Manila

We have spent this week in Manila and have just purchased our tickets to move on from here.  We spent a couple more days than we otherwise would have planned in order to take in the Chinese New Year here where there is a very large Chinese-Filipino population.  Before we move on, we thought we’d share our impressions of the city.

We arrived a bit late after being delayed at the Hong Kong airport with 3 gate changes and finally a caravan of busses taking passengers directly out to the tarmak.  We had our first night’s lodging reserved at a hotel near the airport which had someone waiting to take us to our hotel where we quickly crashed for the night.

We woke to sunny skies. It is about 100 degrees warmer here than back home! We’ve been enjoying very comfortable highs in the mid to upper 70s.  However, our first day, walking about 7 kilometers to downtown in the high noon sun with our packs on left us ready for a nap in our air conditioned hotel room! You may wonder why we chose to walk rather than have someone drive us. Well, funny story.

While the hotel had offered to call us a cab to get downtown, we had read that it was less expensive to pick up transportation away from the hotels, so we decided to walk down to what, from our hotel window, looked like a mall.  (It turned out to be some sort or warehouse.)  We were hailed by a pedicab who offered to take us where we needed to go for the equivalent of a couple dollars.  This would have been great if the driver had any idea where we were going. Instead, he pedaled around in circles for several miles before we decided to just get out to walk.

Once we found our lodging downtown, we kicked our feet up for a bit before going back out under much more tolerable temperatures and without our luggage to visit The Hobbit House – a local restaurant and bar with a LOTR theme that provides employment for little people and had some good live musicians.

One of the aspects of Manila that stands out most is the extreme economic disparity.  You don’t need to travel between poor and wealthy neighborhoods to see it.  Instead, you see young, unattended children sleeping on small bits of cardboard in the middle of the day right outside of high end shopping centers and families bathe their children in the street in front of upscale spas.

There are security officers on nearly every block and in nearly every major store, hotel or restaurant. They are all very polite, greeting us as we walk by with a, “Good evening, sir. Good evening, ma’am.”  They also rush to open doors for people.  While likely not the primary purpose, we imagine it cuts down on the spread of disease to only have one person touching each door handle per day!

There are stray cats and dogs at every turn, but they keep to themselves; the real nuisance animals from a tourist’s perspective are the roosters that crow nonstop from 4am til just after sunset. Manila is no farm country though! It is a bustling metropolis of 1.7 million people. This is most abundantly clear when it comes to the traffic!

The traffic laws in Manila are, at best, flexible.  Even when stop lights are involved, the right of way is relatively unpredictable and extremely negotiable. Also, lanes and the direction of traffic in these “lanes” fluctuate constantly. Our second pedicab experience began with our driver, appropriately named Merlin, first weaving through 3-4 lanes going the direction we intended, then 3-4 lanes of oncoming traffic and onto the far side of the road where we then spent several miles driving into the oncoming traffic. After having walked around the city only 1 day leading up to this, his behavior didn’t stand out as being the least bit strange.

Once we made it to Chinatown, Merlin parked his cab on the side of the street and appeared to ask a stranger to watch it for him as he walked with us into the dense sea of people.  Periodically, he would ask us to wait while he ran back for his cab trusting us to be there when he got back as we had not yet paid him his fare.

The streets of Chinatown were lined with tables full of gold, red and jade trinkets as well as wreaths of mini pineapples and other fruits. There were also long lines for tikoy – a thin, sweet cake.  The strangest site of all were the boxes of live chicks that had been died all sorts of intensely bright colors.  It was extremely loud with all the drums and cymbols that accompanied the many dragon dancers who made their way into the small shops where employees plugged their ears but somehow didn’t seem very nervous that the dancers were jumping around in the 6-8 foot wide aisles of their stores full of breakables. You thought a bull in a china shop was bad? Watch out for dragons!

Our ride with Merlin ended with him blowing through  one last red light but getting temporarily stuck as we were perpedicular between 2 vans with a jeepney directly in front of us and a scooter trying to squeeze between the two lanes but going against traffic.  It really requires an elaborate traffic court illustration to fully appreciate, but just trust us that we were slightly scared and rather impressed.  This was also the point in the ride when Merlin casually mentioned to us that although he has been driving a pedicap for 18 years, since he was 14 years old, he has no license and no insurance.  Still, we couldn’t have been in better hands.  It was an adventurous start to the new year!