Manila - Part Two

Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, has almost 15 million people packed into the highest population density of any city proper in the world. There are, of course, denser urban areas in the world, but no entire city with more density within the city limits. Despite the upside for cost effective public transit infrastructure created by such unusual population density, the city's public transit options are practically non-existent. There's rumored to be mass rail transit somewhere, but I haven't seen a single rail or station throughout my wanderings here. There are also no city operated buses, but the streets are filled with privately operated "jeepneys."

Jeepneys look like a school bus mated with a Jeep and the offspring were raised by a gang of SoCal bouncing lowriders. They're independently operated by the drivers who decorate them lavishly. Most of them run on diesel and bellow thick black smoke when accelerating. The government has issued a mandate for the drivers to form a self-regulating cooperative and slowly phase out the worst polluting jeepneys, but the drivers have resisted and the government pushes back the deadline every few years.

Although there's no central authority that plans or manages the routes, jeepneys tend to follow the same route in any given area. They have a signs indicating the end points, and they usually follow one major street between those end points. To board a Jeepney, you just flag one down in the street like a New York City cab. When you get on, you hand your fare to a fellow passenger and everyone on board passes it along to the driver. To get off, you shout "para" and bang on the roof.

I learned from multiple sources that no one likes to board an empty jeepney. Sometimes you'll see one that's mostly empty idling outside a busy location like a mall. The jeepney will wait there until it's completely full, but it fills up slowly because 90% of the departing traffic flags down fuller jeepneys instead of waiting for an empty one to fill up. I'm fascinated by this kind of inefficiency in a system. Passengers will hang onto the outside of a completely packed jeepney before waiting for an emptier one that might stop more frequently and therefore travel more slowly. Drivers with too small a load punish their few loyal passengers by making outrageously long stops. It's a lose-lose situation. Drivers chase hot streaks that don't last and most of the passengers experience an uncomfortable ride.

A driver cooperative could fix a lot of this. Passive income from clean fuel subsidies or mobile advertising could increase the incentive to drive without long stops. Limits on long stops could increase passenger confidence and reduce the stigma of emptier jeepneys. Fares could be increased across the board when necessary—I have no idea how they landed on a 13 peso fare without coordination.

Apart from the Jeepneys, there are a few motorcycle taxi services available, but they all require a Filipino local phone number. You can hail a car with Grab, but the motorcycles are only available for food delivery.

I initially stayed near Makati, which is one of the areas recommended for foreigners. It's unclear what would make this area appealing to foreigners other than the fact that it doesn't feel quite as overtly hostile and unsafe as some of the other neighborhoods. Makati feels like a newly developed area of a dying rust belt city in the US. It does nothing to fix the underlying problems, it's just new.

Manila's neighborhoods seem to be divided between outright slums and enormous shopping malls and new condo developments.

The slums have the amenity of placing small shops close to housing, but the charm ends there. Most of the structures are built out of salvaged materials. In the worst slums, the roads aren't paved with asphalt, but with trash that's been trudged into the ground. Many of the residents sort through trash to earn a living. Metals and plastics can be sold to the recyclers, and restaurant trash is scoured for leftover morsels of meat that can be fried and sold as a dish called pagpag.

It's estimated that 35% of the population of Manila lives in these slums. They tend to pop up anywhere there's no private developer interest: at trash collection dumps, under bridges and road overpasses, inside of cemeteries, along rivers and flood areas. The slums are scattered all over the city. At any given time you are usually very close to one.

The newer condo developments are usually built as a series of towers completely disconnected from the rest of the surrounding environment. They're fortresses surrounded by surface level parking. They're very American.

At one point I stayed in an AirBNB in Las Piñas near the SM Southmall. Both the mall and the surrounding condos were build by SM Development Corporation, so you'd expect that this master planned development might offer a pleasant and walkable experience. Asian city density usually means that it's easy to pop out of your apartment or hotel and grab a snack from the corner store. Not the case here.

I stayed in a condo on the eighteenth floor of the building on the bottom right of the above satellite image. To walk to the nearby corner store, I had to follow the yellow path to the front gate of the condo community, then walk through an unruly parking lot with no paths for pedestrians. The path to the mall has a few infrastructure features I like, such as walkways that require the cars to come up to level with pedestrians rather than pedestrians stepping down to the level with cars, but vehicle traffic is insane. Drivers and motorcyclists bomb the speed barrier like they're trying to see how much air they can get.

The aggressiveness of drivers in the Philippines is unrivaled in Asia, which stands in bizarre contrast to the ubiquitous sniveling I complained about in my first Manila blog. There's something very upsetting to me about watching people go from disempowered groveling wimps to homicidal maniacs the moment they're given a little power.

My own tone has probably changed, though, because I've been met with less repulsive obsequiousness lately. I suspect that there's a several hundred year old sense that white colonizers are inherently unreasonable and must always be addressed with prostration and self-abasement. My irritation had been causing people to double down on their nauseating tone. "Please sir, I have a family! Think of my children! Siiiiiiiir, please don't ask me for gasoline, siiiiiiiiiiiir." The more annoyed I'd get, the more people would adopt this awful affectation. Yet they were also annoyed, so they really phoned it in. It was painfully obvious that they were bored of me and would like to be left alone, yet they'd commit half-heartedly to some improvisational theater where I play the role of the villainous murdering Kastila while they apologize profusely and beg for their lives.

Perhaps to better research my role as the Kastila, I visited Intramuros, the historically Spanish neighborhood whose name refers to the walls surrounding it. I've become so used to being constantly surrounded by beautiful history or at least modern temples and art installations, but Intramuros might be the only game in town in Manila.

Next stop: Puerto Galera, Mindoro, PH. It'll be good to get a break from the city, but I'll head back to Manila when I'm done.

One may wonder why I've spent so much time in Manila despite having so few positive things to say about it. If you guessed there's a woman involved you would have guessed correctly. I left Bangkok earlier than planned because I was so excited to meet Alicia. She's beautiful, intelligent, funny, musically talented, and very sweet and pleasant to be around. Dating internationally is tough because it's such an all-or-nothing proposition. There's limited time to get to know someone before you're forced to decide whether it was something ephemeral or something very serious. If you feel inspired to weigh in, I could definitely use some advice.

My time in Asia is nearly over. After Puerto Galera I'll spend another week in Manila, then Taipei on February 7th, Seoul on February 15th, Tokyo on February 21st, and back to Los Angeles on February 28th. After Hannah and Josh's wedding in early March I'll be making use of my new GFC Platform Camper and traveling around Baja California and the southern US, making my way toward Arkansas for the solar eclipse in April. It's too soon to announce the details, but I expect to return to Arizona and start a new job in May.