In Paradise, Life is a Buffet

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I wonder if it’s something in the air. Some places you arrive, and you just know it’s going to be good travel, the way you know the outcome of a first date in the first five minutes. I had barely left the airport, the scent of fresh jasmine filling my nostrils, and I was already thinking: how come it took me so long to get here?

I love South and Central America, perhaps more than any other region on our impassioned planet. Asia, collectively colourful and so culturally kooky, represents our past, and our future. Having experienced 300 years of Spanish colonial rule, followed by four decades of the United States, the Philippines falls somewhere in the middle - a meal of hamburgers, served with ceviche, and eaten with chopsticks.

Manila, the capital, has two seasons, hot and hotter. A yellow glare beats down on us, the light shares the faint colour of manila envelopes (originally made from an indigenous plant fibre). I’m here in rainy season, when torrential downpours soak the stickers off the loud chrome jeeps that shepherd the population around the city. These customized “Jeepneys” growl with engines trying to dispel a piece of chicken lodged in its throat, shepherding Metro Manila’s 12.8 million population for a couple pesos a head. Yes pesos, here in Asia, where soy sauce is mixed with vinegar and floating fresh chilli, where people’s names combine Spanish, English and local tagalog. For a city established by the Spanish as early as 1571, there’s a definite lack of historical buildings to prove it. For the Philippines, named after the Spanish King Phillip II and the world’s third largest Roman Catholic country, has been pillaged, bombed, colonized, rebuilt and pillaged and bombed again. The Americans took it from the Spanish in the Spanish-American war (the same war that inextricably gave the Americans Guantanamo Bay in Cuba), the Japanese brutally took it from the Americans in World War II, the Americans took it back (bombing most of Manilla in splinters) and gave it to the Filipinos for independence in 1946. Since then, governed from the main island of Luzon, the country has repeatedly slipped off tightrope of political instability, ruled under corrupt martial law by those shoe-worshipping Marcos’s, pillaged of its rich natural resources (and a hidden Japanese war treasure worth some $100 billion). Battered by up to a dozen typhoons every year, loan-sharked by one-sided US naval base deals, prodded by Islamic insurgencies in the south, and kept afloat by regular remittance cheques from the world’s largest diaspora: some 11 million Filipinos live and work abroad. Yet, much like its Spanish-influenced cousins across the Pacific in the Americas, its people are friendly, genuinely welcoming, impassioned by the sun to dance the fiesta of life. Perhaps it is this dichotomy of tragedy and joy that draws me to the Latino culture, and the dichotomy of a Latin Asia that has drawn me here.

More accurately, I’ve arrived to shoot an episode of Word Travels. As usual, I only have a week, and spending a week in a country is like having only one bite of one dish at an endless 5-star hotel buffet (more on that later). As much as Manila has to offer, the most delicious slices of life are always, in my experience, found off the plate of a big city. One bite and I’d better choose wisely. It’s my dream to snorkel with whale sharks, the ocean’s largest fish, but not only are they tough to find, they’ve also been covered by another travel show on our network. From fellow travellers, I’ve long heard that the Philippines have some of the world’s best tropical beaches, scuba diving, rock climbing and surfing. So I call over the waiter and order a plate of Palawan, a narrow archipelago of 1780 islands located to the southwest of the country. If I’m only going to be able to take one bite, I may as well chew on paradise.

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