Asia Trip 7 Part IV - Makati Madness, Tacloban Fairytales, Sentosa Spaceship
Published March 27, 2024
Country 58 - Philippines: Dirt, Sex, Fairytales
I sat down in my seat to K-pop classics blasting from the plane's speakers.
Twice, IU.
Nice touch.
A woman and her young son sat next to me. Despite the father across the aisle, she was flirty and giving me eyes, lots of eyes, fuck me here, it's fine, it's fine eyes.
I rather enjoyed it.
My worry of falling out of the sky and into oblivion left me long ago, but one place I still feel angsty is flying in this area of the world. There's something about the triangle trapezoid from Taiwan to Singapore to Darwin to Taiwan. Tropical monsters fly the skies here and they get hungry.
It was a mostly peaceful flight, until I closed my eyes on descent and opened them as we were coming into land.
'We're going to crash.' I calmly said to myself.
The plane was coming in too fast and at a deadly angle.
Just a second after I finished the thought, we took back off into the sky.
My first missed approach and my first go-around.
12 years of hardcore world travel and so many flights, and here I was, heading back into the sky, undercarriage retracting, into the darkness of the clouds. Nearly dead, not dead, land the fucking thing,,,
CRAZY SHIT, FUN STUFF, BRADEARTH FOREVER
The drive into the city was fucking horrible.
The traffic moved slower than a snail full o' pie.
. . .a snail full o’pie. Yahuh!
I didn't connect with the city I saw out the window.
I spent many days in Makati. And my time in Makati will be written as a poem.
Here is the poem... --- >>>
love hotel, fuck hotel
fancy hotel, dildos a-chargin', dildo's stuck on the TV
dicks and tits and ARSE
makati avenue
av
en
ue
the dirty little children beggin’
the dirty little adults doing the same
dirty, dirty
filthy
foock makadi
A few days in I developed a cough. I blamed it on the pollution and limited my daily excursions to once a day for food.
At Christmas a large chunk of the population headed home, back off to the suburbs, back off to the provinces and I cranked up the AC. The cold artificial wind made me feel better, so did the absence of filipinos n' filipinas and all their motor smoke.
On Christmas Eve morning some kind of human elf monster whore woke me up screaming hell at 5am. An unpaid hooker or surprise ladyboy rejected by some sex tourist prolly. I flipped the pillow to the col’ side and fell back asleep.
The screaming in the darkness down the hall at some point became calming. I dreamed and I dreamt of boats in space in regions with no pain.
I fucking hated the Philippines. I just wanted to be in bed, away from the fumes and the very sad hordes of dirty street people, especially the little ones, the little dirty street people, running up beside me beg-beg-begging for dat coin-coin-coin, coming way too close to my bags of Jolliebee and 7-Eleven snacks.
Tut, Tut, Tut.
It's a sad reality, the Philippines is a helicopter country. One to jump from spot to spot and avoid what's on the floor. I was already bored now, and tired, I wanted more than anything the end of December and the time until mid-January to pass and for me to be on that flight to Singapore, to smell that 'spicy perfume', eat kaya, see some old spots and some new ones before flying off to beautiful cold England.
I reserved one day to see the little of Manila of any interest.
In the morning I walked across the bridge and to the river ferry station. Apparently this plastic bathtub, thrown together, children's art supplies for windows ferry needed a passport to ride. I walked back to the hotel and got my passport for a ferry boat.
The river was a dirt brown. The brown of the Thames looks sugary, a delightful chocolate milk, this brown was a murky diarrhoea with deep trash lining the bowl.
As we crossed into the Malacañang Palace, the boat's engines throttled back and we floated quietly through the Philippine presidential bubble. I took out my phone to record, this precipitated a meltdown of the crew on board.
With the one exception of Malacañang, the poverty along the river was horrid. Further cementing the view that there is something deeply wrong with the Philippines.
The day finally came to leave Manilla for Tacloban. A city that most visitors to the Philippines don't even consider. I wanted to see it. The entire city was destroyed ten years ago, flattened by the strongest typhoon in history. That was more interesting to me than a polluted beach.
The plane to Tac met wall after wall of cloud.
I love the feeling of hitting the clouds. The anticipation.
The punch to the gut and the madness inside the plastic that follows.
At the airport a girl was waiting for me.
We squeezed into a jeepney full of Filipinos and Filipinas and rode to my hotel.
Tacloban City had an odd mix of highlights.
In terms of tourism, the two things it had going for it was its own destruction and General Douglas MacArthur.
After new years, me and the airport girl headed on jeepneys and tricycles to Palo to see the famous statue of MacArthur and Friends and the flood wall built to keep back the ocean after the typhoon.
We had sex in the afternoon and then I stopped messaging her and I didn't see her again.
I didn't dislike her, but in person there wasn't much there.
I had quite a few interesting women in Tac. A doctor working in the ICU, infectious diseases… she bought me a big packet of medicines as a gift, which was nice. Another was a virgin and then not a virgin. Fun stuff.
But it was time for a fairytale too. It had been a while since I wrote a fairytale.
She walked confidently through the dark parking lot. Hood up.
I stood on the balcony above the stairs.
'Blue shirt?' she messaged.
