Let's Play Bus Roulette

Getting Around In The Philippines: City to town, and back again.
Celine has two accidents on two occasions on one bus!

So you want travel and adventure. There’s plenty of adventure in the Philippines. It’s beautiful, and for the new visitor there’s an unending panorama of things to see and enjoy. Most Filipino’s are wonderful and friendly. Pinoy know how to relax and enjoy life. What problems might come tomorrow are usually not worth worrying about today. And there’s a strong chance that the problems won’t be worried over tomorrow, either. In a very true sense, the philosophy of most peoples of the Philippines is to live in the Here and Now. For too many, that’s all they have.
As a Buddhist, I can relate very well to the idea of living in the Now. It can be less stressful and even mentally and physically healthy not to fret over the future – or anything else – and keep the blood pressure low and steady, the mind relaxed and calm. But even a Buddhist understands that the rice won’t sprout in the pond tomorrow or provide one’s food in the days to come if one doesn’t first plant, then tend to and care for the rice plants today; protecting and nurturing them, ensuring a good crop and life sustaining food for the many months ahead.
We in the West would call that good crop management or, for health, good preventative maintenance.
While the Philippines is a wonderful place and the easy way in which the average Filipino glides through life has some enviable advantages over the high-voltage fast-paced, stressed-out Western lifestyle, that same ‘glide through life’ behavior, taken too far, can spell real tragedy and heartache for the unaware traveler.

An Introduction to long distance transportation

* VANS: The vans are by far the safest and most comfortable way to travel from place to place. They are all relatively new and in pretty good shape. They are air-conditioned, which adds mightily to one’s personal comfort. On the other hand, it can also be a source of discomfort in that many of the other passengers can and do have rather rough smelling perspiration. You can find yourself trapped and nauseous as the smells from your fellow passengers are endlessly cycled by the air-conditioning. Also, bad breath is common in the Philippines where good hygiene is difficult if not impossible for most due to poverty.
Personally, I avoid riding the vans for those reasons, preferring to ride the jeepneys for the fresh air.
Vans are almost always overloaded with more passengers than there are seats to accommodate them, and everyone is forced together at elbows, shoulders and knees, leaving no room to move. You can get from point A to point B the quickest, but that can be dangerous as the drivers are always competing with other drivers and themselves to beat their time. They’ll pass on blind curves with no regard to safety. Vans are the most expensive to ride.
I once rode a van to Aborlan, a small town south of Puerto Princesa. The van had so many passengers that the conductor/helper had to share the driver’s seat with the driver. That meant that the helper had to push in the clutch and help steer while the driver controlled the brakes and shifted the gears.
When we topped one hill, up ahead we saw a military check-point had been thrown-up together with some Land Transportation officers. The van stopped and in full view of the persons at the check-point some 100 meters ahead, the helper got out, ran around the van and sat on the floor wedged like a sardine between the seat and the side sliding door. Then we were off again. When the van reached the check-point, the driver got out for a few moments, paid a bribe, and we proceeded on. Over the next hill and out of sight of the check-point, the van stopped once more – and the helper ran back around the van, crammed himself into the driver’s seat and, again sharing driving duties, we completed the trip to Aborlan.
No one in the van showed any sign that there was anything unusual in having two people drive at once.

** Jeepneys: Jeepneys are open with glass-less windows and have an opening at the rear to enter and exit. Unless you sit on the front seat by the driver, you must ride sideways on one of the two padded bench seats that run the length of the back with the window openings at the passenger’s back The rider can get wet in a rainstorm.
The jeepney makes plenty of stops along the way to pick-up and drop-off passengers and cargo. The roof is overloaded with passenger’s belongings and extra cargo. Extra riders and animal stock – mostly chickens and pigs – will ride up there, also.
Flat tires are a common occurrence, due to the fact that most tires are kept in use long after the inner-threads or steel-belts show through. Jeepneys are all handmade – maybe in a shop, maybe in someone’s front yard. There are no laws applying to the standards under which they must be built. Failing brakes are not uncommon. More often than not there will be no brake or tail-lights. They’re mostly noisy, cumbersome and slow going uphill. Going down-hill they are driven much too fast for safety. Most often they carry weight far beyond the jeepney’s load limit. However, that doesn’t deter the drivers from driving at break-neck speed when possible. These drivers will also pass around blind curves, and take the turns so fast that the highway traveler would not be surprised to see them leaning dangerously or on two wheels as they careen through the mountain turns. Much too often the jeepney’s wind-up demolished in a ravine and the passengers dead or mangled.

