On the Wrong Side of the Double Yellow

Vance, David, Katy, and I set out on Monday morning around 8:30 on a day trip to Dumaguete. Dumaguete is a city on the island of Negros. It took us three modes of transportation to get to our destination. We started out on bus. There are two types of buses on Cebu, crazy, reckless mini-buses and still moderately frightening Ceres buses. I think I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again….most drivers seem to pass other cars or tricycles at any time they deem necessary, which is all the time. Just get a look at us on the wrong side of the road as we are passing a jeepney! Not a lot of time between us and that truck up ahead.

We passed a motorcycle parade in Carcar…

…complete with a band!

If you look closely, in this next photo, you'll realize that we were the second bus to pass the slow bus on a blind corner. As Katy says, there's a reason why people cross themselves and say a little prayer before they get on a bus.

But the good news is that if your bus does take a turn for the worst, you can go to “Green Pastures Funeral Home”…a real sign we saw on the road, true story...I only wish I had my camera ready for that one! Yes, you too can go to greener pastures when you die.

A few things are different about riding the buses here in Cebu. First, they don’t really have designated bus stops here. You stand on the street that the bus drives down and wave at one going your direction. Look out if there are two buses that stop, they’ve been known to fight over which bus you ride. Second, vendors get on the bus from time to time and try to sell you stuff. The drivers don’t really care too much for the vendors so they barely stop for them when they want to get off…tuck and roll comes to mind. This is the second vendor that got on our bus.

Third, we stopped at a sort of rest stop/restaurant called The Shamrock. Maybe rest stops in the mountains are dangerous places because if you look real close in the background you can see an armed guard with a sawed off shotgun. Na, they’re pretty common actually, I just haven’t been looking for them.

Fourth, I have no photo for this difference because it is an audio delight…Filipino radio. We heard “When I See You Smile” by Bad English, followed by the new Eminem/Rihanna song, followed by a Barbra Streisand number…it goes on, very eclectic. The bus home was karaoke covers with Filipino accents…imagine an Asian women singing "Pretty Women" ...yep, it only got worse. By bus, we made it to almost to the southern tip of Cebu in about three hourse. There, we walked to the docks and bought tickets for our 30 minute boat ride to the island of Negros.

When we arrived on the other side, we hopped on a small jeepney. Here it is in all it’s glory!

This is a photo of us before it got crowded.

At its most crowded, there were 12 of us crammed like sardines in the jeepney…that’s the price you pay for a ride that cost about 35 cents a person. I tried to have David take a photo of all 12 from the front end of the jeepney, but after five attempts with the flash still not going off, we decided it wasn’t worth it.

We made it into the city of Dumaguete and noticed that this city was full of tricycles but no cabs.

It was also quite interesting to look up and see such a bird’s nest of wires. I think this situation is a little precarious.

You can barely see this other guy, so I’ll point him out. He's there, on the orange ladder behind that clump of wires.

Careful now, don’t want to cut the wrong one.

Take another look at this photo above and you’ll notice that there aren’t any stop lights or signs in this city. Some of the busier intersections have some traffic enforcers.

While we were snapping photos of the men at work, we noticed some of the billboard signs…apparently Folded and Hung is a pretty popular store in the Philippines. But hands down, the only thing sexier than nude is Walker.


As we walked through the city, I learned the state of the the world from Bogart:

We ate lunch at an Indian place called Persian Palate and then we went to Chowking for halo halo.
This Filipino dessert incudes, ube (purple yam) paste, young coconut strings, candied bananas, corn, lime jello squares, shaved ice, an assortment of beans, something that looked like maraschino cherries but were more bland, cornflake sprinkles, and a scoop of ube ice cream. It was actually a lot better than I anticipated. I'd have another halo halo before I leave the country. For those of you who really want to try halo halo, good news, you don’t have to come all the way to the Philippines…we discovered that Chowking is in Las Vegas, so is Jollibee.

We walked back to the Dumaguete waterfront, and I wanted to snap a photo of us with this beautiful background, but the bus showed up right as we crossed the street. And this one wasn’t very crowded!
So I snapped this photo right before I stepped on the bus.

We made it back to the ferry dock and hopped a bus that looped around the southern tip of Cebu Island back up to Naga. This bus was actually 30 minutes shorter than the one we started on this morning. We rolled in at about 8:30 pm. You might think that we covered a lot of ground/water with our three modes of transportation, but I asked Vance how far we traveled today, and he said it was probably about 160 miles. Boy, it takes a lot longer to get somewhere in the Philippines.