Advertisement
Published: December 17th 2010
Italianni's
It's almost like they're TRYING to be as unoriginal as possible, calling it that. Mall culture at its most depressing.Philippines, Kuala Lumpur and Back to Thailand
Philippines: forever cursed to be spelt wrong.
Well, better late than never: welcome to the final chapter in Don Emilio’s ® Big Southeast Asia Adventure™. By now, of course, I’ve been back in Blighty for ages, but I never got round to finishing this instalment as it’s way too much like hard work, which is against my religion.
So anyhoo.
According to my trusty Lonely Planet guidebook, The Philipppines officially has the cheapest beer in the world: San Miguel, at 8 pesos a bottle (GBP 0.10; USD 0.17; 3 peasants). I vaguely remember getting off the plane in Manila, but not much after that.
To my delight, I got a taste of the Phillippines and the real travelling experience before I even left the aircraft. Some peasant had left shoe prints on the toilet seat on the plane to Manila, thinking it was what I like to call a squitter: a squatting shitter; i.e. a squat-style bog. Top marks.
It’s so often the way when you’re travelling that the ‘growing economies’, or developing nations, or economically less-developed nations, or the developing world, or whatever they’re called this week, are often the most interesting places
Tricycle
"Revolver". Will any of us ever be as cool as this man? to visit. If by ‘interesting’, you mean total freakin’ culture shock.
Spellbound
But aside from the culture shock, being a bit of a languages nut, the first things I tend to notice about a new place are language-related.
It’s almost like Filipinos specially select their place names to be cursed to be eternally spelt wrong. Like most people, I first thought ‘Manila’ and ‘Philippines’ were spelt with a double L. They’re not. Most geopolitical analysts these days agree that it’s all part of the yellow peril’s evil plan to confuse the West before taking over.
El Sleazeholio
My first impression of Manila was that it’s kind of a sleazy place. Or at least the area I was in, the bustling tourist ghetto of Malate.
It took me a while to get used to the accent, but I think I’m finally there, and I can understand what kind of dodgy stuff street hustlers are trying to sell me every single damn day on every single damn street corner. Stolen watches, Viagra, Cialis, women, girls, young girls, really young girls, REALLY young girls, boys; it’s all good. It’s that kind of town
I’m afraid.
Filipina women are better-looking than those in other Southeast Asian countries, so I can see where the demand comes from.
Also, I think I met a paedophile. Mind you, maybe I’m getting the wrong end of the stick entirely, but he did kind of fit the profile: in his 50s, travelling alone, just been to Bangkok, bit evasive about the usual traveller where-you-been-where-you-going kind of questions. Kinda weird really; it only occurred to me after I’d left. Brrr.
Mind Your Language
Another striking thing about Manila is that it’s flooded with South Koreans (no connection between the two, I assure you). They come here to learn English. I met a guy from Leeds —with accent to match— who teaches English in Seoul. So in a few months’ time there’ll be a whole class of Koreans going around sounding like the Arctic Monkeys. Outstanding!
What is it about South Koreans that they’re such an easy-going bunch? They’re almost un-Asian in the way they seem to have no qualms at all striking up a conversation with a daunting gaijin like me. Most Confucian cultures tend to be a bit shy, I’ve found. Not
No humour
Thank you for not joking this lot, though.
Hustle, Bustle and More Hustle
For all its faults, Manila’s a lively sort of place though, I’ll give it that. Malate, the tourist area in central Manila, is a total assault on the senses. Thumping music attacks your eardrums out of every club as you walk down the street; 2-300 sleazeballs on every street corner yell at you, offering you the usual range of Viagra, girls, etc.; the excess of makeup on the faces of the admittedly really quite pretty girls trying to entice you into every bar or club reflects the dazzling neon, blinding the uninitiated. A hundred sights, sounds and smells all vie for your wallet. It’s an experience, if nothing else.
Student ID gets you 10%!o(MISSING)ff in a lot of Malate’s ubiquitous clubs, but staff may accept a tattoo or piercing as proof of student status.
I walked past some club where a local band was raping Guns ‘n’ Roses’ classic
Sweet Child o’ Mine. It made me smile, reminding me of this amazing cover act I saw once in a club in Cancún, Mexico, who did this awesome rendition of the song. These guys here
Drunken Master
Great name for a bus. Note the little pig in its box strapped onto the back in Malate were… well… not quite so talented, let’s say.
