Adventure in Transportation: Masbate City, Philippines

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A trip to the Province of Masbate is a long one, if I may say. My traveling companion and friend, a photographer named Nanette, commented, “The amount of travel to the U.S. is much shorter than this,” which only takes about 14 hours by plane. Here’s why. At 8 o’clock in the morning on May 5, we left Bacolod City for Cebu via a Ceres bus. After a few hours, the bus boarded a barge, along with several other buses and private cars, for a one hour and a half voyage to the island of Cebu. We had to travel for another couple of hours to get to Cebu City. We reached the city proper at 4 o’clock, where we got down and took a cab to Pier No. 5, where the Trans Asia ship, M/V Asia Indonesia, bound for Masbate City, was docked. We bought our tickets and were soon on board. We bought some pusô, rice cooked inside a square pouch of woven coconut leaves, and some cold chicken barbeque steeped in dark orange color. Perhaps, it had too much atsuete, but then it’s their trademark here. We had our dinner at the upper deck of the ship, while the sun was still very high. Then after a few hours, we slept. The boat left the dock at around 10pm. I woke up unintentionally every few hours, checking if there was any island in sight, but we were in the middle of nowhere and it was pitch dark. Finally at 7am, we found that we were approaching land! At the pier, we rented a tricycle to get to our destination, which was about 20 minutes away. That was one exhausting trip! And what happened there during our stay was worse. More storytelling…