Manila the ugly
Entering and leaving big
cities by bicycle is rarely a pleasant experience and Manila is not
the exception. Actually it is the perfect expression of the immense
stress that involves such process. Manila is a huge sprawling city of
millions of inhabitants and for both entering and leaving we had to
ride all across it. Like it's always the case with poor countries, it
isn't a city of harmony but one of huge and harsh contrasts. There are no
greys in Manila, it is rich or poor, it is immaculate or filthy, it
is spacious or crammed, it is ostentatious or plain misery and
unfortunately, the negative connotations are the ones that
predominate in the virtually infinite horizons of this huge
metropolis. The fact that a big city has big contrasts and negative
connotations isn't a surprise, especially in Asia, but many of them,
despite having them, they still preserve some kind of hidden beauty in them, some charm, even when poverty and misery is what
predominates. Manila doesn't even have the slightest appeal, it is
simply ugly from wherever you look at it, from wherever you walk on
it or cycle on it.
From an urban planing
point of view it is one of those cities that it is impossible to
enjoy by foot. Walking in Manila seems to lead nowhere, there is
nothing to see on the way, there are no shop windows, no stores and
the distances are extremely long. It is a city thought for the public
transport but traffic is a living hell and only creates noise,
congestion and insane levels of pollution. Streets and avenues don't
seem to have any logical arrangement, the city seems to have grown in
an organic way without any single planned strategy. From a climatic
point of view, things don't get any better, the heat is torrid all
year round and the very high air pollution coupled with the bad
quality of the water don't make the experience of being in the city
any more pleasant. It is said that the city isn't safe and there
might be some truth to it since every single store has private
security guards fully armed with big weapons. However, in our
personal experience, we never ever felt unsafe.
Entering the city from the
north, in Quezon City, we had to ride for several kilometers across
it dealing with all the hindrances described above. Misery is
everywhere, slums are massive and comprise huge amounts of houses
crammed together, made of everything that can eventually hold a roof.
Carboards, corrugated metal sheets full of rust, straws, wooden
planks, tarps everything held together in any possible way. It is a
very shocking scenery and even way poorer than the one I've been used to
see all my life in the slums of my native Buenos Aires. Manila is not
only poorer in quality but in quantity, the proportions in which you
come across poverty are overwhelming.
But we are in the third
world and the third world is first and foremost, almost by
definition, a place of injustice, a place of differences traced by
huge abysses, and after several kilometers of chaos we found
ourselves entering the first world, a world of invisible borders but
where the “bad” doesn't seem to exist. It is called Makati City
and it's the central business district of Manila and residential
center of the rich who live completely detached, probably even
unaware, from the reality of the rest of the country. It is planet
Makati, where everything is clean, green, organized. An ecosystem
where everything is “perfect”. There's a Starbucks or two in
every single block selling coffee at 3 usd (remember that out of the
city the average salary is 5 usd a day for 12 hours of work) per
small cup of espresso, a Mc Donald's every 100 mts, Paris-like
coffees selling minimal slices of cheesecakes at 5usd or fancy
restaurants selling hamburgers at 20 usd. You smell fragrant perfumes
on the streets, people are sophisticated and seems completely
oblivious of how people live just a couple of kilometers away from
there
It was in this magic
bubble where we found a place to stay in the city at Allen's house, a
71 years-old US American with the energy of a 30 years-old, that has
been living in the bubble for the last 12 years and with whom I have
worked with indirectly in certain projects that I did while I was
living in China. Allen took care of us and spoiled us as if we were
his own godchildren in his flat in Makati. We were able to make use
and abuse of all the ephemeral pleasures of life, air conditioning,
delicious food, our filthy clothes washed and ironed miraculously
smelling like flowers blooming in the prairie, ultra-fast internet
and so on. But it wasn't these but Allen's warmth and affection what
kept us there so happily. It was our first stop in the city but there
would be more to come.
