I really got a kick, in an Ugly American kind of way, out of the mark left by the USA on the Philippines. That most Filipino of conveyances, the incomparable jeepney, was born from American jeeps; bus drivers and passengers in the north sing along to country music, from cover bands with perfect accents. Firearms are rampant—America! In the parts of the country we visited, the USA gets a better reception than in many places it’s been: compared to the Spanish and the Japanese, US occupation forces came out smelling like roses. Peso bills are the same size as dollar bills. We saw parking spaces at Benguet State reserved for operatives of “Future Farmers of the Philippines.” I could go on.

The Spanish mark, of course, is distinct too, and it’s maybe the combination of these that really got to me. What I think of as Latin American is, in part, really Iberian Colonial—it’s in the Philippines, too. (Literally) loud, public Catholicism (now with competition from charismatic and evangelical sects), some of the food… familiar in a comforting way to me.

Unfortunately, these thoughts aren’t very useful to me when I was planning to leave for the airport at 6 p.m., or maybe even go a little early and try to take care of some business at airline reservations counters. It’s 4:45 p.m. now; time to pack.

This morning Trevor and Kerensa went back, and Nic and I walked around a bit.  We saw the waterfront (such as it and its really disgusting little strip of beach were) before walking back to the same café for a pretty good omelet breakfast.  Then we walked all the way back up Mabini to our dump, checked out, had another fight over the merits of the taximeter, and THEN the fun began.

We checked in quickly enough (after jumping through a few security hoops) to learn that our flight was grievously overbooked.  The offer for volunteers was P3000 cash (~US$60) and a free roundtrip ticket MNL-HKG or vice-versa.  We took it.  I guess I’ll be going back?  Boracay sounds nice.  We were offered all of the same again and a hotel room with transfers to abandon our new 6 p.m. flight, but we both had to be back before Tuesday.

The flight was roomy (exit row) and fairly normal, with a minor delay due to the offloading of the checked bags belonging to the 6 p.m. volunteers.  To my surprise, our bags made it on the same flight we did and showed up after just a little agonizing in HKG.  Scenic bus rides later, we were at Lingnan where I have a ton of work to do for tomorrow.  I have to choose a paper topic (or few) by 9:30 and give a presentation at 16:00, in addition to dealing with the paper and electronic pileup of the last couple weeks.  Good trip, though.

The Philippines is an interesting place and I’ve had lots of interesting thoughts, but I can’t remember them all. The Americana is eerie sometimes, and Baguio is full of country music. It seems that (other than the country music) the Philippines is one place that an American colonial presence hasn’t destroyed.

On our return to Cebu we encountered, amazingly, our first trouble with taxi meters. The cheeky bandits surrounding the ferry pier wanted something like P750 for a ride to the airport. We muttered a bit, walked around, and found one.

The flight was pretty normal.

Getting back to Manila, we lost P80 to some sleight-of-hand at the coupon taxi counter. Oops. We got to the bus terminal anywhere where we took our aforementioned hellish bus ride six hours north to Baguio, at the foot of the Cordillera mountain range (yes, that is a little redundant). There we took a taxi to Benguet State University in La Trinidad, the nearby capital of Benguet. We were escorted by security to the “executive house” and generally treated like kings as a result of the wheel-greasing by our host, Professor Mina, who had met Trevor at a student affairs conference in Hong Kong.

BSU is primarily an agricultural college, but also includes a teaching college and laboratory schools. They’ve done a lot with what look to me limited resources, including American-vintage buildings. They have a Marketing Center stocked full of delicious local produce, which we raided repeatedly. The pineapple-papaya jam tartlets are particularly good…

After a dinner with some of his colleagues and a very short night on the town (we were still tired) we left early the next morning for a less-comfortable bus ride on twisty mountain roads (not always sealed) to Sagada, in Mountain Province. Sagada was a nice enough little town. We had a ridiculous several hours in a couple caves, violating what would have been millions of dollars worth of safety regulations in the US and having a muddy and mostly fun time. It wasn’t so fun toward the end when the guides kept following the girls in the front and blocking the light from my next steps. My personal highlight was probably the dip in some bone-chillingly cold water.

The next day’s bus trip wasn’t any less exciting. This time I was in the back, needing to hold on to stay in my seat, and the bus was full. The views, however, of mountain passes and terraces, were no less spectacular. The whole region seems very… wholesome, down to the signs encouraging us to eat more vegetables and do no drugs.

The dominant language of the power structure, Tagalog (rebranded as “Pilipino”) is not so popular outside of the Manila area. English is the lingua franca even when tribal languages are the L1.

We stopped by the executive house on our way back before checking out the fireworks display for the end of the local flower festival. Unfortunately, many of the festival’s purported half-million visitors were too, and only sheer luck and unmitigated gall (a favorite phrase of mine) managed to snag us a taxi to return to our bags at BSU. Security arranged for a taxi to get us from there to the bus terminal, where the same hordes were going to Manila. We got tickets on what seemed to be an older bus pressed specially into service.

This bus ride was mercifully better, and I probably slept through most of it. There was a minor snag at first as the bus had individually numbered seats up to 45… and tickets had been issued up to 48. It got ironed out, though, and there was no TV, and the lights were dimmed, and the curtains were quickly pulled over the air conditioning vents. I can’t complain at all about the ride, and I sat in the middle of the back seat (at the end of the aisle) which afforded me unlimited leg room.

