filipino elite, some more freshly-minted and sporting monosyllabic names than others.

You have to be very rich or you have to know somebody very rich to enter this charmed world. If it somehow reeks with new money and you keep running into people you’ve never met before or who have zero face and name-recognition, it’s because the place only came into being during the short-lived Ramos boom years and reached its apogee in the pre-impeachment glory days of the currently shaky Estrada dispensation.

Older hands will, of course, remind you that the sprawling resort more or less occupies that same verdant-green mountain ridges that Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos once called their very own and even proceeded to crown with the appropriately named but unfinished "Palace in the Sky."

What actually happened was that some real estate geniuses connected with the old Binondo Central Bank which monopolized foreign exchange transactions during the Marcos years took a fancy for the undeveloped and abandoned property. Through the Cory and Ramos periods, they soldiered on and created a fabulous showplace built along the most exacting world-class standards. It was meant to attract plutocrats who long ago encamped from the much-democratized Manila Polo and who only cling to Manila Golf because its very stiff stock and membership fees have kept the riffraff at bay.

Creative marketing favored the project as Ramos brought a flood of foreign investments into the country. The real estate market zoomed to dizzying heights. Million-dollar villas were snapped up by the so-called "top 100 Filipino families", at once endowing the Highlands with unparalleled social cachet and granting its shrewd promoters quite a financial windfall.

The winning streak continued under the Estrada regime with the grant of jai alai monopoly to the conglomerate that runs the Highlands. The place quickly became the weekend destination of choice for Manila’s movers and shakers and their foreign guests. Three branches of the presidential family are said to maintain separate but equal mansions masquerading as log cabins.

According to some insiders, more eye-popping deals and scams have been hatched during certain mahjong sessions in the Highlands than any other place except No. 1 Polk Street, North Greenhills or a certain address along P. Guevarra in San Juan.

Given the Highland’s intriguing history, I was easy picking for this dear friend and his family who called up sometime ago to ask if I was free to spend the day there with them. In no time at all, we were cruising down the South Expressway and right into the Sta. Rosa road for what was guaranteed to be just an hour’s drive to the country’s answer to Xanadu.

All we had to do was mention the name of some taipan to be let into the enclave. Stopping first at the clubhouse, I got my first bird’s-eye view of the immense development. To my left stretched the infinite Calamba-Canlubang lowlands, bordered in the horizon by Laguna de Bay and Mt. Makiling. On the Taal lakeside, we gazed upon stunning vistas evoking Pali Outlook in the windward side of Hawaii’s Oahu Island. Going by sheer natural beauty and grandeur, this has got to rank with the very best on earth.

State-of-the-art facilities and services leave little to be desired. To kill time or drown your sorrows, you may play golf, swim, go bowling, ride the funicular or skylift, pet animals at the zoo, pig out till you drop or do absolutely nothing. Still, you can’t forget you’re in the Philippines and it’s careening down the tubes. That’s what spoils another wise great day.

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Nelson A. Navarro's e-mail address: [email protected]