I went to Naga to visit Leia, who was staying with her family there. To get there by plane, I would have to take a 5-hour van ride south to the airport, then fly to Manila, change planes and take another flight to Naga. Instead, I took the bus, since it turned out to be cheaper. The bus ride should be, I was informed, about 12 hours (it turned out closer to 16). That's not too bad, I thought, sign me up.
We bought the ticket the day before, because everyone advised me that the ride was a lot more pleasant towards the front of the bus. Since I wasn't sure if I'd be coming back to Borongan, I was taking my acoustic guitar in its bulky, cumbersome hard-shell case, and so I asked just to be sure, if I could put it in the luggage compartments below the bus. "No, no, no," they told me. "It'll get broken." Now, a hard case for a guitar is much rarer here than a white person, so I was sure that once they saw how stocky and masculine and fear-inspiring my case was, there'd be no problem.
Still, boarding the bus the next day they told me, "no, no, just put it up there in the cab." I thought they meant the space above the seats, and I was sure my case wouldn't fit there, but I climbed up inside the bus anyway. I was one of the first passengers to board, and there was nowhere to put my guitar, so I plopped it down in the middle of the aisle and said "fuck it. They can deal with it." Little did I know, that's exactly where it goes.
Within about 15 minutes, all the passengers had boarded and in true third world fashion, the bus was bursting at the seams with cargo--suitcases, duffle bags, mattresses, sacks of rice or coconut husks for copra, stacks of pirated dvds. Fire marshalls be damned! the aisle was an obstacle course worthy of American Gladiators. A futon lay across the tops of several seats above the heads of passengers who, being Filipino-sized, still had plenty of room.
We reached the city of Catbalogan and when the bus stopped a couple vendors boarded, as they do on buses throughout the world. "Ha!" I naively thought to myself, "let's see them peddle their wares in this no man's land of a bus aisle." But the stacks of belongings piled three and four feet high seemed powerless to stop the onslaught of shrill-voiced, sandaled salespeople who trod mercilessly on Dora blankets, backpacks, and hard-shell guitar cases in an effort to unload their stock of hot peanuts, dried squid and fish, water, and juice. Like Frodo Baggins traversing the hilly crags of mordor, these vendors eventually returned victorious (having traded peanuts for pesos) from whence they came.
At bathroom stops, the passengers did the same, climbing over seats and suitcases and other passengers to get in and out of the bus, they way you do when you take a road trip and pile into a Honda Civic with four or five of your closest friends. This is it; it seems that poverty (or maybe just common sense) and the dictates of necessity and maximum utility make you instantly more intimate with the people around you than you wanted or thought you could be. When traveling in the third world, and even in many parts of Europe, you necessarily kiss your "personal space" goodbye. I love this not only because it draws you out of the self-imposed isolation of Western individualism, but because it's so fucking practical. If you can fit eighteen passengers in a van, why the hell would you take less just so people can have room to stretch? You'd have plenty of room to stretch if you were the motherfucker whose seat they sacrificed for the comfort of others. Everybody in, nobody out. Stop being booje, America. Put away the SUVs.
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