The Post About Transportation

 

Judging solely by the number of pictures taken during any of my trips to the Philippines, transportation is easily at the top of my fascination list. A lot of that has to do with me spending a lot of time using it in one form or the other and some of it has to do with it being very different from where I have spent the bulk of my life. 

If I had to boil down transportation to something more specific, the Jeepney (seen above) is perhaps my favorite of all. In the mountains of Baguio City, they used to rule the mass transportation market and still to this day play a significant part. They started off as discarded Jeeps left behind by America after World War II but are built specific to the Philippines now. I would call the above Jeepney the second generation of the vehicle and on my last trip, I saw my first glimpses of the third and even fourth generations. 

The third generation is a more aerodynamic version of the second generation Jeepney's and lack all the colorful customizations that are characteristic of the previous generation. The fourth generation is now more like a miniaturized version of a Greyhound bus with individual seats facing the direction of travel versus the bench seats of the first three generations of Jeepneys that face each other and perpendicular to the direction of travel.

Traveling by Jeepney is quite intimidating to me because it requires a solid understanding of the geography of the city you are in and though I have spent nearly a quarter century making repeated trips to this particular city, I still have a severely lacking knowledge of the area. The Jeepneys, like modern day buses or subways state the two ends of their routes but are usually just colloquial names for a specific region of the city. For example, we stay in a region known as the SLU Housing Coop of Bakakeng, for all practical purposes, a suburb of Baguio City. So if I'm heading home, I need to first locate a congregating point for Jeepneys like the one seen above, and then walk down the line looking for one that says Bakakeng and then verify which part of Bakakeng it is going to. Of course there is no map saying that you can find that particular Jeepney at these parts of town. You just have to know from experience. 

To muddy the waters, Jeepneys are everywhere, some in service and others not. Some are for public transportation and others only for private use. Some haul people and others may haul cargo. But usually the most ornate of them means they are used as mass transportation at some point. 

For me, Jeepneys are kind of like trying to photograph Big Foot. The best ones I always see at a time when I least expect to and when my camera/phone is not in my hand. Most times I miss the shot completely and if lucky, I get a blurry unusable picture. I saw a Jeepney named Marlboro Country several times this trip and got not a single shot of it. It is a beautiful work of Americana art. But I have dozens of pictures like the Chris Mark one above that just doesn't speak to me quite as elegantly. Maybe some day I'll spend enough time in the Philippines where I can walk around on foot and photograph all of the Jeepneys I care to look at. Until then however, I have to just enjoy the ones I have.

Seeing that we were there this time during the heart of rainy season, I just have to show you the best of the worst of my Jeepney photos taken in the rain, which was a lot of the time since we were often doing other things when it wasn't raining.

As someone noticed in one of the Jeepney photos I posted while I was away on my trip, the Philippine culture has a fascination with the Mercedes emblem which adorns a large number of Jeepney front ends though there is absolutely no Mercedes parts in these vehicles, and likely very little Jeep parts anymore for that matter. But the emblems, probably hand made somewhere, are nearly ubiquitous on Jeepneys. 

Although I have seen it in the past and have never gotten a serviceable photograph, I finally got a nice photo of how crowded these Jeepney's can get at times. This one taken in the northern part of Philippines later on in my trip shows one with school kids on their way to school. There are enough Jeepneys and obstacles such as electrical wires low to the road in and around Baguio that I don't often see riders on top there. But it is much more common to see when down in the lowlands or other rural parts of the Philippines where Jeepneys don't come around as often on routes. You will also see Jeepneys doing double duty by hauling passengers inside and a mound of cargo on top, especially those that cover long distance routes between cities.

In the eight years since my last trip to Baguio City, a new form of transportation has risen to the top and supplanted the Jeepney, the taxi, more specifically the "Grab Taxi" as you can see denoted by the sticker in the rear window of the one above. Grab is the Filipino version of Uber or Lyft and to get one, you have to have the app downloaded on your smartphone and linked to a credit card. There still are some regular taxis that one can hail down and ride but they have become few and far between since my last visit. But the Grab Taxi is everywhere and if I had to hazard a guess, they comprise maybe 50 or 60% of all vehicles you see on the road when in Baguio. 

