Back in a hotel room – Manila

9pm and we’re whizzing through the warm air of Koh Lanta on a nippy little moped. The smells are thick and real. Amazing food. Rotten trash. Coconut. Ocean spray. It takes 30 minutes to get from the little beach bar, where we’d had a few drinks with the wedding party, to the town where I was picking up some shirts.

Through a tunnel of darkness punctuated by the fairly lights of occasional restaurants and the fevered activity of small towns dotted along the way, I smiled the entire way. It felt like a dream and I didn’t want to wake up. It will be there in the final mind-movie before I buy the farm. One of those memories that gets distilled with each recall to the point where the reality is really just a seed for something so much more amazing. For some reason, that memory stuck out beyond the perfect company, amazing diving, glorious food, clear warm water and incredibly friendly people.

I really do just love to travel. No doubt I can thank my parents for the wanderlust. Weeks on end chugging through the most out-of-the-way places in Europe. From them I learned the joy of not having the faintest idea of where you’d be come sundown, or who you would have met. It’s worse than crack. Once you know it, it never really goes away.

So last night as I drove through Manila with Randy (my driver courtesy of one of the companies I’m here to see), I was beaming. My brain was looking for points of reference and points of difference. The roads are LA. The billboards smack of Vegas. The smell is Thailand. The city is Istanbul. The people…well, the people are Filipino – unique and charming. There is an element of craftiness for sure, but not unlike a Corkonian cute hoor or those guys who want to shine your shoes outside the Blue Mosque, it’s charming and adds rather than takes away.

So why, I asked myself, was there a need for so many armed guards? Along the route on the way through the city and in high concentration around the hotel, were men armed with shotguns, assault rifles and dogs (can you be armed with a dog?). What are these guys guarding? And from whom? As we pulled into the Shangri-La we were stopped and the van searched before being waved on… what the fuck?

On I went into to the wonder world that is a Shangri-La hotel. I’ve stayed in a lot of hotels and these guys consistently go above and beyond my expectations. The one in Singapore rates as the best hotel stay I’ve had anywhere, and even though I’m only 12 hours into my stay in Edsa I have a sneaking suspicion I may have a close second. I threw my stuff in the room and went to explore outside this oasis. It was unsettling that I was questioned by every security guard with a tone of surprise and concern: “Where are you going Sir?”, “Good evening Sir, what are you doing?”. Hmmmm… I didn’t go far but it all seemed very innocuous. Am I missing something here?

So after far too little sleep, a very brief dawn workout, and what can only be described as an overindulgent breakfast, I’m ready to go see something of this place. The trick now is getting around. It turns out that Manila is made up of 14 cities so getting out of it is not really on the cards without having put a bit more planning into it…