Manila

The airport looked half built, with one tiny Maccy D's and not much else. Even in part of the check in area, there were chairs still with their packaging on. Outside the airport a bunch of taxi drivers tried to get us into their cabs, as choice of transport into the city was very limited we headed in a taxi for the nearest LRT station to city. In the taxi we got our first glimpse of Manila which felt like we had got off at the wrong airport and were dropped in the middle of Latin America.

The taxi drivers name was Juan and the radio playing in the car sounded like a mixture of Spanish and English. The roads were completely gridlock so the short journey took ages. Our driver kept falling asleep each time we hit a traffic jam, and was woken up again when one of the buses honked its horn!

At some point he was getting so annoyed with traffic, pointing at a stall selling fruit and vegetables, he goes: Look, that is the cause of this jam! And it is one of the signs of corruption in this city." The stall in question, looked innocent enough, but it was its position that had angered Juan so much. It was right on the intersection, jutting out into the road, blocking off almost one lane of traffic. "The vendors who run the stalls will pay the police a hundred pesos to leave them alone and the policeman will take the money. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. But traffic problems are the result."

At the LRT we got our ticket and walked to the platform, but to our surprise we had to have our bags searched and scanned with metal detector before we could go through. It made us feel a little uneasy.

We got to our chosen hostel which had an armed guard at its entrance. Starbucks next door and also a small 7 Eleven mini market had one too, we looked at each other wondering where the hell we had come.

We realised later on that almost every building, shop, supermarket and restaurant in Manila has security guards. This the first time we felt unsafe in a South East Asian country.

Wandering around the city we felt like we had left South East Asia as everything was very different. Instead of temples and monks there where churches and priests, the language definitely didn't sound Asian. There didn't seem to be typical Asian rice and noodle meals here instead burgers, pizza's and chips.

Taking in our surroundings up close, we noticed a few un savoury elements to Manila creeping in. Families lounging by the side of streets, sleeping on filthy bits of cardboard while their tiny children begged passers by for a few pesos seemed to be quite common around the city.

The air was thick with smog, coming mainly from the jeepneys. The roads were clogged up with black-smoke polluting trucks and jeepneys, all of which ignored lane discipline. At certain parts of the road, Manila's two lane roads became a honking hive of vehicles. Jeepneys were the funky colorful vehicles used as one of the main transport for locals to get around the city, they where American vehicles left from the war.

There where not many sites to see in Manila. Virtually the whole city had been bombed to obliteration during World War II and many of the historical sites that a tourist would normally have visited were no longer excistent. However we decided to give it a go and hired horse and cart for a tour around the city.

Our first stop was Rizal Park, named after Jose Rizal, a revolutionary leader who was executed by soldiers in a spot in the park. A monument had been placed at the exact place where the man who had sowed the seeds for independence from the Spanish had been shot.

We then visited the city's main cathedral which had been completely destroyed and rebuilt eight times in last 80 years. It sounded like the place was cursed. Old Spanish fort known locally as Intramuros, was next and on the way there you could see coils of electrical cables and wires which were a good indicator of how poor the nation was. Manila had lots of them hanging all over the place, very much similar to the ones we've seen so far in many other SE Asia cities.

Approaching Intramuros, we passed another family lying on the pavement. One woman had a girl on her lap and was rummaging about in her hair, possibly searching for lice. Manila it's deffinately a hard city to love.

In the evening we sat in a bar sipping our drinks whilst listening to a couple of young Filipino girls sing along to the karaoke on the TV screen in front of us.