← All articles · Philippines · 16 March 2023

Cebu, Philippines: Horse carts and chrome jeepneys under the spaghetti wiring

Cebu City at street level in March 2023: a tartanilla clopping past old shopfronts, a chrome-nosed jeepney at dusk, a sunrise down the coast.

We gave Cebu a few days in March 2023 and spent most of them at street level, which is where this city actually happens.

A horse-drawn tartanilla with yellow-spoked wheels passing shuttered shopfronts under a dense tangle of overhead cables in Cebu City — A tartanilla doing its rounds beneath Cebu's legendary spaghetti wiring. The horse has seen it all.

A city canal between old houses with a raft of plastic waste floating on the green water — The photo the brochures skip: a canal wearing far too much plastic. We show it because it's part of the picture too.

A red jeepney with a chrome nose and the route board Apas Lahug Jones Carbon collecting passengers at dusk in Cebu City — Chrome, decals, guardian angels: a jeepney gathering its evening crowd at dusk.

Inga and Dileep standing on a sea wall at sunrise with a mirror-calm sea and small fishing boats behind them — A few days later, down Cebu's south coast: a mirror-flat sea at sunrise, the morning before we crossed to Bohol.

More of the city

Cebu City reads as chaos until you spend a day in it, and then it starts to make sense. The traffic works, the market works, everybody knows which jeepney goes where except you.

A long street in Cebu City lined with market stalls under bright umbrellas, shoppers filling the road and cables strung overhead — The market spilling out into the street, which is where most of Cebu happens.

A jeepney painted yellow and red with a chrome grille and hand-lettered route board waiting at the roadside in Cebu City — Every jeepney is a one-off. This is somebody’s livelihood and somebody’s art project at the same time.

A parish church in Cebu City with a pale green and cream facade, a statue in a niche above the doors and a cross on the bell tower, cars parked outside — A neighbourhood parish, mid-afternoon. The Philippines runs on these.

From here we caught the boat across to Bohol, with tarsiers and Chocolate Hills ahead.