The Phils 1
Trip Start
Aug 26, 2007
1
8
18
Trip End
Aug 25, 2008
Manila,
Philippines
Friday, February 29, 2008
The airport was awash with colour, as was the country beyond it. The diversity, the vibrancy of the people and culture before me were dazzling. It was hard to look at and it was hard not to stare at. Two pilots hit on a couple of barely legal girls at baggage claim. Life was unabashedly, unapologetically happening all around me.
I ordered myself to stop making unfair comparisons between the winter I had left behind and the eternal summer I had emerged into. This proved difficult.
I was met, and we flew away south, through the rusting, hurtling traffic. The land we entered a bizarre amalgam of flattened pastureland and housing development, and volcanic spires, great igneous crags breaking up the sweltering flats. It reminded me intensely of Costa Rica, another fertile land claimed by Spain. Fruit was for sale on the roadside. A thousand tricycles swarmed by us. Every spare space was being reclaimed by the hungry greenness.
My first nights were spent the night staying with a family in an overgrown compound populated by hundreds of cats and more than a few dogs. Jackfruit grew in the trees. The creaking, groaning house would once have been an elegant Spanish-style mansion, but was now a spectacular, dishevelled relic with big soft beds.
Taal volcano had brought me to this place.
A. the crumbling foyer of my home in Calamba
Taal - a series of colossal, igneous Russian dolls. Within a great ring of rock lies a lake, brimming with fish. Within the lake rests a low, volcanic island. Within the island is an old, charred crater that is now a glassy lake. Within the lake rests a little rocky column, an island. Within this there is only speculation, a reductio ad infinitum, endless islands within lakes within islands.Each separate ring is another threshold, with its gatekeepers and tolls to pay. A boat to the island, an unnecessary pony ride to the crater, a guided trek down towards the sulphurous inner-lake. Where the earth is stained red it grows hot underfoot and great plumes of white still pour from the ground. There will be further rings and layers added in time. The volcano below the lake is still very much ready to erupt.
Most of the gatekeepers wait at a village on the shores of the lake. They keep trains of ponies ready for the tour groups that come skimming across the water in skinny, brightly painted boats. The village is all wooden huts on low stilts, and fishing nets drying on the muddy beach. Up by the crater they sit by piles of green coconuts in the shade. There is nothing to do but laugh and drum up business. I wonder if there are other tiny villages further in. I wonder if prices would go up with each threshold crossed.
The rest of my time in this region was spent climbing in and out of colourful tricycles and jeeps, clouds of dark exhaust blooming behind me as I wandered about, visiting the birthplace of national hero Jose Rizal, visiting an enormous University of the Philippines campus - all elegantly faded white buildings on a brilliant green backdrop, and visiting a friend also escaping the Korean winter.
B. the Philippineapples
Everywhere I went I was met with smiles and food, the locals always requiring a chat, endlessly curious about who I was and what I was doing. The cone of silence, the language barrier had broken the moment Manila snuck up on me, and in the rare instances when the English of the locals failed, Tagalog, with its grab-bag of international influences, proved quite decipherable. This a country where everyone is a friend until proved otherwise, and I soon found myself nodding to complete strangers in the street. I had expected to find a lot more Americans here, a lot more of the West, so I was pleasantly surprised to find myself the sole whitey in most places. My celebrity rating remained an impressive six foot fourish inches.Manila had snuck up on me the first time but I was ready for it the next time around. I plunged into the capital proper on my way from luscious central Luzon to luscious northern Luzon.
Twenty four hours in Manila is not a lot of time. I think I spent about half that time in transit, commuting from mall to mall. Everything in Manila seems to be located in or in terms of one of its malls. It won't be long before the entirety of the Phils is one big mall, I suspect. The lure of aircon and endless flavours of ice cream is just too enticing.
So from mall to mall, train station to jeep stop, I made my path through the labyrinth of Manila. It is a city smaller than Seoul, but infinitely more convoluted. No metro map to make sense of the jumble of streets.
C. the island within the lake within...
Just a million jeeps roaring and blaring, stopping and starting.Eventually I came to Makati, once an airport, and now the centre of business in Manila and the Phils. Banks and embassies on every corner, and even more shotguns than elsewhere in the capital. I'm not sure about this shotgun logic, that by giving the security guards guns that spray indiscriminately you can save lives, but I saw no indication of trouble anywhere in supposedly hard-edged Manila. So maybe the logic holds.
The security presence was everywhere, though. Even when malls were connected by impregnable walkways, at either end there would be a security checkpoint where every bag had to be submitted to varying levels of scrutiny. This is a city living with a terrorist situation far more real than any abstracted code yellow orange red. A city, too where women rode separate to men on the trains. All these precautions against trouble, but the trouble remained invisible. And all the more insidious, I suppose, because it was so unapparent.
Up up up in Makati, to a penthouse on the thirty-seventhish floor of an apartment complex. From the balcony all the high-rises and malls of Makati and Manila were visible, stretching away into the grey sky.
This penthouse the location of a wild party, a party in which Rihanna-with-an-Adam's-apple and Beyonce-with-an-Adam's apple lip-synched and gyrated wildly, in which absinthe was poured and videoke was deployed. An international crowd was in attendance, their reasons for coming to Manila diverse and colourful.
D. the lake within the island within...
The locals in the crowd delightedly informing the visitors about every gorgeous detail and tortuous bus route of their country. This a country where, far more than most, the locals delight in savouring the treasures of their own land, where everyone, no matter how familiar with the place, is easily caught unprepared by the beauty and trickery revealing itself around them.There was barely time to sleep, the twenty four hours was fast slipping by, and I had a megapolis to explore. I had underestimated the beast, its endless convolutions and cul-de-sacs. I wandered the gritty, colourful streets, not lost but never quite where I wanted to be, glimpsed the holy miraculous black Christ from the far end of a bustling cathedral, and eventually, as the sun was melting into the haze of the horizon, found myself at Intramuros.
Intramuros, the old indestructible walls of fortress Manila, built by the Spanish over the ashes of a Muslim stronghold, and now lost in a jumble of schools and apartments, engulfed by a gold course. The ghosts of Spanish colonialism were among the things that drew me to the Phils in the first place, but their legacy was audible in every sentence spoken, and felt in every breath drawn. The walls were hardly necessary. They were disappearing into the fracas of daily Manila life. High school couples were interspersed along the parapet, and dance troupes thrust and gestured in the wider open spaces. Just another reusable, reclaimable space in a city of a hundred peeling layers. Golf balls pattered down on the brickwork, and will I suppose eventually be the death of those cannon-proof, WW2-proof walls.
One final mad dash through Manila to arrive at a late-night bus terminal to find my bus had filled and left very early. A plan B was cobbled together and I skulked about the grimy streets of Quezon City looking conspicuous until it was time to leave, grinding through the night, sneaking out of Manila and into the north...
