LIGHTING THE WAY | Over a thousand students and faculty members of Saint Louis University in Baguio City return to downtown Session Road carrying colorful lanterns to launch the Christmas season in Baguio on Dec. 1. The annual holiday event was suspended in 2020 and 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. (Photo by EV ESPIRITU / Inquirer Northern Luzon)
BAGUIO CITY, Benguet, Philippines — The grand street dancing and grand float parades of tourist-drawing Panagbenga (Baguio Flower Festival) may finally return next year based on a first-impression assessment of the lantern parade that drew hundreds of locals and tourists to downtown Baguio on Thursday night.
Aloysius Mapalo, city tourism operations supervisor, said measures to control the crowds that turned up to watch 1,000 students and faculty members of the Saint Louis University (SLU) parade along downtown Session Road worked.
“The crowd was not compact and the audience followed rules enforced by SLU volunteers and 200 police officers,” he said on Friday.
Panagbenga was staged last year minus the colorful parades that have made it one of the most popular tourist events in the country. The last flower festival parades were staged in 2019.
The SLU lantern parade on Dec. 1 was the first large-scale institutional parade to take place during the coronavirus pandemic. It tested crowd-control protocols in preparation for the resumption of major tourism events in 2023, which will begin in February with the flower festival, said Mapalo.
Borderless education
SLU’s parade symbolized what its president, Fr. Gilbert Sales, described as the start of “borderless education,” with each set of 100 lanterns representing India, Haiti, Japan, Brazil, Guatemala, Mongolia and the Dominican Republic.
Spectacles like giant lantern elephants, lanterns shaped like cranes and huge walking lantern marionettes manipulated by students entertained the first huge crowd of people to be allowed back at downtown Session Road since the pandemic broke out across the planet from late December 2019 to early March 2020.
The audience was made up of Baguio families, who commuted to the city center to watch the show, and tourists booked at local hotels.
They were kept at the right lane of Session Road, as well as the edge of Baguio’s side streets. The police and crowd-control volunteers prevented them from following the SLU performers to Burnham Park, where the students converged for their own university gathering.
NIGHT SPECTACLE Giant puppet lanterns carried by Saint Louis University students entertain the crowd along the parade route on Session Road during the launch of Baguio City’s Christmas activities on Dec. 1. —EV ESPIRITU
SLU, the city’s biggest university, is also celebrating its inclusion among the world’s top universities by the QS (Quacquarelli Symonds) World University Rankings—a global indicator of university performances. “Very few universities in the Philippines are in the QS Rankings. We have started internationalizing our university,” Sales said.
The Professional Regulation Commission also credited SLU for being the top performing school in the country following the latest results of the November nursing licensure examinations.
Adjustments
Mapalo said some procedures may need some adjustments such as parade flow regulations. The Dec. 1 parade, which started past 6 p.m., took over an hour to finish, which Mayor Benjamin Magalong found too slow, he said.
The city government was also reviewing post-parade rules, because many residents ended up walking home given that the parade ended beyond the regular schedule of public transport.
Jovita Ganongan, Cordillera director of the Department of Tourism, said: “We saw that mobility was a concern [for parade participants and their audience].
In future events, we shall recommend contingency plans for transport. For example, we suggest parking additional Ho-Ho buses (the brand name of Baguio’s two tourist buses) or vans at designated points that would ferry people home. These vehicles could be posted at designated areas that should be a walking distance from any event.”