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Published: October 1st 2009
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Tokyo to Osaka via bus - 7 hours, then 13 hours wait for my plane to Manila, 4 hours on the plane, 6 hours wait at Manila airport, 1.5 hours via plane to Cebu and a 20 minute taxi ride to my guesthouse. All minus the very necessary essential of sleep, I arrived at my destination at 6am 16th September having left Tokyo at about 10pm on the 14th. My brain felt like it needed to haemorrhage....out of my ears.
I checked into my guesthouse and took an instantaneous 2 hour kip before eagerness woke me up and told me to get out there and explore the unknown to myself wonders of Cebu City, the second largest city in The Philippines. After nearly 6 months in the safety, comfort and convenience of Japan I really hadn't prepared myself mentally for this place. I'm well travelled now in Asia now I'd say but was really tuned out on my first day back in south east Asia.
Cebu is 100% sheer anarchy, generally the amount of traffic will be the first thing that hits you with the
potential for a mouthful of exhaust. Then of course with the traffic comes the
people, many many people, god knows what their all up to but they are spread thick upon the streets of Cebu. It's one big greasy mosh-pit. And naturally with this level of people comes an intoxicating level of pollution, like people and traffic there is shit everywhere. Coming from litter shy Tokyo it really is going from one extreme to the other.
Within just moments of walking these mean streets I was almost murdered to death by a reversing truck, one moment it sat dormant parked outside a bank yet the moment I decide I need to walk past it as their was quite simply no other alternative the driver decides that it would be the perfect time to reverse. It's all fun and games now but if my brain hadn't have contacted it's rapid response team and prompted me to move my arse then I'd have been mush.
As per usual all eyes staring, but this I've come to expect now because I am after all a bit of a freak. I made tracks to a place called 'Downtown' (very creative). En route a little beggar boy no older than 10 began to follow me shouting 'Hey'
and 'Hey' and then sometimes 'Hey'. He followed behind for a good few minutes with his shenanigans before being partnered by one of his colleagues. All the time I never reacted to them, thinking that this would ideally be the best way to get them to clear off. I had on my back my small backpack, in the side pouch was a pair of sunglasses, just about the only thing that they could possibly scavenge off of me whilst my back was turned to them. Whilst walking and trying to conjure up the best procedure in order to deal with the situation the boys suddenly stopped. In doing so so did I as I knew exactly what had just happened. They had breached the boundaries of normal people-ship, I turned around and one of the boys stood there with my sunglasses in his hands. I snatched them off of him and gave him and his partner in crime a cold hard stare. And with that they ran off.
To be honest I don't think I blamed them, if I lived a life of shit and squalor I'm pretty sure that I to would be up to these same old
Red Horse
Local brew, nasty stuff! tricks. But at the time this still didn't stop me from wanting to bash their naughty little heads together. Alas it was not to be as all that was left of them were their little footprints in the grime drenched ground. Tracks that may of may not grow bigger as time protests.
The way of life in this neck of the woods seems far from peachy, a walk into the so called 'Downtown' proving this. I've walked many a streets now in some of the biggest cities in Asia and have always felt reasonably safe, but this place does not give me that feeling in the slightest. 'Downtown' makes Cambodia's Phnom Penh seem like Disneyland, Euro Disney that is. Utter mayhem, bodies everywhere, I appeared to be the only whitey present and 3rd party eyes were ever curious with their burning glances. The buildings leaning into one another as if they have spent their years on the piss, removing one would cause them all to collapse in a domino fashion. Security guards stood outside banks with pump action shotguns ready to pump some scum-suckers full of lead at any possible or available opportunity. Often shops or bars would have
a sign up outside stating 'No Deadly Firearms Beyond This Point'. I wanted so desperately to take pictures of the grime on display but a certain level of fear and common sense prevented me from doing so.
Needless to say I made a hasty retreat from 'Downtown' and back 'Uptown' in the direction of my hotel. I'd seen enough of this place to last me a lifetime, Cebu City really is a shit place and I don't endorse it in the slightest. The only other whitey's that I did stumble across were the dirty Gary Glitter style coffin dodging sex tourist cunts walking around with their 14 year old Filipino girlfriends. It would seem that if a local Filipino was to see a westerner around these parts then they would probably be deemed as a sex tourist. This perhaps explaining some of the filthy looks I was getting from the locals.
As nightfall arrived I scuttled on back to my lodgings. Now if there was two plus's to be had with Cebu City then it would be the fact that it has both Mister Donuts and Dunkin Donuts shops. But even this wasn't enough to keep me in this shit hole. shitshitshit!
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