I happened to be wearing my Guns ‘n’ Roses T-shirt at the time, bringing cheers from some of the locals. I remarked that the singer shouldn’t quit his day job anytime soon, but that at least he had good taste in music. I said this, confident in the knowledge that they couldn’t understand a word I was saying. At least I hope not; the let’s-be-generous-and-call-him-a-singer was only trying to make a living, after all.
Mind your Language, Part Two
I hate to say it about such an interesting language, but the national language Tagalog, to hear it spoken, isn’t all that easy on the ear. Even the men pronounce it with this jarring nasal whine that sounds a bit… well, gay really. They all talk a bit like the Chinese mobster in that movie
The Hangover.
Fascinating language though. It’s got a huge number of loan words from Spanish (from their erstwhile colonial oppressors) and English (from their erstwhile colonial oppressors), so I feel like I can understand half of it sometimes.
Bizarrely, Tagalog (a.k.a. Filipino) has no F-sound, so they can’t
pronounce the name of their own country. They have to call it
Pilipinas. Ironically, this is because of the Spanish, who named the place after their king Philip II. The Spanish can’t pronounce the name of their own country either: By rights it should be
Spaña, but they can’t pronounce that so they have to call it
España.
As I say, I’m starting to get used to the accent, though the learning process is one-way only. After umpteen years on the island of Doctor Cameron, my accent is thoroughly Limeyfied, and most of my Rs have gone the way of plusfours and straw boater hats. I say ‘cah’ instead of ‘carrr’; ‘’sweah’ instead of ‘swearrr’. Here in the Philllippinnes, Charlie sometimes has trouble understanding me, so I have to put on this corny faux-American accent just to make myself understood. In the supermarket, I had to ask for beerrrrr, and to get there, I had to ask someone where the superrrrmarrrrket was. Sigh.
Leaving Manila’s Never Easy
OK, so I’d ‘done’ Manila, as we travel types like to say. The problem was where to go next. There were so many interesting places to see
and so little time.
I was really bummed out that I didn’t get to swim with the whale sharks, one of the Phillipines’ major attractions, because it was out of season.
A brief explanation is warranted here, I think. Now normally, I think you'll agree, as good ideas go, swimming with sharks is down there with peeing over electrified fencing and invading Russia in winter. Sharks have big pointy teeth and they’re prone to mood swings.
But whale sharks are actually perfectly harmless; they’re the original gentle giants. I feel they’re unlikely to mistake me for their favourite food, plankton.
I settled on Palawan in the end, the sticky-outy island in the west that juts out into the South China Sea (lending weight to The Philippines' claim to the nearby oil-rich Spratly Islands that they're all fighting about).
The diving's good there (and cheap), so I did a short course. Highly recommended. Strange thing about underwater life: they don't seem to do camouflage the way we do up here on dry land. It's like all marine life is dressed in flashy day-glo colours like we were up here in the early nineties.
Smoke 'Em If You Got 'Em On a completely unrelated note, there’s something about travelling that makes you smoke. Dammit. I quit 2 years ago without any effort, just like that. And now I’m smoking again. I’m an idiot.
Exeunt Omnes
Leaving the Philippines, I’m a little bit embarrassed to say that I never took a jeepney, the brightly coloured car/bus-like contraptions that roam Manila. I wanted to on a few occasions, but I couldn’t for the life of me work out where the hell it was going.
Sometimes I doubt the locals do either. I asked a driver if he was going anywhere near Intramuros, the colourful old town, naïvely hoping for a simple yes or no. He then proceeded to list an array of toponyms that meant precisely dick to me:
Santa Maria Estacion Baclaran Puta Madre Guacamole Quesadilla, I think he said, leaving me none the wiser. Erm, is that anywhere near Intramuros?
Yipa Andele Andele Arriba Puta Madre Yipa, he answered, I think, which may or may not have been anywhere near where I wanted to go.
It was like that the other two or
three times I asked too, so in the end I just gave up and walked.
Why does nobody ever, ever just answer a question with a simple Yes or No? It’s like that at work too; don’t get me started.
I'm getting grumpier as I get to the end of my travels. You can tell, can't you?