*** Buses: Buses in the large metropolitan areas like Manila and Cebu are manufactured by legitimate businesses which use quality control methods. And though, for lack of first-hand knowledge, I can’t speak of the buses of the rest of the country, I can tell you that the buses of Palawan are almost all hand-made. The chassis is purchased new from Manila and shipped to Palawan, or removed from a previously smashed and junked bus, heated and straightened as best as can be achieved. The buses are then built around the chassis by anyone with even the most rudimentary skills. I have yet to see any two buses that look alike. Nor have I seen a builders name on any bus. Buses, like the other modes of transportation are normally hand-built. As with the jeepney’s, there are no laws applying to how the brake and electric lines are installed or maintained, or whether they must use new rather than used parts.
Safety maintenance checks are non-existent. Bad parts are only replaced after they have failed and the bus has had an accident. And someone’s life is usually forfeited because of the complete lack of concern and maintenance for safety. Profit is the only motivator for bus companies.
As with the jeepneys, bald tires are all too common.
The bus seats may or may not have cushioned seats or backs. It may be just a piece of wood. The seat and back are built at a 90-degree angle to one another, leaving the back stiff and sore.
One bus that Celine rode in on a trip home from Queson had three flat tires before it completed half of the 120 kilometer trip. Celine reported that all the spare tires were bald. When she learned that the driver and the helper were going to take one of the blown-out bald tires and have it patched somewhere, then put it back on the bus - as the fourth tire change of the trip - she flagged down a passing van and rode that the remainder of the way home.
In my opinion, the buses are the most dangerous of the three choices of transportation. Bus drivers are not given any special training to learn how to drive a bus. If they can steer it and shift the gears, they’re qualified to be hired. Bus drivers seem to think that because they are bigger than most other vehicles, they can drive as they please. The buses often drive on the wrong side of the road, especially in the turns. Every single time I ride up into the mountains on my motorcycle, I see buses passing on blind curves, and at the same time at such dangerous speeds that they lean over so far as to fall over on their sides. It happens.
The brakes often fail. Buses side-swipe other vehicles while on the wrong side of the road. Loose, heavy cargo flies off of the roof and hits other vehicles. Buses often wind-up in ravines, rivers or ditches. Many people die every year, or are mangled and disabled with missing limbs. The bus companies carry no or little insurance to cover its customers. The families of the dead, and the injured must seek redress and compensation through the civil court system at their own expense. Few have money for attorney fees and court costs.
I know that I may frighten you with the above information. Well, you should be frightened; at least frightened enough to make good choices and to be both aware and wary of the vehicle you are about to embark on. Fore-warned is fore-armed. Keep you eyes open and look at the tires, and how much cargo is on the roof, etc., before you decide to get on and ride.
You ride any of the three long-distance vehicles at your own risk. And, indeed, it is a risk.
If you are a tourist and you can afford it, one of your smartest moves would be to choose to hire a private commercial van and driver – a service offered by many local travel agencies. It’s by far the safest choice. You can also hire a travel guide to go with you if you wish. I estimate the average cost at about $100 per day for all of the above. You can – and should – control the rate of speed and safe handling by the driver. Plus, you can stop wherever you see a photo opportunity.
If you are a permanent resident, the best thing you can do is to buy either a motor(cycle), van, car or truck and get yourself around. Remember, however, that you will need to grow at least six more eyes in your head (two for each side) to stay aware of the wild and crazy Filipino drivers who will kill the unwary and uninitiated in a New York minute.
NOTE: I got my temporary driver’s license papers in March, 2004. At this time, October, 2005, I am still waiting to get my actual driver’s license identity card. Upon being asked three months ago, the person to whom I must see about getting my I.D. card indicated that one-and-one-half-years was not a terribly long time to have to wait. Patience… patience.

