Nobody at the Batangas port believes the schedule, and nobody minds. At 10:40 the waiting room is already full: a family with three balikbayan boxes, a nurse asleep on her backpack, a man with a rooster in a cardboard box punched with air holes. The boat is listed for 11. It leaves at 12:40. This is a story about those hundred minutes.
I have taken this boat often enough to know that the printed time is a suggestion. It is not a lie, exactly. It is the time at which the boat could leave if the tide, the cargo, the last truck and the harbour master all agreed, and I have never seen them agree on the first try.
The waiting room
The waiting room is a long hall of plastic chairs bolted together in rows of four. Nobody sits in the middle seats until the others are taken, which is a rule nobody wrote down. A vendor walks the aisle with a basket of boiled corn and a cooler of cold bottled tea. The corn is good. The tea is cold. That is the whole review.
The family with the boxes are going home to Calapan for a week. One box is food, one is clothes and one, the grandmother tells me, is “mostly the first two.” The nurse wakes every twenty minutes, checks her phone and goes back to sleep. The man with the rooster sits very straight, as if the rooster were a passenger who might complain.
Nobody asks when the boat leaves. They ask whether it has arrived.
The announcement
At 11:15 someone says, not very loudly, that the boat is “coming.” Everybody stands. Nobody moves. The word means only that the boat exists, which counts as news. At 11:50 the crew starts loading trucks, and the waiting room does something I have only seen on this route: it exhales together.
The loading order is trucks, then cargo, then us. If you have ever wondered why night ferries are cheap, this is part of the answer. You are the last thing the boat carries.
On board
We pull away at 12:40. The deck is cool, the benches are damp, and the passenger lounge has its air conditioning set to a temperature I can only call medical. I stay outside. Batangas shrinks into a line of orange lights, and then the lights lose their order and turn into stars.
Most people sleep. A student across from me studies by the glow of her phone and gives up at half past one. The man with the rooster has taken the rooster out of the box, and the rooster is, to everyone’s surprise, calm.
We dock in Calapan in the small hours, and the first thing you notice is that the town is awake. Tricycles are lined up. Somebody is already frying fish. Nobody mentions the delay. It is a small, practical kind of grace, and I have come to depend on it.
If you are taking it
Bring a layer, because the lounge is cold and the deck is wet. Bring food, because the corn runs out. Do not plan a hotel check in before sunrise, and tell your host the boat will be late. They will already know. The times in this story are samples from one night, not a schedule.