Falling in Love with the Philippines: Part One

Most people when they come to the Philippines, come and find a beach, buy some beer, and don’t move more than a one kilometer radius for the next six days. And they miss so much. They play tourist, and miss the heartbeat of the place they’re visiting.

We arrived in Manila Saturday night, and ended up taking a very expensive taxi ride from the airport to the Happy Coconuts Hostel where we had booked a stay for the next two nights. It was a good twenty minute ride into Paranaque, the next town south, with mellow English music playing in the cab. The taxi driver had been a taxi driver since he first learned to drive—basically his whole life. He pointed out the different things we saw as we passed them, and told us what prices to expect on jeepneys, and how to get from here to there.

It was one of those life-defining moments as I looked out of the taxi at a world so different from home, and so different even from the home I have found in Korea. Everywhere, tattered buildings looked like they were pieced together with rusty screws and spit, and then had the ocean waves beat on them for days on end.  Signs were mostly in English, mixed with some Tagalog, and here and there a word of Spanish.

The people themselves were sprawled out in the heavy, humid heat. Guys hung around at broken picnic tables and outside fruit stands, barefoot, shirtless, their teeth white and shining in the darkness. Kids ran around, played in the gutters, searched through garbage. I saw one skinny, dirty child begging on a street corner, not an adult in sight. Elsewhere, men were peeing on the side of the road, girls in shorts laughed and jangled in huddled groups, and toothless men and young boys picked through the refuse left by others.

One dog, skinny and hungry, slithered by, sniffing at an empty wrapper.

Between all the buildings rose palm trees and green vegetation, crawling up walls and around bends and curling around the spaces between things. The whole scene was heart-wrenching and heart-capturing, and I think I fell in love with the Philippines on that first taxi ride.

Well, the hostel proved a bit tricky to find. We knew that it had a bamboo gate and was across the street from a fruit stand, but the taxi driver, I think, wanted to fatten up his fare a bit, and we drove past it, and then for a long ways, going very slowly. We did eventually arrive, and found the hostel to be basically the nicest building I had yet seen. Real beds. Polished wood floors. Air conditioning. Wood cabinet dressers and large mirrors. Lavish for what I had seen thus far of the island.

A little ways down the road from the hostel is a river that flows through and tunnels under the road. It has tangled vegetation on both sides, but it flows strong and fast, and looks like a roaring snake curling through the jungle. It smells badly, and is littered with trash, but from a distance, is quite beautiful.

Beautiful. Even in the middle of a city, the palm trees wave, and there is salt in the air, and you can tell that it is an island. Filipino people look South American in every way, except that they have Asian eyes. The islands feel South American too. Even in the city, out away from the beaches and coconuts and fire dancers, you can tell that these are island people, and that, even if they're living in a cement box with a tin roof, they are people of the sea and the sky and the trees that wave in the air curling in from their salty shores.