Not going to Dis(May)nilad

DONATION-RUN tour group True Manila’s philosophy is to share Manila to strangers without getting anything in return.

The Beatles, 1966. “It was a negative, very negative vibe the moment we got off the plane,” George Harrison says in an interview about the Marcos-snubbing blame game riot that kept them from coming back since. It was in this very airport, over 40 years later, at 2 a.m., that I watched my friend slowly walk into the black hole of air travel, somewhat relieved that the place he spent the least time in a two-week stay in the Philippines was Manila.

For travelers, Manila is a stopover, a gas station where you get your supplies and your last serves of urbanity before hitting a bleak stretch of rural roads. For locals, suggesting places outside Manila becomes a diversion: revering beauty pageant spots like Boracay and Siargao to push aside Manila’s fog-head oafishness, relieving us from the responsibility of over-explanation. Let’s get them out of Manila before they notice our postcards. After all, after the World War II, Manila was the next most destroyed city after Warsaw.

With Intramuros lost to an American bomb in the 1940s, our cultural-historical package has not become an old city restored but a Disneyland of franchises whose disposability can alienate even a Western backpacker who is used to value meals. Our efforts to conceal our lack of tourist spots sometimes fail and can’t be hidden by the comforts of Best Western or the mall and chain. As the world becomes a theatre playing Hollywood films and museums take international exhibits to local tourism brochures (the Titanic or “The Human Body” being tourist attractions wherever they travel), what have we left to offer?

If global cultural capital has scattered to large metropolises, does it mean we’re receiving the West’s discarded offal?

BBDO Guerrero’s campaign for the Department of Tourism (DOT) may have slipped past the cliff of overkill, but its spot on execution does teach us an important lesson: locals first. A user-generated waterfall of inside joke becomes a reassuring pool of collective sentiment. We aren’t pressured to namedrop Fort Santiago or Binondo—so it saves us from pretending we have one over the Sphinx. All we’re saying is that we’re pretty funny people.

And this lack of marketable tourism can be our strength: It’s our way, or the Edsa highway.

I chose to consult a converted local who hasn’t spent enough time here to witness the city’s transformations, who hasn’t been here long enough to criticize the hot pink overpasses one day then the next becomes unabashedly sentimental over it. I asked Emmanuel Natola, a 25-year-old Canadian now based in Manila, to tell me where would people take tourists for alternative shopping. After all, before he started taking Joanna Jesh bus lines and learning ways to use the word talaga in Taglish, he was a foreigner.

He laments that the more densely populated shopping areas famous for haggling have become “overexposed to foreigners, and now many shops there refuse to lower their prices, even for locals.”

Real deals, he tells me, are on Ongpin Street in Binondo. “The world’s oldest Chinatown is home to the metro’s best deals—along with pollution and claustrophobic bustle. It’s best if they pick out what they like and then you do the buying for them so that prices stay low,” says Emmanuel, who writes at negavibes.wordpress.com. “White men can’t jump; they also can’t haggle.”

He points out two places targeted at a demographic whose bearings of the world are guided by the bat sonar of Soundcloud, Vimeo and local bands: The Collective in Makati and Ronac Art Center in Quezon City—places that carry home-grown apparel brands like UNSCHLD.

Emmanuel suggests The Collective tenant Ritual, a responsibly sourced shop of local produce that sweats for the claim “Made in the Philippines.” “Their citronella both saves me from dive-bombing mosquitoes and doesn’t kill me with toxic chemicals.”

I think we’re getting into something here. So then I chose the next person, Clara Balaguer—who runs the Office of Culture and Design (OCD) (also at The Collective)—to list alternative tourist sites off the top of her head. During my recent interview with ceramicist Xavier Mañosa at OCD, Clara told me that she had taken him to a cemetery in a dumpsite (particularly the one near Kabihasnan road by Air Force One). Not long before that, she gave a visiting architect ideas by taking him to Philippine shanties. Her recommendations could make for a bag of travel books, but for now this is what she recommends.

The first is a musty piano bar called The Other Office in Mabini. “See Chinese businessmen belt out classics in a dusky bistro atmosphere,” she says, while I imagine blue neon lights, silhouettes and niche tourist appeal. Interesting.

From businessmen she moves onto “Dong Bei” dumplings: “The waitresses spend all day rolling little dumplings in the restaurant window. It’s Chinese food from the Muslim Chinese region so it’s nongreasy and very clean tasting.”

“A walk in the old railroad station ruins along Quirino Highway (right before the Nagtahan Bridge) [will] have [you] do some short trekking along the PNR railroad tracks to get there,” Clara says of her third recommendation, which really, is something “on the beaten track.”

“Beer and karaoke at Dampa sa Parañaque along Sucat Road: for provincial wet market fare and ubiquitous karaoke.”

But if tourists hike and scrape our knees over our native flora, then her metropolitan counterpart sounds a little bit hard for travel insurance to handle. Perhaps too hard to handle even for this column—but I can hint that it involves a mangrove island party and a boat ride with people you’ve just befriended.

Edwin Nombre, a supporting actor who now supports the alternative tour cause, has been running a donation-run tour group called True Manila since 1986—or, noting his age, since childhood, with the philosophy of sharing Manila to strangers without getting anything in return. He takes tourists by jeepneys to small urban-poor communities where they’re met by hundreds of kids. The donations don’t go to him but to the communities and the families that accommodate tourists over a homemade meal.

While True Manila’s efforts are valid and more than admirable, the jeepneys with which Edwin takes [the tourists] may not fully hold the “real Manila” answer. Neferti Tadiar once called Manila a “city of variegated interiors,” with our socioeconomic structure determining road and flyover access. As they say, different strokes for different folks.

If I have asked someone sitting beside me at a cafe or the person behind the counter, their answers would have been totally different. Before we keep our eyes and ears closed to the great but grating DOT campaign, I think it does tell us to be more creative of what we don’t have and therefore “have.” I realized that even if we don’t have the tourist magnets, we could fill travel books with our own valid tip-offs. Not having that heritage photo opportunity is okay. With my fear of showing the cracks of the city I love, I showed my friend too little of my city—and surely a city is worth more than just a thousand words.

Emmanuel writes unadulterated negavibes at negavibes.wordpress.com; Clara runs The Office of Culture and Design www.officeocd.com; Truemanila.com.