Passenger Tales

On my way to Baybay from Tacloban, I was jolted out of my somnolent state when I saw a motorcycle with a roof. Forgive the surprise of an urbanite because I’ve never seen anything like that before and I have never imagined putting a roof over a motorcycle. For other city dwellers who are also unfamiliar with such a site and whose eyebrows are now raised in disbelief, yes, it was a motorcycle and not a tricycle and yes I can definitely distinguish one from the other. I’m a great fan of tricycles. I thought that it was just a freak thing but I saw that there were more of them as we went along and some had 3-4 passengers riding astride aside from the driver.

I asked one of staff in the office that we went to in VSU about what I saw and they told me that it was called a habalhabal. I theoretically knew what a habalhabal was. My high school Melai, once mentioned it to me that in Carmen, Bohol (where my ancestors and hers came from), habalhabals were the only transportation that can penetrate the interior towns where there were no highways, just dirt roads. However, she failed to mention that it had a roof or maybe the Bohol variety do not have roofs unlike their Leyte counterpart. As they say, necessity is the mother of invention or innovation, in this case. The staff explained that since the passengers wanted to be protected from the heat of the sun and from getting wet during downpours, drivers began putting roofs on their motorcycles. I was told once that a habalhabal could accommodate as many as 10 passengers. Imagine, 10 passengers squeezed together in one motorcycle? Talk about another level of commuting discomfort. I think the seats of these motorcycles are extended so that they can accommodate more than three people.

Incidentally, the word habal is a Visayan term for animal mating, particularly for dogs. I don’t know if the picture of how all the passengers are squeezed in the vehicle brings to mind such a basic animal activity or if there is another simple and innocent explanation in the etymology of the term. Keeping in mind the Visayan quirky sense of humor then I don’t think the explanation is anything innocent, simple maybe, but not so innocent