After two months of excitement in the Philippines it would have been a major letdown if I made it from my apartment in Manila to the airport and on to Japan without some sort of dramatic event… I was not disappointed.
My flight left just before 7am so I packed the night before and was awake at 4am to take a quick shower and get dressed. By 4:30 I was out on the main road flagging down a taxi and when one stopped I hopped in, told him we were going to the airport, and then directed him back to my apartment to load all my luggage. He was a nice fellow and a great help getting my quite heavy bags safely stowed in his taxi. Once everything was loaded, I turned off the lights in the apartment, locked up, hid the key, and hopped in the front seat. It was then that the adventure began.
Once I had seated myself and buckled up the cabbie looked over with a mournful and half guilty look on his face and said “So sorry sir, but the meter it is very very broken…” My ass it’s broken. You think I was born yesterday?
But I was in a bind. We had already loaded everything into the taxi and as the airport was 45min away I needed to get going… so I made a deal. I looked him dead in the eyes and said “Ok, let’s make this interesting. If you can get me to the airport in less than 30 minutes, I’ll pay you 500 pesos.” Now 500 pesos is more or less $10, nearly 2 days’ wages for a cabbie, but like I said earlier the airport was 45 minutes away… this would be no easy task. Upon hearing the offer my new friend’s eyes lit up, he gleefully rubbed his hands together, and with a big mischievous smile on his face he said “No problem, sir!”
Approximately 0.2 seconds later he mashed the accelerator to the floor boards and we were off like a shot. Two streets and 30 seconds later we were momentarily stopped by a red light. The cabbie took this opportunity to fish around under his seat for a second and then withdrew a beaten old white cassette tape. He turned, looked *me* dead in the eyes, and said “Do you like Bon Jovi?” (pronouncing it ‘bone’) Things had just gone from unusual to plain insane. He mashed the tape into the deck, spun the volume knob all the way to 11, and when the light turned green he literally peeled out off the line and through the intersection. For 500 pesos this man had just left his sanity well behind him.
Imagine, if you can, a taxi barreling, weaving, even skidding at times down the streets of a third world capital city at 4:45am, windows down, doing 60mph while the traffic around it is only doing 35mph, and blaring Bon Jovi hits at deafening volume…
Tommy used to work on the docks…
(cut off a bus and narrowly miss a pedestrian)
Union’s been on strike, he’s down on his luck, so tough…
(slam on the brakes and swerve around a motorcycle)
Gina works the diner all day…
(tires squeal around a corner, I’m slammed against the passenger door)
Working for her man, she brings home her pay, for love…
(up on the sidewalk to pass 3 slower cars driving side by side)
She says we’ve got to hold on to what we’ve got…
(no shit honey, I’m white-knuckling the dashboard as we thread the needle between two buses)
27 minutes after my offer was made we skidded to a halt in a taxi parking space at the international airport. My cabbie checked his watch, turned towards me with a big fat grin on his face, and said “we made it, sir!”
It was without question the greatest vehicular experience of my life and believe me I’ve done some damn stupid things in vehicles before…
Never again will I listen to a Bon Jovi song quite the same way.
You live for the fight when it’s all that you’ve got…