# The Philippines



## briancray (Mar 25, 2015)

So I decided to buy a cheap ticket to Manila, Philippines to check out Luzon Province. After squatting at the Kuala Lumpur Airport for 6 days and living at McDonald's I was eager to do some exploring. My flight got delayed two hours and I ended up arriving in Manila at about 2 AM. I tried crashing on the floor, but continually kept getting woken up by security guards until they kicked me out of the airport at 4 AM. The taxis outside tried to get me to pay for an un-metered ride to a "budget hotel" at 4 AM...I said fuck that and decided to walk. I only had 700 pesos on me and needed something for food at some point. So I started just walking aimlessly trying to find a spot to sleep. Manila is the filthiest, most dangerous city I have ever been to in my life as I would soon find out.

I kept getting hassled by taxis, tricycles and all different kinds of people for a few kilometers outside the airport because they all wanted to give me a ride. I just declined and kept walking in a zombie-like state from lack of sleep. A "travel agent" started following me. He was a 33 year old Filipino man with an ID card around his neck that looked fairly legit except for the fact that what travel agent walks the streets at 4 AM on a Wednesday? This guy, Eric, continued to follow me for the rest of the night. I tried explaining to him I wanted to just walk and didn't need his help, but he insisted on following me. This triggered a flag for me and I suspected something was up. We walked to this huge church, where to my surprise, people prayed at 5 AM on a Wednesday to Jesus. He took me to the Asean Mall and finally the deep sea by the coast. By this point we walked for a few hours and I still could not get away from this dude. The sun rose through the clouds and I tried to break away and get breakfast. Again, Eric followed me, we went to a street vendor in a busy part of the city. I ordered a rice dish and when it got time to pay I put a bill on the table. As one of the workers was about to come over and pick it up for payment he offered to take it up. Not really thinking about it I figured whatever. When I looked down to grab my pack the dude ran through the busy crowd of people and Jeepney's and I got stuck with the bill.

I didn't really mind though because had I slept that night he could have walked away with my pack or pulled a knife on me so I got him off my back. I spent the rest of the day just walking around aimlessly. I didn't know where the fuck I was going and just wanted to get out of Manila and start hitch hiking north to mountains I heard about.

I walked roughly 25 kilometers over the course of the next 8 to 10 hours, keep in mind, I never slept the night before. As I approached an alley way near Monumento I just missed a bus crash into a concrete telephone pole. News reporters were questioning the driver in Tagalog on live TV. I walked behind the camera and I guess I was on live television haha. I kept walking trying to find a place to squat because night approached and I was tired as fuck. There is literally no where to squat inside of Manila unless you want to bum it on the sidewalk. So many police and security guard any of the abandoned buildings and I couldn't walk on the NLEX because I got stopped by police so I ended up dragging on further and finally found a cheap motel called the Chill Motel to crash at (the second place of accommodation I've paid for on a 5-month trip in SEA).

I crashed and woke up late as hell around 11 AM. I was still really freaking tired, but I ended up walking down the road further and stopped at a gas station where I flew a sign that said "Baguio." The problem with this being a ton of people just came over and tried helping me pointing out the bus station was a few kilometers the other direction, which I already knew. After a half hour of trying to get away I realized this wouldn't work. I stopped a classy business man and ended up getting some clothes, lunch and directions to the best spot to hitch from right outside of Balintawak near the highway.

I stood there for four hours, flying a sign, trying to wave down vehicles or trucks, but none of them stopped and people ended up flocking to me again. Night was rolling in and there was no way in hell I wanted to stay another night in Manila. I ended up giving in and decided to take the bus. So I stood on the side of the highway on the sidewalk trying to wave down the Genesis buses that go to Baguio. Three buses went by, all in the left hand lane, over the course of two more hours (they were full). 

I met this dude named Welbur. A bleached mo-hawk he wore slicked back instead of spiked up, a few tattoos and blue painted toe nails. He seemed like an interesting guy so we stood around waiting for our buses. By this time the third bus had just passed and I practically gave up on getting out of this city. I jokingly blurted out that the next bus I was going to get on regardless of where it went as long as it wasn't Manila. His bus rolled up like 5 minutes later and he offered me a place to crash on the floor in Vizcaya.

We arrived super late and I immediately passed out despite the cock roaches roaming around on the floor...at this point I didn't really care. I woke up and found out it was his daughter's 4th b-day so I stuck around for the festivities, he showed me around town and his friends and I ended up getting drunk that night off Brandy and smoking a lot of Fortune Sticks (great name for cigarettes). In the morning he took me to the UV Express Service Van for Baguio. I took a 3-hour drive to Baguio through the mountains on the back roads and saw some of the most beautiful, undeveloped mountains in my lifetime. Tons of rice terraces, tiny valleys with nothing but river for miles and miles and a mixture of brown and green mountain peaks. The drivers of these vehicles are complete nuts, passing vehicles around winding turns on 6-10% grade climbs...but I arrived in one piece and ended up stumbling upon this park called Aguinaldo Park across from the university of Baguio.

