How I survived Panagbenga?

It is becoming a verity in this furiously fast world: After a vacation, you need a vacation.

Wherever I go, whether to Pagudpud in Ilocos Norte, where on clear mornings you can hear the cocks crowing across the sea from Taiwan, or to Siasi in Sulu where most days you can hear the great kites flown by men and children singing in the wind, when I come back to Manila I need to rest for a day or two, to smooth out my spirits as well as to ease the bodily pains of travel by bus on bumpy and dusty roads and by boat under a killer sun, and by a plane that leaves hours late while you die of ennui waiting. And waiting.

Last weekend when I left for Baguio, officially for matters relating to inevitable taxes, incidentally for the Panagbenga Festival, the colorful week-long festival culminating this Sunday and presaging the onset of summer, I knew what I was headed for: a disastrous excitement.

It (the disaster, not the excitement) began right here in Manila. Not having reserved tickets days earlier at Victory Liner, since I had not had the time to do so, I waited for five hours as a chance passenger to get a seat. I took the chance, because I was told the only time for guaranteed seats when I inquired Friday evening was 11:30 a.m. the next day. But I had an important meeting at 9 in the morning of Saturday and so, fool that I was for not wanting to stand up my colleagues, I took the chance.

For many years I’ve been going up to Baguio practically every month on Victory Liner, and believe me, it’s more practical and convenient and safer than going there on your jeep or SUV. The bus line knows where Pinatubo, after the big eruption, had covered up the tracks or where portions of Marcos Highway, after landslides, has devious turns that can lead down a ravine. I have just one complaint to make, and I hope the Victory Line management is reading this: The driver and conductor play their taped music and VHS videos as if their passengers were all deaf. On night trips when you hope to be able to get some sleep, you get instead fitful rest, if not nightmares, with April Boy or Limp Bizkit blaring from the speakers. Why don’t they equip the driver,who may need the loud music to keep himself awake while driving, with an earphone?

On this particular Friday evening at 9 o’clock, at the Victory Line bus station in Pasay City, it was absolute pandemonium with chance passengers scrambling for seats. Surely this happens not only during Panagbenga, but also during Holy Week and the Christmas holidays when people make the trek to Baguio. But they have not evolved a system yet to make life easier for their passengers. It took a young woman passenger to put order to the rampage: She asked every chance passenger to queue up according to their numbers and board the bus when their numbers and their names are called.

Simple. But you know why this queuing up system would not work with the so-called Victory Liner OICs? Because you could grease their palms with a few pesos. I know that for sure, because one time I did it.

And so, at three in the morning after waiting for six hours, I finally boarded the bus and arrived in Baguio–after the monstrous Panagbenga traffic on the approach to Baguio–eight hours later. The epic journey took all of 12 hours. Why, in about that time, you could have reached Europe by plane? But this is domestic travel, Philippine-style, you tell yourself, groaning.

After unpacking things, I was ready to watch the parade along Session Road. Fortunately, I had a decent place to stay, which is like a hundred or so paces away from the Cathedral and Session. But reaching Session, I saw that the crowd already looked like it could eat you alive. Since noontime, people had started to line up both sides of Session for the parade. It took me maybe a thousand paces–although my feet hardly touched the ground, I was being borne along by the crowd–before I reached Tea House, which is a few meters down Session from the corner of Fr. Carlu street.

Every Panagbenga time, I always stationed myself in Tea House, where after ordering a late lunch of their Tea House Rice, coffee and a piece of their popular Snow Cake, I would tarry with my meal and when the parade passed by I would watch through their glass display window standing on their chair. Of course, there were other customers with the same smart idea.

The parade began promptly at two. The participants, mostly elementary and high school students from the various barangays of Benguet, were a delight to see in their colorful, folksy flower- and foliage-inspired costumes and playing their drums and bugles and xylophones while executing the steps and fancy formations they had rehearsed for months.

A delightful spectacle, except that you had to wait some ten or so minutes before the next contingent passed you by. "Bakit putol-putol? Nawawalan tuloy ng excitement," a woman in Tea House was heard to complain, as she went back to her table to take some more spoonfuls of her blueberry cheesecake.

I had enough punishment as a chance passenger of Victory Liner, and I thought I didn’t deserve another. And so after the fourth or fifth contingent when it seemed the next one was going to take another eternity, I decided to go back home. Another mistake: the sidewalk was now even more impassable.

An unsolicited, but nonetheless helpful, advice to Panagbenga organizers: Synchronize the numbers of the contingents so that they are all dancing together for a prescribed length of time and at definite intervals. I’m sure they have thought of this synchronization, so what could be the hitches?

I think Panagbenga has been the most brilliant idea to promote Baguio ever since the Americans made it the summer refuge for their sweltering officials in Manila in their perennial white sharkskin suits. Although newfangled, the flower festival has roots in Benguel’s genuine lore and culture and traditional industry. In fact, Baguio can hold other festivals that can be as colorful and well attended as Panagbenga, like a vegetable festival or an ethnic/tribal arts and crafts festival. And these will be relevant to the culture and character of the people and resonant with the spirit of the place. Which you can’t say exactly about other newfangled festivals in other parts of the country, some of them incongruous imitations of the Ati-atihan of Aklan.

The brainchild of then Baguio mayor and now Benguet governor Damaso Bangaoet in 1997, Panagbenga has also succeeded in luring back hordes of Baguio visitors who had been shying away from this fey city after the disastrous earthquake in 1990. At the close of festivities today, visitors may have reached more than 300,000, if the crowds flowing up and down Session are any gauge, reportedly bringing in revenues of P20 million a day during the weekend. A great bulk of these earnings, one can safely surmise, would come from sales in the wagwagan (stores selling imported second-hand clothes, shoes and accessories), the city’s strongly emerging tourist attraction, strange as this may seem.

But most certainly, for the thousands of schoolchildren and youngsters participating in the festival parades, Panagbenga will be a beautiful memory. In their fancy costumes and body paints, smartly marching and playing their music on their instruments, and cheered on by the roaring crowd, they are the real stars of the show!

On the second day of the festival, the parade of the floats of flowers, it was again a thumping, pounding, raucous, eye-filling bacchanal–almost like an anomaly in this laid-back, mossy, foggy city where nothing much happens much of the year. The thick crowd was even more intimidating than the throngs the day before, lining both sides of Session eight-deep (in some places 12-deep). On the overpass across Session where it swings to Burnham Park, and where I found myself pushed inexorably up by the crowd, children and intrepid youngsters were standing precariously on the ledges for a better view. One push from the monster mob and they go plunging to the street., and the thick hedge of spectators, below.

I was able to squeeze myself on top of the steps of the overpass and there held my ground as the people pushed, shoved, cussed–and flattened my buttocks. In this life-threatening perch, I watched the floats of Silver Swan, Jollibee, Don Henrico’s, and other commercial institutions (yea, sure, they are the ones that have the money to spend for the expensive floats), covered in mums and roses and bromeliads and orchids and other exotic flowers. Everytime the floats threw their candies and sachets and mini-pizzas to the crowd, the scramble for the cheap benedictions would almost send the people on the high overpass dangerously pitching over.

And when Judy Ann Santos floated by at the tail-end of the parade, you were lucky if you were not trampled upon by the shrieking and jumping fans.

Is this what people come to Paanagbenga for–to risk life and limbs in the flowery rampage? Yes. And you know what, no one seems to get seriously hurt during Panagbenga. I have not seen any emergency van or mobile clinic anywhere near the parade grounds.