Long Ride

RIDE OR DIE TRYING The struggles of riding the PUV  

IF YOU HAVEN'T BEEN IN the commuting mode lately, you would not understand the torment. When the clock strikes 8 in the morning, you would readily feel the heat intruding on your skin. Middle Earth is getting hotter as fast as with a notification on social media. And that would be intensified as soon as you enter that tight public utility vehicle (PUV).

There’s no escaping from it. No matter how long you spent bathing before riding one of these swarming PUVs, most if not all of the time, you would still look messy (and smelly even) before you hit your destination. Unless if it’s cold out there while you’re in it, that would give you a bit of a breather. But other than that, the prospect of you exiting that multicab in tatters, so to speak, is not at all surprising. 

If you weren’t able to grin and bear it, now is the time. You don’t have a choice unless you’re willing to pay a hefty sum for that taxi ride. What goes on inside that taxi, however, is a different story. The idea, nonetheless, would be that preferring to ride a jeepney over a taxi is strictly for the birds, a matter of choosing the sea over the Devil. And what a predicament would that be!

Bicycles seemed like a good alternative, but considering the sweltering of the atmosphere, that might be easily dismissed, since we still have to take note of its claims with all the diseases attached to being directly exposed to the sun. So there has to be an epiphany at some point. We need a ride to go to work, to go someplace else, for our long-awaited vacation maybe, we can’t just walk or ride a bicycle for stretches and risk ourselves in the long run. That wouldn’t sit well with our desire to have a fair skin in the process. 

If you’re someone who travels on it from the outskirts to downtown Davao on a daily basis, you would definitely agree with what is unspoken inside that potentially tedious ride. It is as if you’re in for some intense trekking as soon as you ride one. But before you do so, make sure you have taken a bath (please), and tuck some music in through your phone or tag a lousy book with you. It’s going to be hell from there, especially on peak hours. 

And if you’re squeamish, you’re in for a ride. Just imagine the smell perhaps of the person closest to you, the overwhelming dust, your own sweat dripping from your armpits down to your hips, that heat wave for a possible vertigo, traffic jams and the prospect of arriving late for work or home, some noisy passengers trying to sound Manileneo with their broken Tagalog, plus the fact that you’re expected to pass the fare of that passenger at the back to the driver. All of these things make the world go round inside a PUV. 

It is a microcosm of life, no less. A parcel of what goes on in our community exacerbated in a peculiar way with forces that are debilitating in nature like global warming or human frailty. You’d wish to have a car of your own under these circumstances, but that’ll take some time before you could have one, and quite possibly a potential headache in the making if you construe the expenses attached to it as taxing and economically draining. 

For now, though, you’ll just have to suffer an extended amount of discomfort on a weekly basis. It’s just a matter of getting used to, getting yourself immune with the situation you're in to, because riding a PUV these days is quite rough, not to mention uncomfortable. At times you’d feel like you’re on the wrong side of the tracks the moment you ride on it. And that sounds like a long ride, to begin with.