Once in Manila, we made our way to and checked in to an absolute dump, the Mabini Pension, which I may write more about if all our stuff hasn’t been stolen while we’ve been out. Not recommended.

The Philippine version of the popular Asian squat toilet seems to be the seatless toilet. I’m not sure which is worse.

Right now, we’re in a massive mall having sought out a specialty hot chocolate shop mentioned in Cebu Pacific’s inflight magazine. Pretty lame. Earlier, after resting, we ate at the Shawarma Snack Center (not bad save the yogurt sauce on my pants) and walked around a bit of the historic walled Intramuros (yes, redundant again for the hispanophones) area, including the seemingly cursed Manila Metropolitan Cathedral (take 6, dating to 1958) and the San Agustin church (stone, dating to the 15th or 16th century, and obviously less cursed).

Assuming we can make it back to the pension and through the night safely, tomorrow should be an early morning taxi ride for Trevor and Kerensa and a lazy progress toward the airport for Nicole and your truly, flying at 1455. You’ll probably hear from me next from Hong Kong.

The next day we woke up early (obviously) and saw Taal before heading back toward Manila. We stopped at a lakeside restaurant (there’s a lake around a volcano around a lake) in Tagaytay and had a good meal, accompanied by a pseudo-mariachi string band. They played the Eagles and Simon and Garfunkel for us, and ABBA and La Bamba for others, but we sadly forgot to request Johnny Cash. We’ll do better next time.

Returning to Manila and Malate, we found our Internet shop and booked a flight for Cebu… four hours later, we flew to Cebu. In the mean time we’d eaten a rushed but very good meal at Cafe Adriatico (very western, very good, not so cheap) and enjoyed the typical gridlocked cab ride. Airport security (liquids and gels! not again!) forced us to check our bags, but we survived this time. In the Manila airport, frantic pay phone use won us a reservation at the Golden Valley hotel, a fairly nice business sort of hotel which managed to fit us all in one room with two extra beds for about P500 each. Under the circumstances, it was great.

We watched Skulls that night instead of getting to sleep at a civilized time, so we barely escaped before the noon checkout deadline. More frantic calling later, we had a reservation at Nut’s Huts in Bohol. After a few very hot hours trying to find the right pier and a soon-to-depart boat, we made it to Bohol’s main port of Tagbilaran.

Tricycles wanted an impressive P250 for the trip to the bus terminal. The posted fare a few feet away was P17. We paid less after splitting a metered taxi—four is a good size for a group if you like to take cabs.

Nut’s Huts was… unique. 750m and endless steps off the roadside (we took a bus), it’s a set of… well, huts along the green waters of the River Whateveritsnameis. The restaurant had amazing, fairly priced food, and it looks like it would have been a neat place to stay if one were planning on making use of their hikes and boat trips and other activities. For me, it was a bit hot and sticky and insect-infested, but the food made up for it.

We left today via boat from the hut level, which was much nicer and included a detour to a neat set of waterfalls. Then we hired a very colorful jeepney (and driver, and tour guide, and… guard? we aren’t sure) for P2000. It was a great decision, as we got to leave our bags onboard and go rambling all over the place. We saw the “chocolate hills”, crossed the river on a precarious footbridge to see endless tarsier knickknacks, and (most amazingly) saw a few tarsiers in their sanctuary.

Look them up. We had one not more than two feet from our faces today. Wow.

We used the jeepney to return to Tagbilaran, where some frantic walking-in found us a nice three-person room with an extra mattress… and well over a couple dozen mosquitoes. It was a bloody hilarious afternoon. Since then, we found a laundry service and food and are getting ready for a lazy night (as laundry won’t be done before late morning) before going to Panglao Island tomorrow for some well deserved beach time. On the 21st we fly back to Manila, no doubt after some more frantic reservation attempts, and we’re hoping to get up to Baguio and surrounds until the 24th or 25th.

Airport (NAIA 2) was shiny but not so useful. One ATM in the place, slow immigration, and all the usual. Taxi fare has gone up substantially since guidebooks were published, but we had a friendly driver who taught us a little promptly-forgotten Tagalog.

Nice if slightly pricy hostel, Pension Natividad. The taxi driver thought we were European, because Americans can afford to stay at better hotels. I guess not so many cheap Americans end up on holiday in the Philippines. ATMs are surprisingly hard to find, but I finally tracked down a friendly Cirrus machine (why does everyone else use Plus?). The limit is low though: 5,000 pesos, at roughly 48 to the USD.

We are going to try for the Taal volcano and surrounds today, once we get all our money-changing sorted. It’s not quite as easy to change HKD as we’d wish; most of the banks take only USD.

Similarities to the States are kind of comforting… the banknotes, for example, are precisely the same size. Same electrical plugs (but running 220V). English is everywhere at a quite good level. Time to look up some more ATMs… more later, depending on how easy it is to get online. Here in Manila, dead-easy… Fancy place, nice chairs, new computers, weeks-old software, webcams and headsets… Elsewhere, we’ll see.

Macau was interesting, I’ll have text and pictures up soonish.