Si in Manila, The Philippines, May 2007
Simon Lockington

Last week was a pretty frantic one at work. I was meant to spend the last half of the week in Sydney visiting customers which is a pretty normal thing I do about once a month.

Earlier in the week though, work decided I needed to go to Manila in The Philippines to help a distributor do a presentation. Awesome! I’ve never been to Manila.

However on the day I was due to fly out to Manila, plans changed again and the people at work thought “well if he’s going that far, he may as well go to Colorado” so a bit of 11 th hour rejigging of my flights now saw me eventually getting home to Melbourne. But to get there, I had to go via Melbourne first (no flights out of Sydney that night), Hong Kong, Manila (1 night), Hong Kong (1 night), Los Angeles, Denver (5 nights), Los Angeles then finally to Melbourne.

THE TOOTHPASTE BANDITS
Airlines have now officially gone overboard in their handling of security in my book. They make it so hard and tiring that you better hope that your destination is worth all the effort.

I flew into Melbourne from Sydney where they now have a squad of people hanging around in front of the international departures area. It’s the duty of these people to relieve you of ANY liquids that are over 100 grams. So it was good bye to my shaving cream, and toothpaste (the toothpaste came in at a whopping 110 grams). The rest of the stuff that was under 100 grams was allowed to be sealed in a little plastic bag. That’s good, because I was worried that one day I might be tempted to hold someone up with a 110 gram tube of Colgate and then subdue them with a good squirt of shaving cream (Gillette Mach 2 no less).

By now I was already stampy at having lost my toothpaste and shaving cream, then I get past immigration and get to security where some dudes were too busy talking about their cousin’s fully sick Subaru WRX to notice my laptop heading side ways off the X-Ray machine’s conveyor belt. A quick and decisive yell at the mohawked-too-much-hair-cream-and-not-enough-intelligence boys saw them catch the laptop before it fell to the ground. They just shunted it back on and resumed talking. Idiots. Those guys are a good advertisement to kids as to why you should stay at school.

However it wasn’t all bad, I managed to convince the ladies in the Qantas Club that I needed to have an exit row seat which they duly provided.

The flight to Hong Kong was standard, there wasn’t much in the way of decent movies though, there was however entertainment from a woman who had drunk WAY TOO MUCH. She was trying to hold her ground against the stewardesses who in typical Qantas fashion weren’t backing down. Very amusing.

After that it was just plain old boredom till we landed. As soon as we pulled up to the gate everyone wanted their bags, determined not to be held up I grabbed my two bags and headed off into security. I was dismayed to see that Hong Kong airport now also subscribes to the overwhelming security idea and so began a wait in a long, long line. Everyone in the line started complaining to each other about it, which I joined in on with enthusiasm.

Hong Kong airport is big and modern and really, as far as airports go really very good. The place is absolutely full of shops unlike the very barren and sterile LAX.

I found my gate for my connecting flight to Manila and the flight was packed. One tip I’ve got for people traveling in Asian countries is stand your ground and don’t be too courteous. For instance, to board this flight we all had to get in one long ass line that had originally started out as four lines but Cathay staff told us to merge. Knowing that if I was too courteous, I’d be pushed way back in the queue cause people just jump in front. I just held my ground and people bounced off as they tried to push in. Don’t be afraid to use a bit of elbow as well, they’ll get the message.

The Cathay flight to Manila was pretty straight forward, I read my Jeremy Clarkson book, he’s the presenter off my favourite show Top Gear and I really like his books. It was while reading one of his comments about buying suits that I suddenly realized I’d left my suit jacket in the overhead compartment of the Qantas plane that had taken me to Hong Kong, which was now on it’s way to London. There was MUCH swearing and cursing under my breath and mental calculations of how much this was going to cost me. As soon as I got to Manila I’d ring Qantas and get them on the job. As a final resort, I was going back to Hong Kong anyway and would get a new suit made for me by the dude who built the first one.

MANILA, THE PHILIPPINES
Manila is the capital of The Philippines, a country that I’d never really shown any interest in or knew much about. I figured it was a pretty small affair with not much going on. It turns out it has a population of 90 million people with it’s chief export being man power.

