Training with Scooma
Hoping to go back to Siquijor, Camiguin, Bohol and other nearby islands, this time to take a slower trip around it on a bicycle, I bought a folding bicycle about ten years ago. It was a shiny blue and black Taiwan-made Scooma Foldy, a small contraption with small wheels and frame that folds down to the front into a size small enough to fit the trunk of a taxi cab or be carried into a jeepney.
I planned to bike through most of the trip folding it down only to be carried into a ferry, a boat, a bus, or jeepney in case I get really exhausted pedaling along the way. I did training trips on Sundays to as far as Danao City and Minglanilla town, stopping by public beaches, bridges, old churches, and whatever might look good in my camera or on my sketchbook.
I also never failed to brake for breakfast or lunch at a carenderia or makeshift eatery that sold anything from steaming tinowa, larang to bakasi. When I ran out of water in my canteen, I rehydrated with fresh buko juice sold from a kariton or a shed along the road.
I took time to check inner routes, including the narrow roads of markets and those that led to places I normally would not venture when I’m on foot. They were always exciting trips of serendipity and I could not imagine a more intimate way of knowing a place.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t really able to go beyond these short training trips. The planned great expedition was always forgone due to urgent tasks that had to be performed indoors. My Scooma never flew or sailed with me to my out of town trips. Instead, it became my daily commuter, taking me through traffic jams from home to work and vice versa. A true mechanical mule, it carried my lunch box, books, and other things in its panniers, actually a dog bag which I found from an ukay-ukay shop.
It had small wheels but in one of those strong typhoons, I was able to pedal my way through strong currents of flooded streets and arrived home dry, thanks also to my emergency plastic poncho which I always kept in my backpack.
I realized then that I could trust my rusty Scooma to take me anywhere. It was all I need to get around the urban jungle, at least for now that everything is within biking range from where I live.
When I bought it, I never saw anyone else using a foldable bike. But today, the influx of surplus bikes from Japan and Korea has flooded the streets of Cebu with cheap yet good quality foldies. It has generated a biking boom and made cycling cool.
I am very happy about this trend. Even today, some security guards look down on you when you arrive in school, the shopping mall, or a hotel on a bicycle. For the latter, for example, the guards find it bewildering if you ask where to park the bike, which could be just any railing, rack or pole you can tie your bike around with a chain.
Some drivers expect that you automatically clear the road when they’re behind you, as if cyclists don’t have a right of way. There are no bike lanes in the city, which only proves that indeed the traffic policy favors private car owners despite the fact that they eat up most of the road and belch more gas over the cyclists whose only crime was to frustrate car users.
In green cities like Amsterdam in Holland and Zhuzhou in China, the traffic policy is the reverse: make driving frustrating so that people would bike instead. They put humps and other road obstacles to slow down cars and make streets safe for pedestrians. Bike lanes take up the biggest share of the road and many parts of the city are closed to motor traffic.
Thankfully, the local biking boom seems to be taking us in that direction. Last Friday, I joined my fellow biking advocates symbolically stencil bike lane signs on one side of Osmeña Boulevard. We also traced with chalk the silhouettes of persons lying down on the road and wrote “Killed by Car”. We ended the rally with a critical mass ride around the Fuente circle.
Then as I write this on Saturday, I oil my Scooma for my wife and my other bike as we prepare to join the Earth Hour night ride around the streets of Cebu. As in last year, hundreds came with only blinkers and flashlights to illuminate streets of the city that responded to the global call to switch off and give the planet a break.