This is where it gets even more interesting. So I sit down to bust open a can of mackerels and I notice these two punk-like kids hanging at the bottom of the steps in the park. The one dude signals me over pointing to his cigarette. Now I'm not even a smoker, but since I've been in Asia I smoke as it makes it easier to talk to people, if I need a light or bum a smoke it strikes up a conversation. So I walk over and set my pack down and ended up stumbling into the punk scene of Baguio. We started off listening to Punk music on our phones and they spanged up some money for this gin called Ginebra Sam Miguel. The cheapest shit you can drink in the Philippines...like 100 pesos or something for a bottle. I threw in some dough and we started drinking. It was 5 PM when we started. 

They ended up pulling out some weed and we started to hit their one-hitter. We got pretty lit and all of a sudden the other people in the park started doing a photoshoot. I'm talking like model-shit. This Brazilian Arab body builder takes off his shirt posing while smoking cigarettes and all these Korean guys are snapping photos with these expensive Nikon cameras. I could not stop giggling and neither could Zea or Yaya (two punk dudes). Then I turned around and noticed a very hot Korean chick, topless, posing in front of a beautiful blossoming vine of flowers. I caught a glimpse of a side boob, but it was just so fucking random and I couldn't stop laughing because we were all high and didn't know what the fuck was going on...they left as the sunset.

As the night continued on we just kept drinking. I didn't completely trust these dudes, but they seemed well enough that I continued drinking. More people showed up and we sat in a circle and drank, exchanged stories and showed tattoos. They talked about La Krshna religion and how they were "Vegetarians" aka Freegans or scavengers. I ended up finding out later that the food we had eaten while drinking was all scavenged from the trash.

We switched chill spots to a different park, which after drinking a shit ton of gin and trying to climb a gated fence out of the park ends up being a tough task. At this point I blacked out. I paced myself and I'm not quite sure how I blacked out, but everything is foggy from that point onward. I remember sitting at the second park, drinking in a circle with at least 12 punks. All of them with sleeves, half sleeves, or face tats of some kind. The one guy whose street name was, LA, ended up giving me a La Krshna necklace as a souvenir. 2 AM rolled around and we all got so drunk we took a taxi to Sharks place. We had like 12 people jammed in the tiniest room with two tiny boards on cinder blocks as couches and a small 24" tube television straight out of the 90s watching some cartoon in Tagalog. I passed out on the board and woke up the next day with all of my gear in the corner of his room and my jacket, but no phone. I have no idea what happened to it, but other shit was in the same pocket so someone walked off with it.

It was 4 PM at this point lol...we slept the whole day and I was so hungover I could not move or eat. We went back to the same park and they were back at it again. I passed, I'm not an alcoholic, but I'll drink now and then. Zea wanted me to leave my shit there to go meet the skaters, but after losing my phone I took my shit with me. Met the skaters of Baguio, chilled there for a bit and the rest of the crew was gone. I ended up crashing in the bushes in Aguinaldo Park.

Morning came I checked out Mines View Park, The Botanical Gardens, The Mansion and a few parks by randomly walking after taking a Jeepney into the city. I walked around until it was dark and took a Jeepney to Wright Park and walked down the road crashing in front of a sign, "No Trespassing Govt Property." I didn't sleep at all that night and it was cold as fuck. Something I ate off the street gave me food poisoning. Fiddling around with my gear without a headlamp in the dark I ended up getting bit by something on the back of my neck, a tiny spider. The whole night I had diarrhea, and could not get warm at all. It sucked balls. Welbur invited me back to Vizcaya earlier in the day when I touched base with him on Facebook.

I woke up early morning at sunrise and hopped the brick wall. The first jeepney that drove by I waved down and they took me right to Baguio Plaza which ended up being exactly where I needed to go to get to Vizcaya. I tried sleeping on the UV Express Van with no luck and felt sick as shit. My stomach in knots, and ass raw from diarrhea.

I took a tricycle to his little village outside of Solano called Curifang and ended up passing out on his floor for hours. Over the course of the next week I suffered from diarrhea, stomach pain, and now it has passed, but I'm severely constipated. It felt like getting stabbed with knives in my abdomen for a while, but now I'm just bloated. I ended up meeting the nicest people ever here and gained a few village friends out of it. I'm kickin' it with him until the 29th before I head out to Batangas and then America, but it's been a fun ride despite all the craziness.

I ended up hitching a few rides with them to Senora Falls on Mt. Palali where we went cliff jumping. I saw my first leech there and learned about the AEIOU Religion. We also ended up going to his brother's wife's parents place in Isabela where I jumped in a filthy pond they owned on their farm and caught Tilapia with my hands as they drained it with a generator. Mud up to my thighs and all over my chest and face next to a drunk Filipino putting live fish in his mouth and swimming in this shit like a little kid. Despite the stomach pain through all of this I still managed to have a great time and it was a great experience catching the fish, gutting them, cooking them and then eating them. Tomorrow we are cooking a pig for his brother's going away party as they leave for Calgary Canada and then we will split ways. If I didn't meet this guy randomly on the bus I don't know how I would have managed with this food poisoning over the past week.

It's been an interesting trip so far, but the Philippines was probably some of the craziest shit despite not really hitch hiking much.


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## Tude (Mar 25, 2015)

quite the adventure!!


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## briancray (Mar 25, 2015)

Yeah the whole 5-month trip has been an adventure. I just haven't been able to write much since I've been moving around a lot. I've been sick the past week though and going crazy being stationary so I figured I'd write about my experience here. A lot of interesting stuff happened in Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore as well. I'll leave that for another time though


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