Iloilo Airport secondary access road

I still avoid the Duyan-duyan route to Cabatuan. The Duyan-duyan road is a turugban when it rains (and it rains almost daily) and a dusty and bumpy dirt road during sunny days. Of course, I can always close my windows. But I don't like to punish the residents with dust fumes each time I pass. Besides, there usually is a traffic build-up because many portions use only a single lane for two-way taffic.

Sometimes I like to stop and have a cup of coffee in this establishment along the road leading to the airport. But my companions are always killjoy. We better proceed daw to the city, where we can have many choices of where to pass the time.

Good thing that the Tiring to New Iloilo Airport road is still passable. The dirt road was used at the time the airport was being constructed. Now, it serves as a shortcut to the airport. It is not asphalted but, at this time, is better than the Duyan-duyan road. Only few light vehicles, aside from the tricycles, carabaos and hand-held power tillers, are using this road. Sometimes I find myself the lone occupant of the road all through-out the trip. Therefore I usually stop along the way to talk to the farmers and just to commune with the bucolic setting.

Through my frequent stops, I rediscovered the smell of rice as it ripens on its stalk. I even took some rice seeds and tasted them. I looked for wild spiders which hide behind rice leaves.

When I was a kid, we play with the spiders by letting them fight on a foot long piece of bamboo stick. We cheered and clapped as the spiders went into a jostle. Our cheers reached fever-pitch as the spider which won the fight wrapped the hapless loser in layers of sticky web. We looked for spiders by following their glistening webs against the sunlight.

Now, there are no webs and possibly no spiders. Could be the pesticides sprayed on the ricefields. And I just munched on some fresh rice seeds.

Farther away some farmers are readying some paddies for planting while others are fixing the banks, we call kahon, of the paddies.

Near the airport is an aeronotics school. Walking distance from this school are bamboo shanties offering bedspace or room-for-rent to students and airport workers. Beside the road is a small sari-sari store which serves as mall, tambayan, or grocery for the transients.

I like this old and dusty dirt road. The scenery is very Filipino. Ricefields, farmers, nipu huts, carabaos, and white egrets - all positioned strategically as if painted on a canvass; the symmetry shattered only by the roar of the coming or the going of a jet plane.

The airport road is a model of a provincial road. But turning right to Tiring on this old dirt road is a turning point. This road is going to be modernized as an alternative access route to the airport. Diggings had already started and the link to the highway in Bgy. Tabucan had been inaugurated by government bigwigs.

Looking at the diggings and the hectares of productive ricefields that will be waylaid by the access route in the name of progress, I couldn't imagine the sacks of rice that will be sacrificed, the ecosystem that will be trummeled, and the bucolic scenery that will be lost forever.

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