Manila 1: The Return of Kenny Rogers

We stumbled off the plane from Incheon, our heads muddled, our bodies utterly baffled by the temperature change, but our backs refreshingly unburdened*.  This was the first time in a month we had been outside with fewer than three layers of clothes and a winter coat -- humidity, by now, was such a distant memory that the warm wetness of the Manila night brought tears to our eyes (and dampness to our underarms).  The exit of Ninoy Aquino International Airport was crowded with touts offering taxis, even at 1 a.m. on a Friday.  We were well prepared for any trickery, having learned well from our time in Bali that we sleepy travelers were easy prey for thieves, beggars, flim-flam men, charlatans, kidnappers, and...quislings.  No, we were much savvier now than before: the best way to navigate this sensitive intercultural dance was a good offense.

“NO, WE’RE FINE, THANK YOU,” we snapped at the polite young woman with a badge and a clipboard who asked if we needed a taxi.  Told her, you betcha.

*For the extremely continuity-sensitive among you, we left our heavy sleeping bags, air mattresses, winter clothes, bowling balls, heavy coats and pots and pans with a friend of a friend in Seoul, and also I only lied about one of those things, we seriously carried all the rest of that stuff from Kansas to Korea, also oh my god what were we thinking.

When at last our taxi arrived, we laid down our arms just long enough to be whisked away to our hotel in scenic “somewhere close to the airport.”  The ride was long and frantic, the cab cutting through tumbledown villages and blowing through security checkpoints.  It all looked so refreshingly different from Korea: even in the dead of night, it was all so colorful, so warm, so excitingly dirty.  The driver honked at the security guard who was napping near the hotel.  Such friendly camaraderie...mabuhay indeed!

After a good night’s sleep (which came quickly after watching a documentary about Caligula on the room’s TV), we set out to explore Manila, the first stop on our month-long tour of the country.  Neither of us knew much about the Philippines; I had a childhood friend named Juan-Paolo in Seattle, and we’re both big big fans of Manila Luzon, but otherwise our knowledge amounted to a few bouts of research on Wikipedia and a handful of half-remembered bold terms from history textbooks (American history education, you’ve done it again!).  We did come armed with a Lonely Planet guide to the Philippines helpfully donated by our friend Kate, and we had divided the chore of researching our newest destination on the plane: Jenn read relevant chapters from the guidebook while I...um...

For our first day, we planned to take a cab from our hotel room to our first Couchsurfing host’s place in Marikina City, a quiet suburb to the south (or possibly east) of metro Manila that Wikitravel assured us was home to “the World’s Largest Pair of Shoes” and “one of Asia’s most disciplined people and Asia and healthiest and most likable people.”  Nifty!  A quick taxi ride to our host’s house, drop off our stuff, then explore Manila for the rest of the day.  (I assure you, the hubris of our plans seemed much less obvious at the time.)

This cab ride was much less of a whirlwind than the previous night’s, mostly insofar as we spent an hour in traffic and another half hour thoroughly lost.  Our cab driver, a jolly older fellow, kept quiet and let us take in the sights of Manila, which were schizophrenic.  First we barreled through a ramshackle village that reminded us of Bali: houses constructed of scrap metal, hand-painted signs above “canteens,” children urinating in the street, piles of garbage by the side of the road.  And then, suddenly (well, suddenly for Manila traffic), we seemingly found ourselves transported back to downtown L.A., staring at gleaming skyscrapers and crawling down wide, palm-lined boulevards.  Ads greeted us from every corner, representing a curious parade of American brands that somehow made it huge in the Philippines: children played around a giant bottle of R.C. Cola, and a trio of well-dressed young Filipino people smiled and invited us to eat at Kenny Roger’s Roasters.

Now, our host (whose name is Alex) had given us his address in Marikina and a collection of helpful landmarks to give our cab driver.  Naturally, the driver had heard of none of them, but when we got to Marikina, he was good enough to pull over and ask a security guard in for directions.  The security guard was pretty sure we were making up the names we rattled off to him, but at last we deduced the general neighborhood to aim for.  For the next half hour, we asked one local after another, old men the driver summoned to the window by calling “Boss!”, middle-aged women who disputed one another’s sense of direction, young women who refused to stop to help.  Nearly everyone gave it their best shot, though, and after a great deal of circling to find any combination of the words “New,” “Mountain,” “View,” and “Village,” we arrived at our destination with much rejoicing.  We tipped the driver handsomely (I think?), bringing the bill for our two-hour ride to about $11.

Source: Alex

We let ourselves in with the key Alex had left for us, then decided to regroup until we were sufficiently rested to explore the town.  After regrouping for half an hour, we realized that we were far too hungry for pure tourism, so we went out to wander the streets of Marikina in search of food.  A walk, a meal in a local diner, a long wait in a grocery store line, and a trike ride (more on this later), and we were back where we started, slabbing out on Alex’s floor until he came home from work.  Whoever Alex was, he was a spartan individual: the house was large, with two bedrooms, a living room and a kitchen, though really any classification of the rooms was guesswork at best, as Alex owned virtually no furniture at all.  It was a wonderfully empty place to find ourselves after a month in a goshiwon (a closet that resembles a dorm room) in Seoul.  Alex’s place is almost like a monastic retreat.

