Regulating tourism in Sagada

HAPPY WEEKEND

1^stpart of a series

By Gina  Dizon

SAGADA, MOUNTAIN PROVINCE -   Backpacker tourists had been visiting this shangrila of the north that is Sagada in the early ‘70s. Must  have been attracted by the mystical  aura of Sagada and cool and natural beauty of the place added to a friendly populace,  that more backpacker  Caucasian tourists  with hippie  long hair stayed for  2 to three days and some for more days before  travelling to another place.  More backpackers came in the ‘80s noticeably this time with Rasta haired men and gypsy clad women.

Locals mixed with the tourists and had the kind of backyard tourism with clean fun, bonfires and guitar jamming with some doses of tanduay rum and coke.

The ‘90s saw tourists with cleaner hairdos riding in packaged travel tours. Even travelling individual tourists showed cleaner looking haircuts.  The late ‘90s on to the present began the coming of Filipino tourists in groups which increasingly went in numbers of vans obviously packaged in Manila and somewhere else in the Philippines.  Commercial tourism was born and so with stricter controls of regulating tourism.

The latest resolve of the umili of Sagada to ban cars from parking along the narrow streets of the town comes as a welcome sight in the observance of the Holy Week 2014 in this much visited northern part of the country. And on with the observance of the No Parking policy every weekend when tourists come in groups Fridays and stay in town till Sunday.  

The locals like it and they enjoy walking freely without the smog and heavy traffic greeting them along their very roads.  And so do the tourists who escape the heat and smog of urban areas and feel the gentle breeze and tensionless walking along the streets of Sagada from Nangonogan to the road section above Sumaguing Cave. Strictly a No Parking policy, cars were directed by the Sagada police and volunteers to the Tangeb grounds except for those which have private parking lots.            

So is  the resolve  due to travails of  heavy traffic  the past  years  especially noted in the middle ‘90s onwards when visitors  came in droves  and riding in vans especially those from Manila and other parts of the country clogging  the already narrow streets of Sagada.

For the past years  since  tourists increased  in the years  2000 till now,  a helpless local government  cannot do anything  except paint the  roads with No Parking and place No Parking  signs on road sides. This did not help with cars and more cars coming in to park along any part of the road while visitors enjoyed their meals and shopped for souvenir items oblivious to a growing traffic jam due to cars parked in the already narrow streets.  Locals grumbled and so with motorists plying the road.

All what the police did was to deploy police to man the street and prevent cars from parking in certain sections of the road according to a municipal traffic ordinance.  This helped somehow but as the policeman turned his back, a vehicle whether owned by a resident or by a visitor will park his car wherever he sees convenient.

While the streets  went  smogged and  jammed and  heavy,  the parking  lot at the Mission  Grounds  were left  unpatronized and so with private parking lots offered for a fee. There must be something wrong somewhere.

Comments and complaints were heard both in print, on radio and in oral talk. Something has to be done this  Holy Week when  visitors will again flock to Sagada and prevent another repetition of the maddening  traffic jam in the previous  Etag festival  first week of  February 2014  where a  resident  coming home for vacation reaches his house 300 meters away after  45 minutes  of traffic jam.

The rest is history with the Sangguniang Bayan, tourist guides and the Sagada police who forwarded a traffic operational plan for Holy Week 2014 to the mayor of the town to act on.   The plan was presented to the community people- inn and resto keepers, shop owners, barangay officials, residents- who   conformed to the plan that Sagada be a walking place for both tourists and residents to enjoy and eventually an Executive Order was issued by  Mayor Eduardo Latawan  to this effect.

Sagada is blessed with beautiful scenery along the road including vast greenbelt along the Mission compound, rice terraces at Kapay-aw, limestone rocks along Makingking and more of greeneries along the road. While walking the roads, one gains a healthy disposition and loses of calories.

Urged by the people, the mayor eventually came up with an executive order a week before the semana santa April 17 to 20 guiding the police and the volunteers man the national road from Nangonogan to the section above Sumaguing cave.  

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The curfew hour is coming out to be the most violated among the tourists. I live near the road and usually sleep around 12 pm to 1 am. I can hear loud talk and boisterous laughter of tourists passing by starting at 11 pm on to around 1 am late in the night.

Boisterous talk and loud laughter at the dead of night are situations local inn keepers and bar and resto managers contend with. They could either tell their  visitors that fun time is up and go to sleep because  they are  disturbing the night  and violating the curfew or let them be as they  are visitors.

People in the villages and the Poblacion are day workers and thus sleep early and wake up early. It is a violation to their rights to privacy and restful sleep to keep them awake of boisterous laughter and talk beyond 10 o’clock pm.

Rule Number 7 of the Sagada Environmental Guides Association organized in the ‘80s is clear on this: Observe the curfew hour. Curfew hour is 9 o’clock for minors and 10 o’clock for adults, this means stores and establishments are closed by 10 pm and residents and tourists should not be loitering around, talking and laughing out loud beyond this hour. Yet there are persistent violations and it is up now to the establishment and the neighborhood to tell noisy neighborhood and visitors to shut up and go to sleep. (to be continued)