Cab Talkin’

Taxi cab drivers worldwide are a curious lot.

Every time I hail a taxi cab you get to meet drivers with all sorts of personality creed and religion.

From the most pious to the proselytizer, from the silent to the most talkative, from the courteous to the down right obnoxious, there is always one that you will pleasantly or unpleasantly encounter.

Statisticians may argue otherwise, but I will postulate that they constitute a microcosm of a country’s working masses. Politicians will do well to learn the public pulse from them without the expensive costs of national surveys.

Rightly or wrongly, taxi drivers in many cities are notorious for their outrageous driving but you gotta love the conversations!

Take the case of ‘Manong’ whose taxi I hailed just yesterday on my way home from work. As we went through the traffic of Quezon Avenue approached the elliptical road around the Quezon Memorial Circle, he started talking on how the government should already prepare plans to address the growing volume of vehicles in the metropolitan area.

Evidently a fan of the late President Marcos, he went on to cite the various achievements of the former dictator in the area of transportation and public works, on how an experience of worsening traffic in Thailand while attending an ASEAN summit prompted Marcos to direct his officials to prepare plans to address anticipated heavier traffic conditions in our own country. This led to the construction of mass urban transport systems like the Light Rail Transit (LRT) in Manila. Its success according to Manong led to other planned routes across Metro Manila like one transit going all the way to Antipolo and another to Sapang Palay, etc., seven transit railways all in all.

According to Manong, he knew what he was talking about since he was part of the construction team for this massive public work projects. Taking his word for it, I had no reason to doubt the authenticity of his claims especially brcause the formulation of these plans made general sense with today’s traffic and increasing urban population.

As we traversed the long stretch of Commonwealth Avenue he also mentioned the good old days of the Metro Manila Transit, those blue and not crowded air-conditioned buses that shuttled commuters on time to work from and to various points in Metro Manila. He also told of passenger white Ford Fierras (which I had no personal recollection) that were allowed to shuttle riders in the metropolis and were not considered colorum.

Then, the Cory administration came, which according to Manong changed all those initiatives. He blames Cory’s former Transportation Secretary and Executive Secretary Oca Orbos for today’s traffic woes with the liberalization of second hand vehicles and spare parts, the entry of Chinese and Korean made cars and the entry of right hand vehicles and trailer trucks picking up container vans directly from the port area rather than using the national railway system.

He even theorized that Orbos almost became the next President if not for the mistakes he made later during his meteoric stint in Malacanang, which according to him, gave Fidel Ramos the opportunity to ascend into power.

By this time, I had to cut our interesting political discourse to make a quick stop to the Pan de Manila shop in Fairview and buy some of their cool stuff.

The presence of pugon (earthenware and brick oven) cooked tasty Pan de sal probably impelled Manong to shift the discussion to food. With certainty he declared that the best tasting pan de sal comes from Casa Marcos (was the name just a coincidence?) formerly in Greenhills but has now moved to a place somewhere in Sct. Tobias. He attributed the superior taste of Casa Marcos pan de sal to the sole use of “trigo” (wheat) without any additives AND the use of “bakawan” (mangrove tree fire wood). He relates how he had learned the trade from his father who was a baker in Davao and that had he not gallivanted into the wrong path may have eventually taken over his father’s bakery business.

Upon reaching the streets of West Fairview, Manong proudly talked about his relatively good health considering he has reached the age of 70 and this longevity he ascribes to a regular food regimen of fish. A native of Mindanao, he ate a lot of fresh fish and had a particular liking of “GG” or galungong which way back then was the staple fish of the masses but whose price for the last two decades or so, has been quite restrictive.

I enjoyed this particular conversation all the way to the time I alighted in front of our home. I didn’t share his obvious political preferences but he did have some insights worth bearing in mind. Cab talkin’ is a good way of easing through the heavy traffic and you actually learn a lot in the process.

Cab drivers are a curious lot without a doubt. I should know…my father used to be one.

For a good portion of our lives growing up, my father earned a living driving a taxicab. He owned one (which eventually became two) and in it he made and compiled his own unique one thousand and one stories to tell passengers and family members alike.

Most of the time, he used to line up in hotels particularly at the Regent Hotel in Manila. Because he was friendly and honest a lot of foreign tourists befriended him, going out of their way to meet us, giving us gifts and even writing to us long after they left the country. Some, who had the opportunity to return, looked for him from among the hotel taxi cab drivers. He enjoyed what he was doing and my father could have easily passed as a reliable tourist guide of the DOT. Now retired, he still recalls many of these stories to us and to anyone who would care to listen.

One of my favorites was when he told us of this time that one of his drivers bought a bootleg cassette tape of Elvis Presley from a roving Muslim trader near Roxas Blvd. The said driver had the good sense of playing the tape in our taxi’s cassette player immediately before the trader could go far away beyond their reach. True enough, there was a problem as it appeared that the tape was a blank one devoid of Presley songs. The driver called back the trader to complain about not hearing Presley sing while playing the tape. The trader tactfully replied by saying “Huwag kayong mag-alala, napagod lang siguro si Elvis sa pagkanta. Hintayin nyo lang, maya-maya lang babalik na siya!” (Don’t you worry, Elvis probably just got tired of singing. Just wait for a while and soon he’ll be back!) :]


Here’s to your fair share of pleasant taxicab conversations…may God bless us all!