The Early Bus To Baguio

By Jude Polotan

Barely seven in the morning, the Victory Liner bus jolts to a stop and the youngster-sized driver announces in an accent I can barely make out, “Five minutes!”

Ken wakes and shifts in his seat. He laughs at the sight of me huddled beneath garments I retrieved from our bag and have draped about my shoulders and more than my legs. In the Philippines, they like their air-conditioning set at meat locker.

“Stay here,” he says. “I’m going to use the bathroom.”

I nod, teeth chattering.

We’ve been underway two hours, obtaining boarded the bus just before dawn. In an try to distract me from both the early hour and the artificially-induced cold, Ken had purchased us a bag of macapuno donuts. Consider a Bavarian cream, then replace the sickly yellow custard with a naturally sweet, velvety glob of young coconut. “Nice try,” I teased, wiping a blot of the gooey elixir from my chin, but he knew I was looking forward to this trip practically as significantly as he was.

Baguio was the location where in his childhood Ken had escaped the brutal summers of Manila. In the highlands a number of hours north of the capital, Baguio got cool sufficient to develop strawberries. Ken was excited to take a look at again — it had been numerous years — and I was thrilled we’d ultimately have some time alone.

Coming from a compact family, the vastness of Ken’s clan overwhelmed me. In one particular week I’d currently met dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins and there hadn’t been a day however when we weren’t setting off to a different relative’s property for a reunion.

His parents pronounced us crazy to undertake this trip. For days the newspaper had carried nothing at all but sensational headlines and incomprehensible images of submerged villages and landslides due to the monsoon rains. Ken’s mother wondered aloud why we had this death want.

On the bus, as a couple, we attracted a lot of interest. Just as in the Manila website traffic, exactly where young men in the backs of jeepneys stared and pointed, here, too, we had been conspicuous. I wanted to believe this was mainly because there weren’t many white individuals in the Philippines at the time — in addition to it being the rainy season, the U.S. State Division had issued a travelers alert due to the current kidnappings by a regional terrorist cell — but I knew it was more simply because they were unaccustomed to seeing a Filipino man with a white woman. Back dwelling in New York, I didn’t assume of us as an interracial couple given that arriving right here, I was reminded at every turn. Of course, a lot of Filipinas have been with white guys, but that was distinctive.

The moment Ken is off the bus at the rest stop, numerous barefooted peasants jump aboard. They wave newspapers and rice cakes and long sticks of barbecued chicken and pork. The fatty aroma of grilled meat floods the bus and a smell that would make me salivate at noon makes me want to puke now. I verify my watch once again. Yes, just 7 a.m. The macapuno roils in my stomach.

For the reason that I’m a foreigner, the only one on the bus, since I am white, I’m singled out. A man with a ragged t-shirt, leathered brown skin and valuable handful of teeth tilts toward me, dangling the pork beneath my nose. He barks at me in dialect though I attempt to impact a smile that balances kindness with a clear message: go away. The other passengers watch, rapt.

Then all of a sudden the hawkers are scurrying back down the aisle. The bus driver is back in his seat. The peasants jump off the bus, the driver pulls his lever, shuts the door. I stare out the window. Have the police come probably? Are the vendors not supposed to be harassing the bus passengers? Completely awake now, I’m excited by the guarantee of a juicy story to inform Ken when he returns.

Except now there’s the loud grind and catch of the bus engine starting up, the driver revving the gas. I shoot up straight in my seat and press my face to the fogged window, peering desperately via the torrents of rain for Ken. At the front of the bus, the driver is putting on his seat belt and adjusting his cap. His hands take the wheel at ten and two. Certainly we won’t leave just before all the passengers have returned? I really feel the bus jerk as it shifts into gear. I’ve stopped breathing, although my heart is off at a gallop.

I strive to stay calm, speedily sifting by means of my options — the last point I want is to come across as the hysterical American woman. But the next quit is hours away and the deeper we go into the province, the much less English is spoken. Will there be a police station there, a person who can reunite us? No one on the bus appears to speak English, so I rely on my eyes to implore my fellow passengers who need to surely remember I had a companion and he’s not back. I picture them intervening on the poor white woman’s behalf. Somehow, even though, those who earlier had been so acutely interested in me, in us, are now oblivious, nibbling on their BBQ pork, the fat glistening on their chins.

Finally, there’s nothing at all else to do. I rise from my seat, get started down the aisle toward the driver. Wait!, I’ll shout, wait!, not figuring out if he’ll understand me, but I’m angry now, I will make him recognize me.

Just as I’m about to reach the front of the bus, although, right here comes Ken running alongside, knocking amiably on the windows and then, as he catches up with us, on the door. The driver opens up, Ken hops on. No sigh of relief, not a wrinkle of concern creasing his forehead.

He holds out a skewer of BBQ pork. “Want some?” he says.

About the Author

Jude Polotan is a novelist and fledgling travel writer. You can learn a lot more about her fiction at judepolotan.com.

[Comfort Cease by Arnis Dzedins/Flickr In between Baguio and Sagada by Liza Pratt/Flickr]