introducing the trisikad drivers

Trisikad is a foot driven vehicle with a bike and a side cab. There are hundreds (or even thousands) of it in Talisay City, a city with 22 barangays, barangays with thousands of lazy residents who make trisikad driving a very lucrative career.

I am one of these lazy residents, and for 4 years of commuting to and from my place, I have encountered different types of trisikad drivers. Here they are:

The Mahalon type

There are drivers who think all passengers are rich and daft. One time, I was on my way home from barangay Poblacion, hailed a trisikad and told the driver my destination: Dumlog, that’s just next to Poblacion. I normally give P6, which is actually more than the popular fare of P5 (P3 is the minimum, btw), for this ride. But the driver that day wanted P10 for that trip. Huh! Ten pesos is fine, but to let them have their illegal way is just wonderful! Unsa mo siniswerte??

The slow-mo ride

You pay for a ride because you want to get to your destination quickly. But there are trisikad drivers who don’t want to get there just yet, not at your own bidding, that is. Either they are already tired after long hours of pedaling their bikes or they just love hanging around with you. Either way, it’s never fun, it's even embarassing. I have been in this kind of ride twice. The first time, it took me hours to get to my place because the driver was, I think, too weak to drive his sikad and I did not notice that he was already that when I hailed him. The next time, it was the same driver (the joke was on me, really!), and I only learnt that it was he when his sikad was moving at a very leisurely pace that the people we passed by seemed to be laughing at us. And since everyone in the street was feasting on our predicament, I quickly paid the driver and transferred to another sikad. I think he was really sick or something. Good grief!


The drunk/drugged driver

Since I am not a popular figure in our place because I am not a generous passenger, I have no choice but to go for anyone who is willing to drive me to or from my place. One late night, there was already no sikads in the streets except for one driven by an old man. And this old man agreed to take me to Dumlog. At first, I thought he only had a minor hearing impairment as he could not easily catch my direction. For more than one occasion he stopped at someone’s place to drop me off there without my telling him to. It was on his last stop when I finally decided that the ride would never take me to my home. This last stop was in a dark place where he made an abrupt turn to his right, knocking something off on the ground of someone else’s premises, and finally bumping off that someone else’s door. Ghad, it was a disaster! I got off of course.

The hold-your-breath experience

Riding in a sikad whose driver knows no deodorizing substances is a bad way to start a day. Man, you really can’t tell if a driver smells something or not until you are already seated on his trisikad. And it would be rude to run away after smelling something awful in him, right? So when I am already trapped in this situation, which is on a freaking regular basis, I remember this SCUBA diving breathing technique: breathe with your mouth. This is probably why I learned scuba diving so easily.

The talker

There are some drivers who talk a lot. They tell you their life stories, their experiences as drivers, and even current events in the metropolis that they gleaned from media reports. I actually like hearing them talk. There was one driver I met once, and since then I kept on looking for him since he first brought me to my place one night. He was from Mindanao, was hired as a construction worker for a commercial establishment in my city but when the project was suspended he had to drive for a living. Roughly P150 earning in a day, not much to feed his family that he brought along with him here. Too sad, but pretty interesting story, really. I told him our local government, even if he is not from here, gives financial assistance to anyone who wishes to go back to his own province. I don’t know if he heeded my advice to go to our city hall to avail of this program because I haven’t seen him after that encounter. He was also very nice. There are very few of his kind, I'm still on the lookout.

The good, the bad, the smelly, and the drunk drivers. They are everywhere in my city. If they could blog, too, I wonder to which category they would put me. The chick, the thrift, the crazy, the sick, the lazy, or the smelly. Nyaaa...