In writing the following two stories, I was forced to write the second story first, then, later I added the first story. The second story only happened days ago, and the details were fresh in my mind. Celine was off shopping and I had it mostly finished by the time she returned. I had to have Celine refresh my memory as I wrote story number one. New details that I was unaware of surfaced, and I realized that the two stories were becoming at times convoluted and redundant.
To straighten out and rearrange the details would make for a more clear story, but would require considerable time to revise. So, instead, I will rely on the reader to sort through the mess and rearrange details and explanations to fit better in his curious mind.
The same bus: It wasn’t until last night when I was almost completely finished writing both stories that Celine told me, in both instances, the bus she was riding was the same bus. Even more amazing was that, in both instances, she was also seated in the exact same seat!
It was the bus from hell! Now, however, it is the bus in hell since, being completely destroyed in the last wreck, it will never roll again. Thank goodness.
So, good reader, do your best to make sense of those seemingly backwards explanations and details. Rik


Play Bus Roulette… at last.

Consider the risk you take when you ride on the typical modes of land transportation throughout the Philippines, as I tell you a story about two recent experiences my darlin,’ Celine, had while traveling in Palawan by bus.


Down The Mountain From Buena Vista

On this particular trip, Celine had gone to Makirawa to see her father who had been quite ill. Celine was very concerned that he might die, because he was losing a lot of weight, and he already is a bone-thin and slight man who only weighs about 40-kilos. Among other things, he was having problems with his heart and his breathing.
Making the return trip, Celine met the bus at Buena Vista, as usual. The bus had traveled only about six kilometers when it came to a place where the highway drops in a long, steep decline. The road, at the bottom, curves in a tight blind curve to the right.
Soon after Celine boarded the bus and seated herself, she noticed that the bus was wandering on the road, crossing over the painted center dividing lines again and again. She watched the driver intently to try to understand why the bus was veering around. Was it because the bus had a mechanical problem? Or was it that the driver was sick or just a horrible driver.
Celine watched carefully so she could make a decision whether to get off of the bus or not, perhaps saving her life.
It wasn’t long before Celine realized what the source of the wandering bus was. It was the two young teen-age girls in tiny mini-skirts and blouses with a deep v-cut that exposed more than a decent Filipina should expose and seated on the bench seat directly behind the driver.
The driver had adjusted his inside mirror for maximum exposure, and he was giving most of his attention to filling his eyes with the tender flesh of the two girl’s thighs.
All men can understand the intense concentration that can consume the attention of a young man when confronted by the toned and shapely legs of a teeny-bopper, and the chance to catch a glimpse of that little mound with a hint of a split at the bottom of a girl’s panties.
We just hope that the one whose attention is so concentrated won’t be the guy whose driving the bus we’re a passenger on while rolling down a mountain road!
According to Celine, the driver eyes were fixated and he gave scant attention to where he was going.
Celine gave thought to either going to the front of the bus and yelling at the driver to keep his eyes forward, or getting off of the bus.
But it was too late to do either.
The driver, distracted as he was, took advantage of the long straight part of the road to feed his lust with the sight of those four fine legs, and didn’t notice that he was on the wrong side of the road, nor did he realize that he was then beginning to enter the blind curve.
Traveling through the blind curve in the opposite direction was a large dump truck filled with gravel. The dump driver, seeing the bus headed towards it had no time to do anything but react by blowing the truck’s horn in a long warning blast.
The bus driver brought his eyes back forward only to see that avoiding the truck was by this time impossible. The truck driver tried to steer to the side of the road and out of the way, but the bus’s trajectory was fixed for collision. There was an ugly grinding between the sides of the truck and the bus as the two vehicles met; the bus hitting the truck just behind the drivers door. The bus scraped along the truck for its full length. During the process of side-swiping the truck, the bus’s back wheel was ripped-off. The left rear of the bus sagged, raising the right front wheel off of the ground, preventing the driver from being able to steer the bus.
Once they separated and passed each other, the truck, now traveling uphill, came to a stop on the side of the road. The bus, having cleared the end of the truck, continued going straight. However, since the bus was at that time going through the curve in the road, the bus drove straight to and over a 50-meter deep cliff which dropped at a very sharp 75-80 degree angle. The bus, while still airborne, rolled over to the left 90-degree’s so that the bottom of the bus was now on the top. The driver had caused the bus to roll as he tried to make a correction to keep the bus on the road.