Land of volcanoes and
frustrations
Luxuries
are nice to have for a while but they are not indispensable and they
are far from being enough for us to give up the intense pleasures
found in the adrenaline of the roads, so after a couple of days in
Planet Makati we set off towards the south, to Bicol, in the extreme
south of Luzon. It was in search of volcanoes and whale sharks but we
mostly found traffic and rice plantations. To begin with, leaving
Manila was hell in itself, the city and its area of influence extend
for no less than 100 km and the road is a never ending torture of
insane traffic that never ceases, not even for a meter. There are
virtually no empty stretches, there are people and settlements
everywhere and all imaginable vehicles transit the two lane narrow
road by two per lane, that is four across the width of it. Needless
to say this was a very exhausting experience, it exhausted the mind a
lot faster than climbing the hardest and remotest mountain. Three
long days had to pass by until we would finally start to find some
breathing space in the narrow forest stretch of Quezon district. At
that point we started to cycle uphill and downhill, left and right,
turn after turn but we were already able to breath the fresh and
clean air liberated by the dense vegetation around us. There, at the
small barangay of
Ikun, we found a place to stay at the hall, but unlike the other
barangay halls where
we had been staying at, in this one, the tanods (the
night watchmen of the hall) stuck around for quite a
long while into the night. At around 10 pm, when I was still awake
hypnotized counting the billions of stars in the sky, two of them
came out of the complete darkness of the road carrying on their
shoulders what seemed to be a huge ribcage of an animal, it still had
the skin and fur on it but I wasn't able to tell what animal it was. I
asked them and with their eyes shining bright they replied – "It's
horse!! it's a delicatessen in our barangay". Right
there, in the front courtyard of the hall, one set up a wok and
started to boil coconut milk, another one started to separate the
skin from the ribcage, another one lit a bonfire and another one
chopped it in pieces and seasoned them. Before midnight, the wok
smelled delicious and they started setting up plates and cutlery. The
tanods looked at me
excitedly, I had initially told them that I wasn't going to eat, but
when the dinner was served, my cyclist's appetite was impossible to tame and said “alright, let's get to eat!”. In my ever
failing road to an eventual vegetarian life, even by the hand of a
vegetarian girlfriend, I have to say that that horse skillfully
cooked in coconut milk was the necessary delicious dose of proteins
that I needed to bring my muscles back to life, or at least that was
the perfect excuse that I made to myself to justify that I still
surrender to the pleasures of meat.
Not
long after we passed the forest stretch we went back to a completely
flat road, surrounded by vast rice fields that blended seamlessly
with the sky in the horizon, even with spectacles such as something I
had never seen before, a double rainbow!
However, the clean horizon
would soon become interrupted by the shape of the volcanoes coming
out of the flat land. First came Mount Isarog, after that Mount
Iriga, both inactive. Finally, far ahead, at the end of the road,
the most spectacular and the main reason of our journey down to
Legazpi, the magnificent Mount Mayon, active, always simmering out of its perfectly sharp summit. The volcano is a perfectly symmetrical
cone, 2500 mts high, coming out of a fully flat surface. It has
brought both peril and fear many times, causing several deaths every time
it erupted. Like all beauties of nature, the Mayon didn't make it
easy for us to let itself be seen and during the first two full days
of cycling within viewing distance of it, it wrapped itself up and
hid behind a veil of clouds from the top to the very bottom,
regardless of the fact that the day was radiant and sun shone.
After those two days of
hanging around the area feeling completely frustrated, we decided to
take a detour to Donsol to swim with the whale sharks, which it is
said to be one of those unique experiences in life. The best thing
about this 40km detour that we had to cycle twice, to Donsol and
back, was to see the most beautiful rice plantations that we had seen
so far. By the end of the day, when the sun didn't squeeze the body
anymore and it bathed the land with its golden color, the pale green
hues of the middle of the day went away and the splendor returned. In
the villages, the farmers return home walking along the narrow paths
that split the plantations in different patches. The kids happily run
all around the rice fields, having fun for the mere fact of being
kids, since here there's no electricity and fun is reduced to the
simplest things in life. Riding along this quiet roads of small
villages, no traffic and simple people is one of the most beautiful
reasons why one chooses the bicycle as means of transport for
traveling.
And we finally got to
Donsol to soon find out that the whale sharks hadn't migrated to the
area yet, despite the fact that we were already well into the season
when they should be there. Just perfect, yet another frustration! So
we took a deep breath and cycled all the way back, after all, we
still had a couple of days and we still had chances to see the Mayon.
But we got back to Legazpi and saw that the Mayon was still
completely covered in clouds, while the rest of the sky was totally
clear, what the fuck! It was almost the end of the day and there
wasn't any single reason to stay in Legazpi, which is a small
horrible city, like all the cities of all sizes in the Philippines.
So we made the decision on the spot to start cycling to the remote
Caramoan peninsula and for that we would keep riding around the
volcano entirely. As we were leaving Legazpi when day was almost over
and our hopes were on the ground, the clouds started to move leaving the
magnificent Mayon partly uncovered to see it in its full glory.
It was sunset time, the
sky was clear, the coconut trees gently swayed with the wind, the
remaining clouds beautifully wrapped around the volcano giving it an
amazing sense of motion, the sun dyed its simmering sulfur and made
it pink and at that time, nothing really mattered. Finally, the
waiting had paid off and the Mayon revealed itself and the beauty was
incredible. We stayed until we saw the Mayon disappear in the shadows
of the night and we had to cycle in the darkness for a while until we
reached the first barangay
where we found help as always, and this time, it was a family that received
us in their home and even made us a great dinner.
Noises noises noises
and more noises!
Filipino
hospitality is amazing but to be able to enjoy it you have to be able
to adapt to their way of life. Filipinos wake up early, VERY early.
