Tom Spender

After five months without even leaving Beijing, let alone China, I needed a break from the city’s blocky buildings, its “fog”, its faces – everything about it. Where could one go that was more or less the opposite of Beijing?

The Philippines seemed like a good bet. Unlike the Middle Kingdom and its age-old bureaucracy, the Philippines didn’t appear to have much of a system at all, to the extent that its biggest export was its people, eager to work in low-paid jobs as maids, restaurant staff and singers from Dubai to Shanghai and supporting their clans at home through remittances.

I was also curious about the country in its own right – I met a lot of Filipinos in the UAE and was struck by how they seemed to go cheerfully about their lives, putting in long hours for low salaries while I and many others bitched incessantly about the heat, the place and the life there as the dirhams piled up in our bank accounts. Some of the best bars in the UAE are run by the Filipino community, with terrific live music and no elitist door policy, and are full of friendly young guys and girls without any discernible chip on their shoulder.

It helped that Cebu Pacific, the Philippines’ biggest low-cost airline, flies to Manila direct from Beijing for very few pesos. I booked a two-and-a-half week trip a day in advance and got the hell out of Zhongguo.

Manila really was very unBeijinglike. I stayed in Malate, whose scruffy downtown streets are full of rundown vice, massage parlours and karaoke bars bearing big pictures of hordes of women, and all manner of street kids, vagrants and pimps. Many of the ubiquitous security guards are armed. One of the hostels I had a look in was full of safety warnings about nice girls who invite you for a drink and then spike it with rohypnol and steal all your things. Taxi drivers make sure to lock the doors once you are in the cab. There was an edge to the place, a sense of a predatory existence that is wholly absent from the Beijing zones I blithely stroll around in at all hours. I’ve become soft, I thought.

Yet the city’s reputation for being a mess is perhaps only half-deserved. Its traffic is bad but at least it moves. Pollution is nothing like as bad as in Beijing. There’s not much planning in evidence, but it’s not vast and chaotic on the epic scale of Jakarta. There’s an edge to the place and a lot of struggling, but it’s not dangerous in the same way as (I imagine) Latin American cities are and its slums are nothing like as big as those in India.

I spent an enjoyable few days stomping around. The elevated metro line is crowded but works well and I rode it up to the old city – Intramuros – which I learned suffered some of the worst destruction of any city in the world during WWII as the Americans shelled it to boot out the Japanese, ripping Manila’s heart out in the process. A fair number of pretty colonial buildings survived and still line the cobbled streets, but it’s a zone that feels decidedly quiet and empty, a backwater in the city centre. At Manila cathedral, big posters proclaimed the Catholic church’s staunch opposition to a proposed new family law that would see easier access to contraception etc. Such resistance is part of the reason why the Philippines has such a high rate of population growth – “We do family planting instead of family planning,” one of my trekking guides later said – even as other Southeast Asian countries are seeing their demographic growth rates level off.

The real action is outside the old walled city in Quiapo and Chinatown (where you can find fresh fruit being sold on the street, a similarity to China that I was thankful for). I wandered through Quiapo’s maze of markets, flooded in the wake of a heavy downpour, and meandered across to Globo de Oro, the Muslim quarter. The attractive gold-domed mosque there was apparently financed by Colonel Gaddafi, according the Lonely Planet, and I was pleased to see written on a board that many of the Ramadan Iftar meals had been provided by the UAE, some by a Filipino expat there and others from the UAE embassy in Manila. Further up the metro line is the Chinese cemetery, where rich Chinese residents have been buried in huge tombs and memorials describe the contribution made by Manila’s Chinese youth to fighting the Japanese in WWII. The Chinese are pretty dominant in trade in Manila, but have not recently suffered the kind of anti-Chinese pogroms that took place in Jakarta around the turn of the century.

I was intrigued by Makati, where most of Manila’s super-rich live and which boasts the terrific Ayala Museum, with a great set of historical tableaux illustrating defining moments in Filipino history (and also including repeated height measurements for both Filipino and foreign historical actors) and a fascinating exhibition of gold’s significance in local tribal culture.

The museum is housed in what is the best shopping mall I have ever seen, and I’ve seen a few. Dubai has some spectacular malls – Mall of the Emirates and Ibn Battuta are highlights – and Hong Kong’s malls ooze sophistication, but Greenbelts trumps them all by doing something very simple. Amid a big ugly urban area, it combines a sense of not being in the city with retail by arranging long two-storey arcades around a lush central garden. In some ways, using nature for retail ends is the height of cynicism, yet it also responds to a real need to escape the concrete. A great place to sit down with a coffee and watch some of Manila’s various characters cruising around.

I also went to Makati in search of the local salsa scene, which I imagined would be lively given the Filipinos’ reputation as the “Latinos of Asia” but actually turned out to be rather elusive. Both events I had found on the web weren’t actually taking place and instead I caught a typically brilliant covers band in a biker bar and, in the red-light district beyond, midget- and womens-boxing in a strip bar called The Ring. The female boxing was particularly entertaining because they asked for a volunteer from the public to umpire the bout. A young American volunteered and told his friends to make sure they got everything on video. The women then spent much of the fight whacking him with their oversized gloves and, after he declared a winner, forced him to take down his trousers and underwear and lie on his back in the ring while one of the women gave him a handjob, his friends dutifully filming it all. It was a fun place, but one that was rinsing my wallet as its army of bar staff, masseuses, dancing girls and fighters demanded a continuous stream of tips for not doing very much, so I legged it.

Manila was my introduction to Filipino food, which, while reasonably tasty, also seemed pretty limited. There was a surprising insistence on fried meat and eggs and gross negligence of vegetables. I asked about this several times, people said (in their unimpeachable English) it was because Filipinos are poor and are therefore bored with constantly eating vegetables. I had some nice food in the Philippines, but the cuisine there is definitely not the country’s major attraction.

Having spent a bit of time in Indonesia, I was particularly interested in how the Philippines compared to it. Both are diverse archipelagos with Austronesian roots, a history of colonisation and a relatively recently-formed national consciousness. One is mostly Muslim and one mostly Christian, and both experience bloody religious friction. Both have relatively recently emerged from kleptocratic dictatorships and are clearly deeply corrupt, yet people in both countries are almost all genuinely friendly and aren’t prey to the kind of isolationism and nationalism that afflict northeast Asian countries. Filipinos are perhaps more worldly thanks to their command of English and the job opportunities abroad that affords them, but Indonesia seems to be doing better economically and offers its citizens better opportunities at home.

Manado, located just to the south of the Philippines and with its modern westward-looking Christian population, its shopping malls and fast food outlets, could be a Filipino city, yet it would be a very prosperous and well-maintained one, while Manila is a bit like Jakarta’s smaller cousin. I was impressed with the division of the entire country – including Manila – into barangays, or village units, yet organisation on a bigger scale seemed somewhat lacking. But people were optimistic. The latest President, Noynoy Aquino, is less corrupt than his predecessors, they said, and in broad terms the sheer development rush of all the countries around them must surely carry the Philippines along in its slipstream, to some extent.

Anyway, I didn’t go to the Philippines to spend all my time in a dirty big city – I wanted to get into nature. I took an overnight bus to the north of Luzon island to do some hiking amid ancient rice terraces and headhunter tribes and that’s what I’ll write about next…