Retro Manila Tours

Back when I was still unaware that Luneta used to be called Bagumbayan where our national hero Jose Rizal was shot to martyrdom in 1896, we would go to this vast park of greens and playgrounds during the summer and spend the morning exploring its open spaces. The gardens were made for tireless children like us who would run and run to our hearts' content and pause only to pose for pictures deemed shutter-worthy by our adult companions and to munch on chips and sandwiches when our little stomachs were finally devoid of the breakfast we took.

The statue is headless (must be the norm when it comes to our old pictures) so I can't really tell now if it was a famous personality in Philippine history or just any Juan riding our national animal, the carabao. I didn't know what possessed my sister Pie to pose with her hand on the statue's foot. It looked dirty! Oh by the way, I'm the one in fuschia pants, Pie in olive and the lone boy is our cousin Ron.

Posing with some creature, obviously long extinct. Or did it ever exist at all?

Our photographer got carried away cropping the shot so it's not very clear now that we were actually standing on the tongue of a humongous hippopotamus. Only Ron seemed happy here. If I remember correctly, it was a bit stinky inside the hippo. Someone must have had difficulty finding the toilet the day before.

I was such a cow when I was little girl, would you believe? The adults had to spend some time convincing me that nothing bad was going to happen if I hopped on the giraffe's back. Take note: I was holding on to Pie as if for dear life.

It also didn't take much to send me into bouts of dizziness before. Look at me here. It was a wonder I was able to stand upright to think my eyes were multiplying everything by two already.

See, I was so dizzy I didn't get to slide!

Snack time. Note that I was able to have a Coke here. The oldies in my life were too far away in Batangas after all. Pie must be counting the number of Cokes she was able to drink while she could! (Also in this picture is our cousin Kuya Totie who is more than ten years older than all of us.)

A change of shirts and the three of us were in Manila Zoo. I wonder what animal was inside that cage. Perfect "souvenir" shot.

And here is a suggestion of a giraffe. I told you headless pics were the in thing in my family those days.

Finally, the perfect zoo shot. It certainly took a long time coming.

I have not seen the zoo since the 70s; Luneta, since college. That last visit was a Manila-by-night tour with two of my friends, Boone and Uncle, during which I had quite an unnerving encounter with a very dubious VanDamme-ish character who asked me for a Marlboro. I hastily threw the whole pack in his direction thinking this was far more horrifying than my ride-the-giraffe experience when I was five years old.