Road Trip!

When I was growing up we took a lot of family car trips. At least twice a year we took the eight hour drive to Florida to visit my Grandma in Ormond Beach. These trips usually consisted of waking up at around 3 or 4 in the morning, stumbling to the car, and falling back asleep. If the set time to leave was 4am, you better be in the car by 3:55 because Dad had been waiting for you with the engine running for about twenty minutes anyway. We would usually stop twice for a bathroom break and once for a fast food breakfast. When we did stop at gas stations or rest areas to use the bathroom Mom would yell from over the stall to me and my sister, "Don't Touch Anything!" Since the hour we left was timed around being away from the big cities during morning rush hour, since we made efficient stops, and since my father drove relatively fast, we would make amazingly good time and get to Grandma’s for cold cut sandwiches and potato chips at lunch.

This is not how Filipinos take road trips! First of all, Filipinos aren’t so strict on time. So while your fellow travelers may say “we’re leaving at 9:00am.” You probably aren’t leaving until 9:30, maybe 10:00am. You don’t have to worry about getting hungry because you will stop for major meals along the roadside. Many small establishments dot the highway with a table stocked with covered pots. The family that lives there probably cooked what is in front of you. You take off all the lids to see what is being served and point to what you want to eat to order. You sit down to eat – there is none of this eating in the car while you drive business. Even if you left at 11:30am or 12pm you will stop 30 minutes or so into your trip for lunch. As Filipinos (at least here in Mindanao) eat about seven times a day (morning coffee and snack, breakfast, then merienda or snack around 10am, lunch, then second merienda around 3 or 4pm, dinner, and then evening snack) you will probably stop at least once more for a snack. On the trip I took to Bukidnon we got to the first gas station, about 20 minutes away from the office, and stopped to buy car snacks – snacks which are completely unnecessary since you stop for food every couple of hours anyway. On the way back home your trip is elongated because you will stop at the vegetable and fruit tables to purchase even fresher and cheaper produce than you can in the city to bring home. There are clearly no laws prohibiting public urination anywhere in Mindanao as far as I can tell, so men stop usually anywhere on the side of the road to relieve themselves. Women can stop at gas stations to use the restroom but sometimes they bring a malong instead (a fabric about the size and texture of a bedroom sheet but sewn together on the long side to make a tube) to cover themselves when they need to use the bathroom on the side of the road. You may also be able to use the CR (comfort room, as they call it here) at one of the roadside eateries, but it is probably the personal bathroom of the family who runs the eatery.

Now I’m not trying to make a judgment on the best or worst way to make a road trip. I like both ways for different reasons. I like that my family raised me in a way to care about timeliness and efficiency. And Americans, in general, covet these values I think. On the other hand, I can often have a lot of anxiety around being a perfectly scheduled and timely person. Filipino culture is quite laidback and easy going, and while there can be drawbacks to this approach too, these are values I could use a good dose of. And while I might get stressed sometimes that I’ve been waiting for someone for twenty minutes or a meeting is going way longer than I thought it would and I have fifteen other things I’ve been planning on getting done that night and now I can’t and that affects the skype calls I said I would make the next morning…I clearly need to chill sometimes!

Anyways, here are a few pictures from my last road trip to Cagayan de Oro. The view is beautiful, and these pictures don’t even come close to doing it justice. But it’s hard to get a lot of good pictures in a moving car with tinted windows. (And while it is beautiful, I just also want to make a note that these lands are horribly deforested and a lot of Filipinos have mentioned to me that they miss what its beauty could have been without the environmental degradation the lands have suffered).

This is at a roadside cafe we stopped at for breakfast on our return trip. It is run by NGOs to buy local farmers' produce. I took this pic because the plants are lined with gatorade bottles!