At immigration, there is a separate OFW queue (Overseas Filipino Workers), The Philippines makes a lot of money from the income that OFW people bring back to the country so they have special immigration benefits to ensure swift processing. No one really seemed to know, but they estimated that at any one time, over 20 million Filipino workers are overseas bringing billions of dollars back to the country.

Just like in Cairo, taxi drivers are allowed on the Air Side of the airport (before you clear immigration and customs) which is very strange. I was supposed to be catching a car provided by the hotel to get me to the Edsa Shangri-La.

As soon as I walked out the door I knew that even if I hadn’t been a dumbass and forgotten my suit jacket, I would never have worn it anyway, the heat and humidity were incredible!

The Shangri-La has a nice air conditioned office in the carpark that you sit in and wait for your car to arrive while minions tend to your needs (do you want a drink Mr Simon? Newspaper?).

Driving in Manila is crazy, it’s a mix of Bali and Cairo which is saying something. Use of the horn here is not as prevalent as Cairo where you use it to announce that you’re alive. Here you use it when someone shows potential to cut you off to let them know you’re there because no one checks behind them before merging. Especially buses who just move in.

Ironically, each and every public transport vehicle have signs on them saying “How’s my driving? Phone blah blah” which is apparently government mandated. I’d love to know how many times that number gets called.

JEEPNEY
There’s a WIDE variety of transportation solutions here. You can start with your basic pedal taxi where some dude pedals you around all day, that’s very cheap, but the risks of getting flattened by a truck are very high.

There’s the motorcycle variant of the pedal car where Filipinos believe that a two stroke 125cc motorcycle has more than enough power to be able to carry five to six Filipinos in a side cart. It’s not unknown to have three to four people on a single two wheeled motorbike either.

Then there’s the famous Jeepney. These are crazy looking contraptions built upon World War II Willys Jeeps. They’ve been lengthened so you can get over nine people in the back of them and they’re everywhere.

Some are really pimped out with big chrome bars, large numbers of lights and proclamations to the Lord (just about every Jeepney I saw had a big sign on the back of it with some kind of Christian religious message which was strange cause I thought this was a Muslim country).

Apparently, there was a time when some people customized their Jeepney’s so much with chrome that there were crashes when other people got sunglare off the chrome and crashed. Sounds strange I know, but apparently now there is a limit to how much you can have.

Most of these cars wouldn’t have a hope in hell of passing a Warrant of Fitness in New Zealand, but apparently they do have an equivalent inspection regime, however you can get past any mechanical problems by furnishing the inspector with an appropriate amount of pesos.

Occupational Health and Safety is also not a big influence over here. We drove through a couple of tunnels on the way to the hotel to find dudes in there painting the walls. They weren’t using masks, although they must have been concerned about the fumes because they had pulled their t-shirts up over their noses. Also interesting was the lane nearest to them wasn’t closed so trucks were whizzing by a meter away from their heads.

SECURITY
I had planned on spending the weekend in Manila and looking around the place to see what could be seen, however a couple of the guys in our office suggested it probably wasn’t the kind of place you’d want to do that. I checked the Australian Government travel website which made references to ‘bombs’, ‘explosions’, ‘terrorist activity’, ‘Elections next week’ in just about every paragraph so my desire to stay longer in Manila died quickly.

However they do tend to take security relatively seriously here (as seriously as the Balinese do anyway) and each car is stopped and checked at a security check point as it approaches the hotel. They were expecting trouble given the election. Just about everywhere you go you’re then checked by a dude with a metal detector, but even when the detector goes off, he doesn’t do anything, so I’m not sure what the point is of that.

THANKS QANTAS
I got checked in and settled into my room and set about trying to find Qantas’ number to try and track down my suit jacket. The plane should still have been in the air so I felt confident I could get it back.

My Qantas Club card only has a tollfree number on it that works inside of Australia and says “If you’re overseas, please ring your local office”. So that meant firing up the internet to find what the office number was, but do you think I could find where the internet connection was? Hell no. After 20 minutes I found it in a secret compartment in the desk and got the number.

I got a woman in Melbourne who I explained my story to expecting her to say something like “Don’t worry, I’ll ring someone at Heathrow and get them to get the jacket when it lands”. No, instead I got “You’ll have to ring British Airways about that, they’re the ones that clean the planes at London” and gave me a number which turned out to be the wrong one and so I got no where.

