An expensive mistake
Manilla erm not my favourite city! The plan was to get to Manilla and then do some Island hopping but Chinese New Year ended that idea with no flights or hotels available for a reasonable budget anywhere, so we were stuck in Manilla for 12 days. The hotel would have been beautiful 30 years ago the staff were great though but after discovering cockroaches in the bathroom ( more than one) we got our room changed – I was a bit fed up to be honest. I think sometimes I forget how hard it can be living in Vietnam in the sense that I can’t communicate and still get lost a lot, and when we got the the Philippines I sort of couldn’t be bothered starting all over again. Fortunately English is the second language and it is everywhere so that wasn’t as much of a problem .
View of Manilla from the Hotel
Getting lost though that was another issue, the hotel didn’t have a map! so we were directed to the nearest Mall to go to the post office, the directions were super wrong and we got insanely lost. In the heat and my general dislike of everything at that point we argued and then got a cab to the Mall. I was so overcharged by the cab driver ,it should have been 50 pesos I was charged 500 pesos ( and the cheeky bugger still asked for a tip) but at that point I still hadn’t managed to work out the exchange rate properly, but we spent the rest of the day in a huge air conditioned mall. Deprived of western shopping for over 6 months now I nearly squealed when I saw Marks & Spencers, Top shop and The Gap. Unfortunately the prices were high, very high so apart from a couple of skirts for Hwa from The Gap in the sale, very little was purchased. The one thing that struck me about Manilla the most was the amount of fast food restaurants and the amount of overweight people, I’ve never seen anything like it. Over the course of the 12 days we struggled to find any fresh vegetables so our diet and my waistline suffered, Hwa of course didn’t put on a pound!
An Olympic sized ice skating rink in the middle of the enormous Mall of Asia
Manilla is heavily polluted, thick black residue /dust everywhere and don’t get me started on the smell of the sewers, but what got me most of all is the poverty. Desperate, poverty everywhere… families, children, solo adults, disabled, disease ridden people which what looked like leprocy, it was tragic to be honest and made me feel like crap. Some people had inventive ideas in ways to collect money though such as the old man just outside our hotel.
dogs with begging baskets
and the man who owned them, outside every day in the scorching heat.
On a trip to Chinatown to celebrate ‘Chinese / Vietnamese New Year /Tet that’s when I saw the street kids. At first just a few but after a few hours they must have numbered over 100.
fighting over a coin a passer by had thrown them
some kids we gave money to and had a chat with....
a little girl who never mentioned her father but her mother had gone away and she was living with her grandmother
A harsh introduction to Manilla in our first few days it did get better … honestly
