Ever wanted to attend the famous flower festival, the Panagbenga Festival? Held annually in the city of Pines-Baguio City, this colorful event draws a lot of attention with visitors and tourists coming from all parts of the Philippines and the world.
The Street Dancing and Grand Float Parade are one of its highlights usually celebrated on the last weekend of February. If you plan to go, here are some things about the Panagbenga Festival that you probably didn’t know about.
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You want to go, so do thousands of others
If you’re planning on watching the parades, chances are others plan to go too. Now, I’m not talking about hundreds of people here. Remember what I mentioned a while ago about ‘tourists coming from all parts of the Philippines and the world’?
The city will be swarming with thousands of visitors during the parades. Classes are also canceled due to the great influx of tourists. Good luck finding your way in that crowd. If you’re bringing children along, make sure you put a leash on them to avoid missing accidents. After all, the city was only designed to accommodate a few thousand people.
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For this year’s Panagbenga festival, an estimated 1 million people flocked to the event according to Senior Supt. Ramil Saculles, the Baguio City Police Office director.
The 30-minute ride turns into a 4 hours-painful-butt-sitting experience
Baguio’s roads aren’t that wide compared to EDSA. But despite that fact, tourists keep bringing their oh so fancy cars. Some drivers even keep honking, you know that won’t make the traffic any better. Please do some research before you decide to travel to a place. Check if it’s okay to bring a car first.
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Back to the topic, because of the influx of tourists, the usual 30-minute ride is multiplied eight times so get yourself ready and download a lot of movies so you can binge watch inside the car.
The Panagbenga Festival parade’s aftermath looks like some garbage truck went around distributing trash
Every freaking year, the city deals with scattered garbage around the town center. Hello people, trash cans were invented, didn’t you get the notice? ‘Put your trash in the garbage bin. If there’s none, take it with you and place it in the bin when you finally see one.’ Didn’t our teachers AND parents teach us that?
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Organizations spend tens of thousands of pesos for one float
Those beautiful floats you see during the parade cost a lot. Dozens of flowers usually amount to 100 pesos and a float consists of hundreds of dozens of flowers. Imagine how much money goes into creating one beautiful float. Do the math. This goes to show that the province of Benguet is rich in agriculture not only with regards to vegetables but also flowers.
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If you don’t like squeezing yourself in the thick crowd to get a glimpse of the floats, you can check them up close after the parade
Yes. You read that right. After the parade, the floats are left on display in the Melvin Jones Grandstand or the Athletic Bowl. There are still a lot of people but at most, you can take a selfie with it and even admire the flowers individually.
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That’s all folks. Which ones have you experienced so far in the Panagbenga Festival?
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Great. I miss going to festivals. =( Last one I had was in Quezon a few years back.
Keep it up.
Neil Alvin Nicerio
The Backpack Adventures
Haha. Here’s to hoping we can attend more festivals this 2018. 😀