Meanwhile, the guys who I was in Manila to meet had turned up and wanted to have lunch with me so the Qantas project had to go on hold.

THANK GOD IT’S FRIDAY
I went downstairs to meet the guys who I’d come to see and we were off to our meeting.

The meeting went well and afterwards Rick, who was the head guy, suggested we go and have a drink at the Thank God it’s Friday restaurant in the mall next door. The Filipino beer we had was pretty good, but a couple of the locals put ice in their beer which I thought was strange. It turns out it’s purely for logistical reasons, a lot of the time the beer may not be cold cause the fridge isn’t working well and no one wants to drink warm beer no matter where you’re from, so they just put ice in it.

Rick and the other guys were very forthcoming about information on their country. They claimed that Filipino people sent more text messages per capita than any other country in the world. Similarly, it also has the highest rate of mobile phone theft in the world.

The Philippines is strongly influenced by US and Spanish customs. Back in the old days it was a Spanish territory, then around 1901 the Americans moved in. Ofcourse then the Japanese invaded in World War II and were kicked out again by General MacArthur in 1945. The Jeeps and other military vehicles left over from the war effort formed the basis of the Jeepney.

As a result, cars here drive on the right hand side of the road when most other countries in the region drive on the left. There are a lot of American cars here.

We left for another restaurant in one of the dining districts where we were swiped with metal detectors which once again went off and once again, nobody cared.

Dinner was really nice and a mix between Filipino and Chinese food. I struggle a little bit with chopsticks but summoned up enough co-ordination to not look like an idiot.

After dinner Rick wanted to show me another bar so away we went again. After a couple more drinks I started dropping hints about perhaps dropping me off at the hotel (I hadn’t had a decent sleep in about three days and the humidity was really starting to get to me). Thankfully he agreed and said we’d go, but he wanted to show me just one more bar before dropping me off.

KAROKE AND BARRY MANILOW ARE WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION
Rick parked the car and we walked into the ‘bar’. I thought it strange that there was a large group of young women in red dresses near the front door, but didn’t think much of it.

Rick got some drinks in and we sat down to listen to an average band play. They actually did a decent rendition of ‘Don’t dream its over’ by Crowded House. It’s always good to see New Zealand influences reaching far and wide!

Suddenly our view of the band was obstructed by a line of the girls we had seen as we walked in.

“What’s going on here Rick?” I ask
“You pick one”
I had become very suspicious and edgy. “One what?”
“You pick one of the girls, maybe even two if you like”
“Oh HELLLLL NO. I’m not into that s%*t at all man. HELL NO”.

It turns out I had misunderstood the purpose of these girls. They become your personal waitress and will go fetch you whatever you want. You want beer? She’ll go get it for you. You want some nuts? (not that you’d want to eat nuts in a country like The Philippines), she’d go get that too.

It’s the most highly inefficient use of labour I’ve seen anywhere apart from Bali.

So this girl would follow you round all night asking in English I couldn’t understand if I wanted anything and I would respond in English she couldn’t understand that I was OK and didn’t need anything.

All of a sudden someone thinks it’s a good idea to fire the karaoke machine up.

Never in the history of my life, have I ever been anywhere, where it has been a good idea to fire a damn karaoke machine up. This time was no different.

What made it worse is these guys (and Hong Kong people too for that matter) have a REALLY STRANGE TASTE IN MUSIC. Barry Manilow is HUGE here. HUGE. Everyone wanted to sing bloody Barry Manilow songs and couldn’t understand why I wasn’t singing along.

Barry Manilow for God’s sake!

The only time I ever sing is alone in the car, where the only thing that can hear me is the IPOD and I only ever do it when not at intersections where people can see you. Eventually even I gave the Karaoke a go, an experience which re-affirmed my hate for these machines. After my performance the Filipinos were quite happy for me to not try again as well.

Thankfully everyone eventually had enough and I was dropped off at the hotel where I was asleep before I even hit the pillow. Tomorrow I was due to fly out to Hong Kong and I had to get up early, pack my stuff, have breakfast, do my postcards (I send mum and dad postcards of wherever I go in the world) and get to the airport.

NINOY AQUINO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT
Is Manila’s airport and the place is crowded. Just the place some terrorists might fancy blowing stuff up if they really wanted to disappoint some people.