At last, Alex got home.  He is a tall, Southern nerd, the kind of guy who’s so excited about what he’s telling you that he gets out of breath.  In fifteen minutes, he told us all about his work here in the Philippines on a machine that makes solar panels.  Alex, then, is the sort of person to whom words like “startup” and “venture capitalist” are a part of his daily life rather than, say, concepts in a Malcolm Gladwell book.  He also briefed us on his new rule of the house: no electric lights. 

“Wow, cool!  Why did...uh...why?” I asked.

“Eh, just kinda to see if I could do it.  6 months, no electric lights.”

We extinguished the lights we had left on and lit candles...who were we to argue with an eccentric inventor?

His “scruffy inventor friends,” as he introduced them, arrived then and began laying out their things.  They too were tall, Southern nerds, both with names that rhymed with “lawn.”  Both of them lived in Hong Kong, and all three of our companions were extremely excitable about their chosen profession.

With not a moment to lose, Alex led his crowd of houseguests on a walking tour of the back streets of Marikina, which, at least in this neighborhood, tended more towards Bali than L.A.: scrawny dogs roamed the streets, a long, seemingly abandoned concrete building was home to graffiti and weeds beyond counting, and right around the corner from his house was a fenced-in yard filled with roosters, some strutting about the grounds, some caged.  Tied to the barbed-wire fence was an ad for Kenny Rogers’ Roasters, who apparently delivered.  We would later become extremely well acquainted with these roosters, but at the moment we had no time to consider them; our host had a goal in mind.

He led us aboard one of the Philippines’ famed “Jeepneys.”  A Jeepney is a rehabilitated  WWII Jeep with an elongated body, or at least a faithful recreation of one, typically decked out in outrageously airbrushed artwork.  Some have portraits of the Virgin Mary next to Iron Man or Captain Jack Sparrow, others bear tattooish nightmares and have their names written in sharp, Gothic font, names like “FAST TRUCK” or “PRINCESS CHARLYN,” “GOLDEN HAWK,” “X-ECUTIONER,” “MONEY MAGNET,” “THE MIDWIFE.”  There was even a “JENNIFER,” if you can believe it.  The overall effect is a sort of neo-retro-cyberpunk-pinball machine-meets-bumper-car-meets-the Muppet band's bus.

Anyway, our intrepid host marshaled us onto the first Jeepney headed in a suitable direction.  We squeezed in, knees to our chins, squashing onto the seats with the locals and passing our money up to the driver like absolute pros.  Then, of course, we had to make absolute asses of ourselves with our iPods.  Alex cheered us on by chanting, “OK, guys, ha ha, OK.  OK.”

We boarded a veritable fleet of Jeepneys that night, all headed in one direction: up the mountains and away from Manila.  Sometimes the Jeepneys were all full, but such is not a problem for a Filipino (or stalwart tourist), as there was plenty of room hanging onto the back like a Southeast Asian Marty McFly.

Eventually, the five of us made it to the spot Alex had picked for our first night in the Philippines.  It was a collection of traditional wooden huts set into the hillside with a traditional Filipino drink menu.  It was called “Leonardo’s.”  We drank our San Migs happily as we talked about precognition and shoveled down plate after plate of Filipino food.  Jenn and I had heard rather negative things about Filipino cuisine before this trip, and this was not quite disproven over the course of the evening.  Basically, every dish we were served was delicious up until the last word of its description (e.g., “crispy, sizzling tofu drizzled in hot...mayonnaise”).  Still, we ate and watched the city late into the night.

When at last we had had our fill, Alex, Jenn, Sean, John and I hiked still further up the mountain in search of something to quench the thirst that we had earned by all that mountain climbing.  Somehow, we found ourselves at a karaoke bar (how does that keep happening?) and proceeded to strut our stuff all over the hillside.  The three inventors were great singers and an even better audience for Jenn’s masterful rendition of “Hot Stuff,” which they greeted with whoops, riotous applause, and cries of “Oh my god, seriously?!”

Alex and John, no slouches themselves, wowed us and tickled themselves with Disney songs.

When the night grew late, Jenn moved on to the Temptations, which the karaoke machine accompanied with pieced-together footage of Tiannemen Square, Bon Jovi, Barack Obama, and Princess Di cradling children in her arms, and we all started to freak out a bit.  It was clearly time to go home.  We got back to Alex’s place and collapsed, the smell of mosquito-repellant incense filling our noses as we fell into deep sleep that was interrupted around 3 a.m. by a chorus of very confused roosters.