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This is the blog of Ian Rosales Casocot. Filipino writer. Sometime academic. Former backpacker. Twink bait. Hamster lover.

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Sunday, April 12, 2026

entry arrow9:00 AM | Oases

I missed my connecting flight from Iloilo City to Dumaguete via Manila, and rebooking, in this energy crisis, would have cost an arm and two legs. This was bound to happen. I’ve traveled considerably all of my life, both domestic and international, and I have always been on time for every flight, with time to spare—but for some reason, this time around, I misread the “flight time” on my itinerary as “boarding time.” I casually arrived at the counter of Cebu Pacific at the Iloilo Airport, ready to come home to Dumaguete, only to be told that boarding time happened 45 minutes ago, and they had already closed the plane door. There was no chance I was getting on board. What do I do know? I asked the check-in girl, who was in no rush to be empathetic. Buy another ticket for Manila, she said, for a flight scheduled later in the afternoon, and then manage my Manila to Dumaguete flight by rebooking. The thing is, I couldn’t do that, because it wasn’t I who bought my ticket. And again, all these would cost an arm and two legs.

So I opted to do the land trip home, via ferry from Iloilo City to Bacolod, and then the mind-bending six-hour bus trip to Dumaguete. It wasn’t the most comfortable way of getting home, but it certainly was the cheaper option. A part of me was also curiously pragmatic: at least, this way, I’d know the land and sea route from Negros if I wanted to visit Iloilo City again.

I Bonamine’d through the rough seas, and the Oceanjet took about an hour and thirty minutes to cross Guimaras Strait, docking in Bacolod. I immediately flagged down a taxi to take me to South Bus Terminal, in order to catch the next available aircon bus bound for Dumaguete. This part of this trip would take more than six hours, and I wanted to be as comfortable as possible. I toyed with the idea of hiring a car or a van, but the leasing company was asking for seven thousand total for the entire trip—which I understand in the parlance of an energy crisis, but much too much for me to even consider as a viable alternative. In my GC with friends, Ernest told me, “The Ceres bus is comfortable naman.” That gave some comfort. Plus I’ve always loved Ceres buses. As a Negrense, I grew up riding it.



I was lucky to get a good seat in the bus. My body, reeling from the subterfuges of sudden travel changes, was too wired up to even be bothered by the fact that two Pentecostal preachers came one after another to offer visions of fire and brimstone if there was no salvation for us, and then handing out envelopes for charity. I ignored both of them so very thoroughly. I needed sleep, not a promise of flimsy salvation. After almost an hour of marinating in the confines of that bus terminal, we finally felt the movement of the bus moving quickly along half-deserted highways. The energy crisis has a silver lining: no traffic as usual.

I would go back and forth between waking and sleeping while the bus plowed its way down south of the western side of Negros. It was mostly nighttime, and there was only darkness staring at me from my window—so sleep was preferable. I was growing hungry though. I had only eaten one ensaymada while in the pier in Iloilo.

All told, the sea and land route would take about nine hours of my life, but at a thousand pesos in total fares, this was preferable than forking over almost twenty thousand pesos. [P20,000!!!] In that sense, the hassle was not quite a hassle, to be honest. And something else entirely different didn’t make me mind everything at all.

The reason was this: I am endlessly fascinated by the mealtime stopover in Mabinay—always in Mabinay—the halfway point in the mountains between the two Negros capitals. When I go to Bacolod, this happens around lunchtime or maybe in the early afternoon. That night, however, it occurred around half-past 9 PM—and I was already thinking there was to be no such stop and I was already very hungry and I’d eaten all the butterscotch squares that Leny Ledesma, our Iloilo host, had given me. I calculated there were two more hours before arrival in Dumaguete, and my hunger could wait.

But there was a stop, finally! Somewhere in the mountain darkness, the Ceres ground to a halt and I heard the bus driver say, “Manihapon ta!”






I bolted out of my seat to exit and line up at this well-lit carinderia whose existence seems to primarily depend on regular bus loads of hungry people coming its way. It had about fifteen tables for the taking, most of them already occupied. Somehow I remembered the protocol of ordering: at the counter, I pointed at my choices of viands—a plate of two pieces of fried chicken and a plate of bihon—then to another table where the plates of rice were, and I got one serving—then to the refrigerator at the side to grab a sakto Sprite. Having gotten a table shared with another hungry passenger—a girl—I proceeded to eat, and after a while, someone came over to check what I’d gotten, and issued a bill written on a small, green Post-It note: P170.

I was happy and full. “But was it delicious?” someone asked me on Facebook when I recounted all of these in a short post. My answer: my hunger told me it was delicious.

I don’t know why I look forward to these mealtime stopovers on my Ceres trips, because there’s no such thing as taking your pleasurable time to eat, since you have to finish your meal before the conductor and the bus driver finish theirs. It’s also a very simple meal, not even hot—but it does feel to me like some culinary version of an oasis in the desert.

It’s sustenance in the middle of a very long trip.

It’s also a chance to awaken your sleepy legs.

And it’s a moment to reflect, while eating, on the realization that you’re almost home [or near your destination], which is a kind of excitement all its own.

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