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And I thought I was adventuresome for taking the bus in China.

Yikes.

Somewhere on the road from Baguio to Bontoc, this bus encountered a little trouble. My mom had been in the Philippines for at least six weeks when she took this photo.

When I first came across this slide and several others like it, I marveled at the lack of siding on this bus.

So I called my mom in sunny Arizona yesterday to ask about this bus ride and how International Harvester (the American maker of this contraption) could produce such a death trap.

“That’s just the way things were,” she said. “When you had no money for infrastructure, you didn’t have much choice.”

And then she told me the bus started out as a truck that some creative mechanics later converted into a bus. Kind of like those boats Cubans have made from 1959 Chevys.

As I blogged yesterday, when my mom was in college she joined a group of Americans who traveled to the Philippines during the summer of 1962. The group was led by a former US Navy civilian who was so enamored of the Philippines, he organized this trip for American college students to see the country first hand.

And as you can see from this photo, it wasn’t a cushy trip.