As we entered the shared space outside my room, I turned and looked at her.
It wasn't a 'love-at-first-sight WOWZERS, but it was one of those hard to describe moments, there was a pause in time. Some kind of realisation, a lost love in some other galaxy, some other timeline. It was a familiarity.
There was an elegance and ease to this hood girl that I rather enjoyed. She was also the best sex I'd had in a while, and even a contender for the top spot of all time.
Let that sink in.
A Contender For The Top Spot of All Time.
After HoodGirl left I ate some crisps, turned on the TV and began an evening pacing session.
The Man from U. N. C. L. E. was on and they were in room 304 and I was in room 304 and I first watched this movie in a cinema in Victoria, British Columbia and the woman in the film was called Victoria. Fun Stuff, Fun Stuff!
The last morning in Tacloban HoodGirl returned. Another session of top notch, super sex. Gold medalists. Well done us.
When we were finished, I think we both felt a little sad.
She zipped up her perfect brown tits behind her black hoodie and asked if I wanted to get lunch. I had time before the airport so I took her to KFC.
KFC was built for the romantic. A romantic like me.
When I got back to the table she asked if I ordered
I said yes
She had already ordered for both of us and paid for the meals. So I had two and I ate two.
An hour later we stood outside the catholic church digesting our chicken, the skies teasing rain.
She came to the airport with me.
I hadn't felt sad about a girl disappearing into the nothingness for years. But I felt a bit sad about it. Maybe I liked her. Maybe she was just great at sex. Maybe I should render her again.
I flew to Cebu on a propeller plane and left those thoughts behind.
But, then…
Cebu was melty-trash. Cebu was pus-shit.
I got off the bus and was walking the dark highway to my hotel when I fell into a storm drain.
I power-walked away with deep scratch-like cuts and the toes of my left foot nearly sheared off.
The main concern was rabies and then tetanus.
It all looked dirty.
I tore off my clothes and showered and soaped the injuries.
I get paranoid about these things, breaks to the skin. But I should. We all should. I carefully placed my broken toes into my stolen flip flops and went to the 7-Eleven at the corner of the street. I bought rubbing alcohol and felt better.
The next night some skank grabbed my cut up leg while I fucked her.
Foreign fluids on my dry blood. Oh no. Yuckies.
I stood in the shower, wall tap running on the worst of my gashes, broken shower head too.
The only nice place I'd been in this country was Tacloban. The only place I wanted to spend any more time here was Tacloban.
Thoughts of HoodGirl were starting to pop up.
Usually phone application girls are phone application girls. They come, they cum, they go. But HoodGirl was starting to be mythologised. A dangerous thing. So dangerous that after a night and a half in Cebu I booked a ticket back to Tac to see her again.
Because I wanted it. I wanted more of her. More high quality sex with something similar to feeling. More nights and mornings like those.
I moved to a new hotel and focused my thoughts on my return to Tacloban and finishing this giant trip in style.
I ticked off the few things I knew I wanted to see in the city and then that was that. Cebu was done.
I went back to stay the final night in the first hotel and saw a beautiful dead dog on the sidewalk.
My heart broke.
I didn't hate Cebu but it just wasn't the time. This wasn't our time, this time around. It started by falling into that storm drain and it ended with that dead dog. I made the right decision in leaving, in going back to what I wanted.
It was a risk though. Heading back to see a girl so soon after leaving can be romantic or doom anything further. I was confident I could turn things in my favour.
The risk ended in reward.
We watched Money Heist, fucked like the Earth was falling over and on the last full day before I left we went to her family home and made a Fillipino chicken dish.
Who knows why. Some people are special. Even if just for a little while.
I pulled her in for goodbye kisses and she left once more by jeepney.
Re-rendered. Re-vanished.
Spicy Perfume Land
The blades cut up the air and propelled me back to Cebu Island. We landed through fast dark, dirty clouds. It was airport life Cebu side for some hours and then airport life SG side for some hours more.
I knew what to expect in Singapore. But I still found novel magic.
Changi Airport goes so far in it's perfection that it's almost full circle and disgusting. Ya tryin' too hard, mate! But only almost. Changi is a palace of travel. A gilded home of the global nomad. It's an airport I'm always excited to land in and an airport I love spending hours and hours before finally making my way through immigration.
I know Singapore, I love Singapore.
The only thing I had itching at me to do this time around was the beaches of Sentosa.
The little train took me across the sea to the Little Red Dot's little blue paradise. Sentosa Island.
A former British military fortress.
A former Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
Once a fishing village.
Location of Donald John Trump’s and Kim Jong Un's first sexual encounter.
In 2014 I went to the aquarium here with an odd Finnish chef.
I hadn't been to the beaches though. And I wanted to go to the beaches.
They were the extreme of sterile. Sand and palms on a generation ship on its way to another galaxy.
Perfection in design and execution. With the one exception of the mosquitos by the bushes, it's a dream.
In the morning I packed up my small grey backpack, checked out and headed for the airport.
At Changi I ate tteokbokki fries, and drank spearmint tea. That night I flew back to England.
Asia Trip 7 was at least three years of life in two and a half months of actual time. Time travel. I love this life.