The bus, now upside down, dropped about 8-meters before it crashed into a large tree that was growing from a rock outcropping. The tree snapped in two and the bus continued another few meters until it hit and was prevented from going further by a stand of four other large trees - the only remaining trees on the outcropping of the rock.
Had the bus gone over the cliff a few meters sooner or a few meters later, it would have plummeted to bottom of the canyon, and ended its fall in the river, with a high probability of killing all those aboard. It was only the passenger’s good fortune – if it could be called such – that they hit the only outcropping of rock on the cliff.
By amazing luck, no one was killed. But, there were many injuries of broken bones and severe lacerations. There were pigs tied on the roof of the bus, being transported to Puerto Princesa to be sold in the market, which were crushed and killed when the bus landed on top of them.
Note: Celine had been seated by the window in the exact same seat as in the second story you’ll read after this one.
When the bus turned over Celine had been holding both the horizontal hand-bar and the vertical hand-bar that is used by those disembarking from the side-door immediately in front of her seat. She also wedged both of her feet under a fold-down seat that hung down over the door-steps and which was used to seat one more passenger. That prevented her from being thrown around inside the bus as it rolled and when it crashed into the trees.
The only injuries to Celine were a few bruises to her legs. She later complained that her hips hurt, but nothing serious came of it.
All of the passengers had to climb out of the bus any way they could and climb back up the cliff. The truck driver was there standing alone watching as the passengers made their way back up to the road. He had used his cell-phone to call the police and for an ambulance.
There were two foreigners on board; a Swiss husband and his wife. The wife was seriously injured with two broken legs. One leg was broken at mid-thigh; the other broken at the shin-bone. The broken bones of both were protruding from her legs.
A private van came along and stopped to offer assistance to carry injured persons to the hospital in Puerto Princesa. They offered to carry the foreign couple. The husband at first refused the ride saying he preferred to wait for the ambulance to arrive and take them to town.
Celine told the Swiss man, “Here in the Philippines, it’s not like the United States. Every time there is an accident and it’s very far from town, they use a helicopter to save them. Here, we have no helicopter; if you wait for the ambulance, you’re wife is going to die. Often-times they don’t have gasoline in the ambulance and it may or may not get all the way here, and it may or may not get back. If you want to live, better you ride in the van rather than wait for the ambulance.”
The Swiss insisted he’d rather wait for the ambulance because it would have trained medical personnel, medical equipment and medicines and oxygen.
Celine could only laugh at the man, as serious as the situation was. She told that man, “The ambulance only carries the driver, a mid-wife and dextrose, and nothing else. No medicine, no pain pills, no oxygen - no nothing. And when you ride in the ambulance, the bed-cart isn’t fixed to the floor, and there are no locks on the wheels. So the bed keeps rolling around, and the mid-wife has to hold onto the bed to keep it from crashing around inside the ambulance.”
The husband was astonished by the description of the ambulance services Celine described to him. “Really?” was all he could say.
“Yeah,” Celine replied. “I live here and know how things are. Believe me… that’s the truth.”
The Swiss man asked Celine if she would ride with them, as she spoke good English and could translate for them. Celine said she would.
They laid the Swiss wife on her back on the middle bench-seat of the van. The husband sat on the floor with her, and Celine sat on the rear seat.
The husband was in a panic. His wife was unconscious. He tried in vain to get her to wake-up, while admonishing the owner of the van to drive faster. The driver spoke no English, so Celine had to tell him what the Swiss man was saying. The driver drove as fast as he safely could, and after one-and-one-half hours they arrived at the Adventist hospital.
The Swiss man didn’t want to let Celine leave, still wanting to use her translation skills to communicate with the nurses. But the nurses spoke English more-or-less enough to understand him.
Celine left the couple in the care of the nurses and the emergency doctor and came home.
When Celine got home she was very upset and shaking, and I held her close to me as I took in her tale. She has had so many close calls with accidents and near accidents involving tricycles, motorcycles, vans, buses, and has come close to being killed so many times…
I was grateful to have her home again and in my arms.