Like the Jeepney, they all have a unique name or phrase on the front door panel so you can identify it from the dozens going by every minute to know which one is the one you hailed. In this case Fil-Am is a term used to refer to couples such as my wife and I, a Filipino married to an American. Lately that is being phased out by AFAM which translates A Foreigner Assigned in Manila but is used more generically to describe any foreigner in the Philippines.

Another example of a taxi, this one happens to be an odd one that wasn't associated with Grab.

When you get down to the lowlands which is the bulk of the land area of the Philippines, the tricycle is the ruler of transportation. They are cheap, everywhere and will go where ever you desire to be dropped off. Like the Jeepney, they are often customized like the one you see above but just as often, they can be quite utilitarian. The sidecar attached to the motorcycle also comes in a large range of flavors. The most common one for passenger is the enclosed passenger sidecar like the one above so that the driver can operate even in the rainy season. But you also see everything from rolling livestock cages, to flatbeds to just a open air bench seat. Unlike other forms of transportation, you don't pay by the person but by the vehicle so it is quite common to see as many as four or five people squeezed into the sidecar, sitting sidesaddle behind the driver on the motorcycle or hanging off the back. 

Another common form of transportation these days in the Philippines is the rental van which is likely to be a Toyota Hiace like the one above which was one of three I rented from a Filipino named John Wayne during my stay there. They can haul 10 to 12 people around and we rented some for as little as 1000 peso per day which is about $16 U.S. Unlike vans designed for the American market, these things are quite well designed vehicles that allow for easy configuration of the seats with a pull of a lever or two so that you can haul just about any configuration of people and cargo.

Since my BIL is quite adept at driving these things, we just rented the vehicle but more often than not, you can rent these things with a driver too, similar to what we did in El Nido. It doesn't cost much more but generally you are responsible for the food and lodging of the driver during your trip though that doesn't mean a motel room and eating at a nice sit down restaurant. The rented drivers there seem perfectly happy getting a meal at some nearby street vendor while waiting for us and sleeping in a nearby hostel to the motel. I have always insisted they get what I get but it often takes some arm twisting to get them to accept such luxury.

The one downside to renting a van with a driver is that nearly every rental driver takes great pride in getting you to your destination as fast as humanly possible. This means driving with what feels like a death wish to my American driving sensibilities. Translated, this means driving extremely fast on crowded and sometimes very crude roads and passing others as quickly as possible while counting on oncoming traffic to slow down or swerve out of your way. When I was younger, and felt more immortal, I found all this amusing. These days when my mortality is closer than I care for, I have opted to be highly selective of my drivers, in most cases timing rental van use for days when my BIL wasn't at work and could drive us around at a more sane speed. 

With the patriotic Jeepney picture above, I'll end this long post by just saying that with the increased wealth of the Filipinos in general, private vehicles are quickly making inroads for domination of the roads. I saw many carports and garages in residential areas where a decade ago there were none or extremely rare. With an infrastructure designed around mass transportation and there are no such things as parking lots of even parking spaces, this is causing a lot of problems when traveling in the Philippines. Nearly everywhere we went involved getting dropped off somewhere and then the driver having to go far away to find a vacant stretch of road where they can squeeze the vehicle out of the center lanes of traffic. 

On my previous trip eight years ago, going anywhere meant bumper to bumper gridlock traffic that would sometimes take me an hour to go someplace that took me ten minutes this trip. The only reason I got around so fast this trip was due to the oil crisis caused by America's war with Iran. The Philippines buys nearly all their refined fuel from countries that get their oil through the Straight of Hormuz and thus the cost to fuel up a vehicle this trip were high even by my American based standards and well out of reach of probably the majority of Filipinos for casual driving. Thus this trip, mass transportation was once again making a comeback and the roads were breathing a sigh of relief though are still extremely crowded compared to most places in the U.S. But I fully expect gridlock again upon my next visit to the Philippines... sadly.