At least in Manila, you don’t have to take your laptop out of its bag when you go through security - that just really sucks. I kept an eagle eye on my stuff at all times though. The place was so crowded that it would have been very easy for someone to steal my stuff and just melt into the crowd.

In Manila, you’re not allowed to take ANYTHING that is liquid on board with you. No perfume, no water, no nothing. At all.

I was pretty excited about this flight, not so much to get out of Manila, but it would be the first time I’d ever flown in business class on a work trip and damn, I was going to make the most of it.

Part of this is getting an invitation to the Cathay Pacific lounge (which you get if you’re in the Qantas Club – which I am – but only if you’re a gold member – which I’m not – don’t get me started on what I think about that either).

WHY AIRPORT LOUNGES REALLY ARE GOOD
This is probably going to sound elitist, and really, that’s because it is. I’m a huge fan of airport lounges. You know, those secret rooms that you see business people go in and out of but normal people can’t go in.

I really like those places.

When you travel a lot, the little things count for everything. Being able to go somewhere and not have to deal with screaming kids whose parents won’t shut them up, you don’t have to deal with the general scum of society, there are comfy seats, there’s free food and free drink and most of the time, stuff to read and the internet to play with.

They really are good places especially in a place like Manila where the alternative is sitting out in the departure lounge…

What you do have to put up with though, are people who think they own the world and today we had one of those. He was traveling first class and one of the Cathay girls had dared make a mistake. I’m not sure what she did, but he lost his mind, numerous times. He did the full American “Get me the Manager-I spend 30 thousand dollars on this trip-Get me the manager” performance. And a performance it was.

It was such a performance that he had everyone in the lounge watching and an elderly British gentleman found cause to say “By Jove, he thinks he’s Lord of the Rings!”, I couldn’t work out the relevance of his statement but damn did I laugh. I laughed out loud.

FOR ONCE I TURNED LEFT
Oftentimes my mates and I will sit around bleating about travel and how Qantas must be contravening human rights laws with their lack of leg room and how they shaft us with their frequent flier points programs. We talk about turning right when you get on a plane (if you’re flying economy, you’ll always turn right when you get on the plane), if you turn left you’re flying business class (yes I know that sometimes you can turn right and still be in business class, but humour me here).

I have a mate who is a Partner for PriceWaterhouse. He’s a big man on campus, a real high finance type. He can’t understand why we complain and bitch, however he never turns right. No sir, instead he turns left and walks straight to the front (which means he’s in first class – I’ve never even seen what first class looks like – I think there might be hand maidens up there that fan you and feed you berries).

Well for once, I got to turn left.

There was soo much leg room, I couldn’t touch the seat in front of me even if I tried! For once, it didn’t matter if you didn’t get an aisle seat (for which you would sell a kidney for in economy), because there was soo much space.

The seat reclines flat! You can sleep! No more contortions that would make a Russian ballet dancer cringe to try and get comfy!

The stewardesses addressed you by name and when they did, they didn’t hiss!

I could even work on my laptop, something that is not physically possible in economy. Plus, the headphones are REAL headphones that you can hear stuff with without having to turn the volume up to full and press the phones against your ears to work out the muddled audio.

Boy was I going to make the most of this. I had only an hour and a half to live it up which meant I had to divide my time between watching a bit of a movie, reading a bit of the complimentary paper, stretching out a bit with the foot rest, reading a bit of my book, doing a bit of work on my laptop, then finally, having a nap. Plus I would need to fit in some time for the two course lunch provided. And here’s something that will really mean something to travelers, as soon as you were finished with lunch, they took your dishes away immediately! No having to wait for 45 minutes until the trolley came around! There was not much time.

To say I was slightly overwhelmed by the luxury of it all wouldn’t be an overstatement. However it’s still too expensive to justify. You’d never pay it on your own money that’s for sure. The day that I left to go to Hong Kong the travel agent said to fly business class from Melbourne to LA was $10,000 one way. Sure you can do it cheaper if you book ahead, but rarely do we get to plan our trips with lots of notice.

Next on the list is Hong Kong then Denver which I’ve never been to before. All I know about Denver is there’s mountains and Colorado is where South Park is set, so I’m keen to see what’s up.

Si