As for the fate of the Swiss couple; we never heard what the final outcome was.


Celine Clings To A Banana Tree

As my regular readers know, I have a fishing banca that works on the coastal waters in northern Palawan, and recently I had two fish cages built in Ulugan Bay. Since I have a bad back and can’t get around to keep an eye on things myself, I rely on Celine to handle my affairs for me. And, as her father, sisters, brothers, and brother’s-in-law are all working for me, with hardly a one able to speak English, it’s better if Celine does the traveling and runs the business. That means that Celine must travel the mountain route north and south on the National Highway by commercial bus, Jeepney or a van.
Last week Celine made one of her trips to Makirawa at Ulugan Bay to see how the building of my second fish-cage was going and the move of my first fish-cage from one place to another. The government made the area where it was off-limits for fishing.
Business and visiting taken care of, Celine began her trip home.
To get home from Makirawa requires one to either take a banca, travel down the bay, then up river to a point where a 3.5-kilometer long trail must be traversed before reaching a place where you can catch a ride to the highway by tricycle or small jeepney. The only other choice is to walk through 8-kilometers of jungle. For obvious reasons Celine doesn’t like to walk through the jungle. It’s not safe for any girl, but a slim, beautiful girl is at high risk for being raped.
The long-distance bus passing from Tay Tay and Roxas in the north on its daily run can transport one the remainder of the way to the terminal on the outskirts of Puerto Princesa.
Buses and commercial jeepney’s are no longer allowed to enter the city as of a year ago. One must then hire a tricycle or ride on the mini-van’s to get home. The mini-van’s are what I call toy trucks. They’re very small, but can carry about ten passengers in the same style as a jeepney – that is, sideways one a long bench seat. They are extremely cheap, costing about ten U.S. cents to ride.

Celine boarded the bus in Buena Vista and made her way over the cartons of food, clothing, sacks of rice, cans of propane, etc., that completely fill the isle of all buses, front to back, until she found a seat by the window just behind the side-exit door. Another woman joined her there, sitting on the bench seat by the isle.
Philippine buses aren’t air-conditioned. Well, they are, but only by virtue of having all of the windows open. The window where Celine sat was open when she sat down. On this particular bus the windows had been made larger than most. As it turned out, that was most fortunate for Celine.
The bus lurched forward and Celine sat back to relax and look out of the window, hoping to be spared any talk with her neighbor or others. Chika-Chika is a national pastime and on any kind of transport, most people take the opportunity to talk and visit with each other, and gossip about mutual friends and acquaintances. This bus ride was no different. However, Celine is a very quiet and private person who detests Chika-Chika, and so she always tries to keep to herself.
Celine watched the world go by through the window, but shifted her attention to the bus after they were going down the steeper part of the mountain road. The bus, she noticed, had picked-up quite a lot of speed and Celine was concerned; knowing how many times the stupid drivers end-up crashing the buses or going off of cliffs. She was particularly concerned this time because of the new, inexperienced driver. Part of the Chika-Chika circulating through the bus was about how the regular driver had refused to drive the bus that day, claming the bus was unsafe. Why it was unsafe apparently no one knew.
The owners of the bus could not be bothered with having the bus checked for unsafe conditions; there’s no profit in that. The bus has to makes its run.