KL
Next stop: Kuala Lumpur.
For all its bluster, Malaysia remains very much a third-world country.
The fun starts when you get off the plane.
Arriving at Kuala Lumpur’s ratty un-airconditioned airport, you’re made to walk miles (none of Heathrow's wonderful horizontal escalator thingies here) for the privilege of joining the usual monstrous queues for passport control.
Once there, you have to fill in an arrival form of course, even though this isn’t announced anywhere and there weren’t enough copies to go round. Then some lab experiment in a uniform was going around telling people they didn’t need to fill one out anyway, which was of course a complete fabrication. You do. Cue more delays and longer lines as people found themselves hastily scribbling away at the last moment. All this in the
tropical heat, natch.
Kuala Lumpur’s public transport system, called —with a breathtakingly relaxed attitude to reality— the Integrated Transit Network, is about as integrated as Abu Hamza, North London's hook-handed hate preacher. Changing from one line to another involves queuing up again to buy a ticket. And this being Asia, the queues are massive.
(Still, at least they do queue, which in itself is fairly unusual in this part of the world.)
They have an electronic ticketing system, you see, similar to London’s Oyster card, New York’s Metro card, etc., but the cards are very expensive to buy, so most people don’t have one. Which rather defeats the purpose.
After that ordeal, you find yourself on the metro train, which consists of a whopping three whole carriages. This insane lack of carriages turns out to be a bit of a blessing in disguise however, as the ludicrously overcrowded conditions provide handy padding for when the train sets off with a colossal body-jostling jerk and stops with an even more sudden, bone-rattling shock.
All this in 30-degree temperatures. Great fun.
As if to deny all of this, back in the nineties, when this Asian tiger
was booming, they built what must have seemed an appropriately bombastic monument: the Petronas Towers. They're actually quite striking at night, all lit up, but they're not exactly subtle or understated.
With admirable disdain and humility, proud Malaysia wanted a monument that made a statement. The statement seems to be something like "I spawn WARRIORS from my BALLS of STEEL".
Finally leaving this chaos (I thought), my train to Thailand arrived a mere five hours later than announced.
Sort it out, Malaysia.
Screw You Guys, I’m Going Home So, having come to the end of my Big Southeast Asia Adventure™, you may be wondering which places stood out from the whole sweaty mess.
In overall terms, China turned out to be my favourite country, much to my surprise.
I’d heard bad things about the place: unfriendly locals, lots of cheating of tourists, that sort of thing. Turned out to be the complete opposite: the people were awesome, the food excellent, nobody trying to cheat me. One thing that is true is that absolutely nobody speaks any English (or anything else apart from Mandarin etc. for that matter), so it’s
a bit challenging that way. But that kind of adds to the adventure really; makes the place more exotic.
Oh well, I’ve always wanted to explore the Pacific rim
– The 13th duke of Wynbourne
Food-wise, Malaysia, for all its faults, was the surprise winner. I grew up with yummy Indonesian food, which is very similar, so it was nice to be able to recognise what I was eating for a change. Plus, you can get a huge plate of delicious buffet food at street stalls for an absolute steal.
Thai food is OK too, but a little overrated, I thought.
The food in China is good too. Not that you can read a menu in most places though, so it’s often pot luck.
Vietnam was disappointing, food-wise, most things being a bit bland. But I’m told it’s much better in the south of the country, where I didn't go.
On a Stick I have by now tasted so many bizarre ‘gross-out foods’, I think it makes sense to just list them all in one go. So here we go.
Culinary delights: barbecued frogs on a stick (Laos; taste a bit like chicken), roast beetles (Thailand; taste like chicken), grasshoppers (Thailand; chicken), scorpion (Thailand again; tastes like chicken, again), dog (Vietnam; tastes like chicken).
As for favourite town or city, China wins again with fairytale Lijiang.
This Is the End, my Friend
And that’s it, my little sweet-and-sour roast pork balls. I’ll let y’all know if there's a new adventure on the way. Probably a month or two after it’s started.
May you live in interesting times,
Emile.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.193s; Tpl: 0.02s; cc: 6; qc: 47; dbt: 0.0519s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Rosie
non-member comment
Look no Engrish
Wow is that a first for your travelblog?: a public notice written in flawless English.