Life usually starts at 5 am if not earlier and by 6 am in any
village, life is already in full motion. The hustle and bustle used to make it almost impossible for us to keep sleeping, no matter where we
would be sleeping that night. On the other hand, as I wrote in my
previous post, Filipinos love their roosters and most people have one
or more in their houses. Around 3 am, every barangay slowly
becomes a henhouse and I'm fully convinced that Filipinos wake up
before 5 am because by that time, the amount of roosters crowing at
the same time is so so so unbearable, that they prefer to believe
that their rooster will one day make them a small fortune and keep
living with that illusion, rather than coming out of the house with a
shotgun and blow the fucking bird's head off to let them keep
sleeping. I wouldn't kill a rooster but I swear that every single
day, by 4 am I was afraid of seriously becoming a rooster serial
killer. So, that's how as a result of the combination of noises plus
our daily exercise, we adjusted our biological clock to fall asleep
every day at around 8 pm and to wake up at around 5.30am (thanks to those
m****r f*****g roosters). This routine eventually became so automatic
that even if one day we had the chance to keep sleeping, we just
couldn't.
So
going from one noisy barangay
to the next, we moved north along the west coast passing through very
nice settlements surrounded by massive rice fields, a truly beautiful
landscape.
In
most of the Philippines, outside of the cities, most of the houses are
simple huts on stilts with almost no internal divisions. The entire
family eats, sleeps and lives in only one room, and we are not
talking about a two-kids family, no. Filipinos are procreating
machines, a typical family has anywhere around 6 to 7 children and if
it weren't for the feeding power of rice, that grows everywhere in
this country, it is hard to figure how it is even possible to feed
all those mouths being them so poor. Despite poverty, Filipinos are
not afraid to have kids till exhausting the mother's strength, the
amount of kids and young people of this country is simply staggering.
There are lots of kids, lots of teenagers and youngsters, a massive
labor force but little profitable jobs available for everybody.
However, family is the strongest unit in this country and everybody
helps each other here. Most, if not all, families, have at least one
member living abroad and the Filipino labor force outside of the
country is one of the largest in the world. The amount of money sent
from Filipinos living abroad to their families back home is so
massive that the stability of the economy of the country depends a
great deal on it. No wonder why there seem to be as many Western
Unions and Money Grams as there are Mc Donald's. The Philippines is a
big exporter of highly trained nurses, highly educated personnel for
luxury hotels and restaurants across all Asia and construction
workers for the Middle East. Filipino nannies are always in high
demand in the neighboring rich Metropolis of Hong Kong and Singapore, because Filipino women are well-known for taking care of all children
as if they were their own. But family links are so tight, that they
are as admirable as exhausting, On the one hand, the family is always
there for them to support them, but on the other, to a certain extent
people are enslaved to their families and individual freedom is
usually very restricted.
The rain
over our heads
Reaching
the Caramoan peninsula was no easy task, at one point the road took a
turn away from the flat rice fields and entered a stage of lush
mountains following the amazing coast line. Each bay enclosed a
secret paradise of crystal waters and empty beaches where we could
leave our bicycles and go swimming to refresh ourselves from the
intense heat of the day, floating belly up facing the sky and
drifting with the gentle waves.
After
several consecutive bays we finally reached the end of the road, in a
very small barangay, where
we put our bicycles in a bangka, which
is the aquatic version of the jeepney, and for little over two hours we navigated on electric-blue waters until
reaching the remote peninsula. It seems that there is some TV show,
apparently very famous all over the world, that I had no idea of but
I'm sure it is yet another stupid reality show.
It is called Survivor
and it consists of a bunch of people going through supposedly
“extreme” experiences that they need to survive. Needless to say,
I'm sure these “extreme” experiences are nothing but bullshit and
cheap entertainment for the masses. The thing is that some versions
of this show for different countries were filmed here due to its
remote location and geographical qualities, however, a local person
told me that the crew consists of 650 people who bring dozens of
containers with all the gear and live in the peninsula for 3 to 6
months. That doesn't really sound like being in a extreme situation, does it?. During these months, the sleepy village experiences a sort of
financial spring, especially due to the huge amounts of beer they
sell during that time. The rest of the year, when we were there, it
is no more than a quiet village in the middle of nowhere, beautiful,
but I would only dream in a nightmare going there when that stupid TV
channel is based there. The whims of the weather make it that just in
this tiny tip of Luzon there is wet season when is dry season in the
rest of the country, go figure!
As a result, the mornings were fine but after noon the weather grew
worse, thick black clouds would take over and heavy rains would come
down on us for the rest of the day.
Just
after a couple of days there we started cycling back to Manila, we
went back to the carpeted green lands and farmers working the land
from dawn till dusk.
On
the way back we had several different views of Mount Isarog, which
despite being inactive and with its mere 1400 mts being considerably
shorter than the rest, still had an impact when coming out of these
flat lands.
We
got to Manila ready to receive a very special guest and take a
two-weeks break from our bicycles. It was finally the time to rest
big time and enjoy the paradise that everybody thinks about when
talking about the Philippines.
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