The driver was someone who had been hanging around the terminal hoping to find driving work. At last his chance had come, and he was told to make the run to the northern-most part of the island. Now, on the return back down out of the mountains, he was speeding too fast for the conditions of the road. This was area with many steep and high cliffs. There were a few places that the road ran next to long sloping areas that ran all the way down to the river. It was no place to be recklessly speeding.
Celine was all to aware of the dangers, having already been in one accident that took her over a cliff.
No one except Celine was paying any attention to the bus, the driver or the road. They were too immersed in gossiping or listening to gossip.
The bus continued to pick-up speed. Celine watched the driver. The first thing she noticed was how often he kept looking back at the passengers in the rear-view mirror, and his frightened eyes. Celine leaned forward and to the left so she could look down the isle and see the driver better. She saw that the driver was pumping the brake pedal furiously, and the pedal was going all the way to the floorboard. She looked in the mirror; the eyes of the driver were even bigger now and more frightened. It was obvious to Celine, now, that something was very wrong.
Celine called to the driver, “Driver, do you have brakes or wala (nothing)?” The driver didn’t answer, but only stared in the mirror, wild eyed, at Celine. He seemed frozen to the wheel.
Celine watched him continue to pump the brakes, but the bus, rather than slowing down, was still gaining speed.
Celine shouted to the other passengers, “The bus has no brakes!”
They just looked at her.
“The bus has no brakes!” she again shouted, louder this time.
The passengers paid no attention and kept on with Chika-Chika.
Celine turned to the woman next to her. ”You’d better jump from the bus. There’s no brakes.”
The woman acted as if she didn’t understand. Celine repeated the words to the woman, and the woman told Celine that she wasn’t about to jump from that bus.
Celine stood up on the seat, turned around and shouted repeatedly to the people in the back of the bus, “The bus has no brakes!” Crouching down, Celine grabbed her back pack and threw it through the open window. Then, putting one foot on the window sill she put most of her body out of the window and, using her foot, launched herself from the bus. An instant before she kicked-off, her view was to the rear of the bus. She noticed a teen-age girl hurling herself from a rear window. She saw the helper lean over the roof and look down at both girls. He immediately jumped. Celine then pushed herself with her foot and flew through the air. She was now moving through space, the road rushing passed beneath her.
Celine looked forward to see where was headed. She immediately saw a banana tree rushing up to her on the side of the road. Reaching out, she grabbed a hanging banana leaf with both hands. Since she was moving forward both she and the banana leaf continued to the trunk of the tree. When her body slammed hard against the trunk, Celine wrapped both of her legs around the truck and locked onto it.
She watched as the bus continued about ten meters before it left the road, dropped over the edge, and 50-meters down a 45-degree slope, picking up speed, bouncing wildly, the cargo on the roof flying-off in all directions until it entered the river and came to a halt after and crashing against a large 10-meter high boulder. Steam rose from the front of the bus which was now crushed inward.
Some local people, along with the riders of a passing van rushed down the slope to assist the people who remained in the bus. Others ran to aid of the helper and the girl who had jumped from the bus and were now lying on the road, bleeding from their injuries.
The passengers were removed from the bus and helped or carried back up to the road.
Fifteen to twenty minutes had passed by this time since the accident.
Celine, still gripping the banana leaf and in a complete state of shock, heard a voice say, “Hey, woman, what are you doing in that banana tree, are you from that bus, too?” Looking down to see a woman looking up at her, Celine thought, “Oh, that woman is talking to me. That means I’m still alive, and not dead.”
The woman continued, “Come down, now. It’s already fine, and we already called an ambulance to help the people. How did you get up there in that banana tree? You’re like a monkey hanging there in that banana tree.”
Celine lowered herself down the tree trunk. The woman repeated her question, and Celine replied, ”I don’t know. I think I jumped.”
Celine didn’t realize at that moment that she had actually jumped from the bus window or had grabbed the leaf of the banana tree. She was so frightened that she had been hanging with that banana leaf in her frozen fingers for more than twenty minutes.
Walking to the edge of the road, Celine looked down at the destroyed bus, and around at all of the passengers laying and sitting along the side of the road.
Three were dead and many were bleeding from serious injuries. One boy had had his arm severed. A foreign woman, who was on vacation with her husband or boyfriend, had a metal pipe protruding from her upper chest. There were many facial injuries, broken teeth and jaws.
The driver had been killed instantly. The woman, who had been sitting beside Celine, was killed when the side-door’s hand-rail pipe was ripped-off and sent completely through from one side of her head to the other - sticking out some eight inches. The third was a young teen-age girl.
The girl, who had leaped from the rear window after seeing Celine jump, broke her knee and exposed bones from protruding from one elbow. Both ankles were broken.
The helper, who’d leaped from the roof, had one broken ankle – the other sprained, and was bleeding from his head. He stood at that time, however, and in a daze said that the real driver didn’t want to drive the bus because something was wrong with it; that he wanted the bus checked before it left. The owner told him that they had lots of passengers and he had to drive. But, the driver refused. The helper then said he should have listened to the driver and not gone along on the trip, then sat down on the road.
We later learned he had suffered a concussion and had slipped into a coma. Whether he lived is unknown to me.


