Thursday, May 31, 2007 So: The comfort of relief By Michelle P. So Caught in the Net
“COUNTRYSIDE tourism” sounds beguiling. You picture greeneries, mountains, seas, seashores, coconut trees, cliffs, scrawny cows being pastured, sunsets, nipa huts, bonfires, guitar-playing, deep love affair with the Glen Soco-lookalike habal-habal driver….
Imagine all you can because once you’re out on the road in the countryside and you feel your bladder is about to burst and you can’t find a public toilet anywhere, you can’t think of anything else but to get to a damn toilet while squirming in your seat.
For anyone who has taken a road trip in Cebu, this is not an alien situation. Cebu, which prides itself of being a top tourist destination, is short of public toilets.
“We need clean public toilets, especially when promoting countryside tourism,” Jenny Franco, Cebu president of the National Association of Independent Travel Agencies, declares. The need for them is “crucial” as what had been shown during last year’s Suroy-suroy of Cebu Gov. Gwen Garcia, she says.
Franco emphasizes “clean.” I say Cebu needs to put up first the public toilets. The “clean” description will be affixed when the public toilets are already there.
The absence of public toilets in the Cebu countryside may have something to do with the short distances between trips. Land travel from Cebu City to Bogo in the north, for example, takes only three hours; from Cebu City to Moalboal in the south, two hours or three hours max depending on traffic.
Does this mean that many Cebuanos can hold their bladder long enough to reach their destination?
In Luzon and Mindanao where two major destination points eat up five to eight hours of land travel, public toilets are aplenty. And they’re clean. That’s where your P2 for “ehe” or P3 for “dumi” goes—for their upkeep. Though public, the toilets are not to be used gratis. Pay per pee.
The bus trip between Manila and Baguio or between Cagayan de Oro and Davao City via Buda takes seven hours. Within this period, there are three to four pit stops. In every stop, you can buy food and drinks that you can purge from your body (provided, of course, that you ingest them) in the next stop.
But these are densely traveled routes. What about those long and winding roads that are less traveled, like Baguio to Sagada in the Mountain Province or Banaue to Baguio via Nueva Vizcaya?
Public toilets are available along these routes, all right, but they’re the kind that begs for your liberality and maneuverability. They’re the kind that you’d like to use only in extreme measures, like when the goose bumps and sweat beads already enwrap your whole being.
The farther the public toilets are from Baguio City, the more unconventional they become. But I’d like to think of these public toilets as part of the attraction of countryside tourism.
Cebu has nothing of this sort, I mean, the public toilets. Discussion is limited to absence of public toilets. In Sagada, you need eloquence to talk about toilets.
Until such time Cebu has put up public toilets, road travelers will just have to make some personal ritual before leaving home. Like what indie filmmaker and part-time Sun.Star Cebu copy editor Publio Briones does: he goes to the toilet before he leaves for anywhere.
