Sinulog traffic

Sure. Sure. The Sinulog is good for us. Still, we would all be better off if we had a way to get real traffic bulletins, a clear schedule perhaps of when certain streets will be closed at precisely what time. After all, this is the information age and the media for moving information is fairly well established. But we are stuck in traffic near the Capitol building coming from Escario Street trying as best we can to get to the corner of Guadalupe and Banawa road. All the radio plays is top 40 music. How do we get there?

There are five Citom officers at the corner. But they have taken what would have been their job instructions for the day absolutely literally. They are not directing traffic. Instead, they are watching a contingent of Sinulog dancers apparently dancing their way from the Capitol to Fuente or the downtown area. We have no way of knowing for sure. No way of knowing which open street we can use to get us to the other side of the city. And all it would have taken was a simple sign to say: you can cross over at P. Del Rosario or Urgello Street or all the way to the SRP. Any route will do because its way past noon and you haven’t had lunch yet. And the traffic crawls if it moves at all. You just want to get home.

Caught in traffic like this, you have no recourse but to wax philosophical about the type of person you are. You are like water yielding to gravity and the terrain to pull you to where you are going. You have no clear vision of your route. All that is for fate to decide. And so you try at every corner to make an educated guess. Is this route the right one? Will it be open at the end of the next corner or will the parade block you once again? Will you be directed instead to the next small corner? At worse, you could get blocked at a corner  that becomes a dead end. And then you would have to wait-out the impromptu, unannounced Sinulog parade until it passes.

It is much better to play safe and get a route as far away from the Fuente as possible. But will it be P. Del Rosario or Colon or Magallanes, or will it be as far away as the SRP? You go for the middle ground. Fortunately, you just manage to make it through at P. Del Rosario. The head of the parade was nearing the corner but they hadn’t blocked off the road yet. You manage to drive through making it by a hair’s breath. It is midafternoon by the time you are safely home. After sating your hunger, you settle down to a good chair and heave a sigh. When was the last time you actually enjoyed the Sinulog?

Oh, back in those days, it was not yet such a big affair. The true economic constructs around it had yet to be established. It was only a “cultural” affair. To be sure, it was never a “religious” one. The regular fiesta procession was the religious affair. The Sinulog parade was always envisioned to be a sort of “mardi gras” to bring in the tourists, eventually. Toward this end, it certainly has succeeded. But the cost was always well within the vision of planners. One can only wonder if it is as bad or as good as they had initially envisioned. As a plan, is it drifting along like water down a hill, the same way we drive? Or do they drive it by some sort of moral compass?

After all, that is always the problem with all aspects of the tourist industry. Tourism is designed primarily to bring in the dollars. But it will do so at some amount of risk and cost. The best study for it is Panagsama Beach in Moalboal. Panagsama was its original name although we call it only Moalboal now. Once, it was only a medium-sized strip of white-sand beach that Paking Silva was trying to develop to ease the poverty of its local residents. The poverty problem has been solved. But one has to wonder: Whatever happened to its original “poor” residents? Are they better off now? Or have all these developments simply driven them away?

And as one skeptic was wont to put it in the mid-‘80s: You can hardly find a virgin left here. Think in terms of man, woman and child. But this should be qualified. I have not been in Pangsama longer than a few hours recently. But once, I actually sat at a bar there with my friend Sean when a woman of the commercial sex trade came to drink beer with us. She offered her services at peso-rate (as opposed to dollar-rate). I politely declined. And more especially so after her cute little child came along to tell her she was needed at home.

Ah, the vagaries of life. My traffic problem is small compared to what else might be out there.