Three days after the accident, Celine’s sister, Baby, came to the house. She knew that Celine had been on that bus. She’d heard about the accident on the radio and traveled from Makirawa to see if Celine was among the dead..
Baby told Celine about the radio’s news report, describing it in detail. The last piece of the story was about a “Miracle Girl” who had somehow landed in a banana tree and was completely unhurt. No one knew the identity of the “Miracle Girl in the Banana Tree.”
Celine laughed and told Baby, “That miracle girl was me. I was the one hanging in the banana tree.”
The truly frightening thing about the two bus accidents Celine was involved in is that it was the same bus involved in both accidents. Still, in neither accident, was Celine hurt in any way. Amazing…


Sunday, October 02, 2005
I did some editing of this article this morning but couldn’t finish because Celine wanted me to drive her up to Santa Cruz to check on some of her younger siblings. Two boys, age 14 and 10, and one sister, age 9, are living by themselves and going to school while the parents are living in Makirawa, some 36-kilometers away. That isn’t considered unusual in the Philippines. Life is very different here.
While I was driving through the mountains I was thinking about this article. I decided to do a survey of the commercial transport vehicles I passed on the trip.
Of all I saw while going through a blind curve, all were well over the center lines; and all were speeding. Even while driving on a straight stretch, all but one vehicle was over the lines on the wrong side of the road.
I saw one bus come around a curve up ahead of me that looked so strange. It looked as if the bus was on ice and the back was trying to “slide’ around to the front. I soon saw that the chassis frame was so bent that the rear wheels were a full 18 to 20-inches off center!


Things such as these two stories are all too common. Much too common. Death is always lurking nearby in the Philippines. One can never be too careful when traveling in the city and on the highways.
It’s the responsibility of the foreign traveler to keep his eyes and ears open at all times and to protect himself from all of the many types of accidents that, in their own country, would only occasionally happen through a freak accident, but is a daily way of life here.

Although I have written a truly frightening report that should concern every tourist and expatriate, I also don’t want to scare you off from coming here to visit or to live.
Things are as they are, and there’s no getting around that. But not everyone dies in some horrible accident. I, for one, have never been in an accident, although there have been plenty of near misses.
By all means, come to the Philippines and enjoy yourself. It is a wonderful place. You only have to be aware, wary and careful. Don’t be so busy being the ogling tourist that you don’t pay attention to what’s around you, or the vehicle you’re about to get into.
If you have a bad feeling about riding in a tricycle, bus or jeepney, don’t get in it. Follow your intuition. There’s always another that will be along shortly.
Use your good common sense, and you’ll be fine.
Rik