Philippines 1995: Part 6

Note: this trip was made at Christmas 1995. In the time since then I'm sure much has changed so it may not be a great idea to treat this as a guide. Treat it as a memoir, which - give or take some editing - is exactly what it is.

I slept very badly, not as badly as the night before but badly enough considering that I was indoors, warm, dry and on a bed. The problem was a combination of a wooden bed, a thin mattress and off-stage noises. First of all it was the Germans next door arguing in voices just loud enough to be able to identify the language but just too quiet to work out the words. Then there were children outside singing songs at about five a.m. Then there was a jeepney struggling noisily down the hill and a little later more noisily back up it.
When we had all got up and had breakfast, we gathered to go and were told that the rain had washed out the road to such an extent that a Jeepney could not get down to fetch us so that it was back onto the bangka to go round to Puerto Galera for the Si-Kat. It looked for a while as if that plan too was doomed. The engine coughed and spluttered and died. Several more attempts produced the same result. A hasty change of battery led to no improvement. Finally however for no apparent reason it lurched into life with the grace of Frankenstein lumbering from the slab and we were under way.

We reached Puerto Galera with no time to spare and hurried aboard the ferry. The crossing was dull in every sense of the word. The weather varied between drizzling and overcast and outright downpour. A Filipino girl, aged about seven, trotted round the deck chatting to the tourists. She talked to me in excellent English and then skipped back to the other end of the boat to have a conversation with the group of Germans who had gone seamlessly from a liquid "Frühstück" to a liquid "Mittagsessen". Her German was as good as her English.
The plan was to meet the bus at Batangas. Of course it wasn't there. An hour and a half later it still wasn't there. While we had been in the jungle Alex had quoted John Ruskin - "there is no such thing as bad weather, only different sorts of good weather". I sat on the deck watching a dredger clearing out the channel and reflecting that perhaps there is no such thing as boring, only different sorts of interesting. Eventually, delayed more than two hours by Batangas eternal traffic jam the bus did arrive and we got underway. After a brief visit to a muddy field which turned out to be the Batangas bus station we headed out onto the main road.
I spent the traffic jam to Manila filling in my diary and writing my impressions of the place and the people with whom I was travelling and watching the unfolding tableau of the Tondo slums. I had read about them in the guide book but they were something else to see. An entire city, made from crude huts thrown together from whatever could be salvaged, followed the line of the road. A bleak and ugly strip like a scene from some post-apocalypse science fiction movie it stretched for miles. Most of the buildings were single storey although here and there one had had a second and seemingly unrelated structure built on top of it. It was separated from the road by a rusty railroad track that I thought at first was derelict but along which I later saw a train slowly labouring. The most horrible aspect of this 'city' was the mundanity of the life within it. People in this terrible place went about the normal business of living as if it were any other suburb. Dirty and torn washing fluttered from lines strung between the buildings. People crouched out of doors cooking in pots over fires that burned with a greasy green flame and left oily smoke like a smear in the air. At the back of the huts rubbish was piled high. At one point there was a break where the road passed over a wide drainage culvert which was perhaps twenty feet deep. It was half filled with the ghastly detritus of slum living. Children were playing in the filth.
Here and there though there were small triumphs of humanity as some of the inhabitants, even here, had hung up home made Christmas decorations that turned gaily in the wind. Occasional billboards advertising Coca Cola or carrying the ubiquitous 'Philippines 2000' slogans mocked their efforts.
Eventually, to my mixed feelings of relief and guilt, we left it behind and soon afterwards were in the more prosperous part of Manila where our hotel was located. There was just enough time to shower and change and watch an episode of Batman on cable television before shooting off to dinner, the shanty town shunted off into some recess of the memory.