A tour in Manila

I slept pretty well, probably thanks to the ear plugs, and woke around seven ready to see what Manila had to show us. I really felt the benefit of those couple of nights in Abu Dhabi as I had no sense of jetlag at all, despite being eight hours ahead of UK time.

Now it was daylight we were able to look out of our tenth floor window, but if we’d been hoping for a view (I had) we were to be disappointed!

We had breakfast in the hotel’s buffet restaurant, which was mixed – sweetened apple juice (yuck!], OK muesli, nice croissant, OK coffee. We changed some money at reception and were ready and waiting when Frank, our guide for the day, arrived just before nine. Our driver for the tour was George. We headed out into the often manic Manila traffic, with cars, motorbikes (many motorbikes!), jeepneys and more all jostling for an inch of space on the road.

The American Cemetery and Memorial

Our first stop was supposed to be the Ayala Museum but it didn’t open until ten so meanwhile we went to visit the US war cemetery, the largest outside the US and the second largest anywhere. It was very peaceful after the city streets and being on a hill, a little cooler. We saw the maps outlining all the major battles of WW2 as well as the names of the missing engraved around the memorial.

The Ayala Museum

Back at the Ayala Museum, now open, we toured most of the galleries. My favourites were those on the top floor, with pre-Hispanic gold and indigenous textiles. The Gold of Ancestors collection was particularly impressive, reminding me a lot of the wonderful Museo del Oro in Bogota, although not quite on that scale. It houses more than one thousand archaeological gold objects from the various cultures that flourished before the Spanish colonisation of these islands.

Many of the treasures come from the Surigao collection. A sign in the museum described how this was found:

In 1981, heavy machinery operator Edilberto "Berto" Morales was part of a team working on a government irrigation project in the hamlet of Magroyong, barrio San Miguel, in Surigao del Sur province in northeastern Mindanao. Morales reported for work on April 27, not realising that day would dramatically change his life. The team had been moving soil down from a nearby mountaintop. As Morales operated his motorised scraper to shift and redistribute the soil, a coworker called his attention to a glistening object in the mud, warning that it might damage
the scraper. Morales recounts that it looked like a ‘helmet’ which appeared to be made of gold. This later turned out to be a round golden bowl.

Suspecting the presence of more valuable objects, he shooed away his coworker. Left on his own, Morales combed a stretch of more than three-hundred feet from ten o'clock in the morning to five o'clock in the afternoon. By the end of the day, he had recovered about twenty-two pounds of ancient gold jewellery. The cache included an amazing necklace that measured about thirteen feet in length, which he nicknamed kwintas ni nanay (mother's necklace). Morales recalls retrieving a rectangular, openwork vessel, woven waistbands, gold bangles set with semi-precious stones, several fragments of neck ornaments, granulated funnel-shaped finials popularly called pipa (pipe), cord weights, twisted-wire leg hoops, and a dagger of solid gold.

The embroidered gold cloth details are from, as a sign in the museum explains:

a bed canopy known locally as ol-ol. Floating over the bedstead of a sultan in his torogan (his residence), the ol-ol was best viewed when sitting or lying down on the bedstead and looking up. This particular ol-ol is unusual and significant. It depicts a representation of Al Buraq, the mythical beast who figures prominently in the Night Journey of the Prophet Muhammad PBUH. …

In this depiction, only Buraq is shown. In other traditions, the prophet is shown mounted on Buraq. It is unusual in Islamic art to see representations with human and animal figures. In this Maranao representation, the mythical mount Buraq, half woman and half beast, is flying over the garden of Paradise of birds, deer, flowers, and trees under the stars and the moon. On the lower right side is an archer with a bow raised. This depiction of Al Buraq with flora and fauna is reminiscent of scenes in Persian paintings.

Lower down we saw the work of a twentieth century Philippines artist, Fernando Zóbel, some of which I liked, and a series of dioramas showing scenes from the history of the islands, which were well done but seemingly interminable in number! Actually there were ‘just’ sixty, which for me was probably about forty too many. I confess that I drifted past many of them, not taking them in fully if at all. But I did pause at those I found more interesting and managed to capture some by pressing my camera against the glass in front of them to minimise reflections. My photos therefore are of small sections of the full dioramas.

Intramuros

By the time we left the museum it was around midday so Frank proposed lunch. We drove to the old centre of the city, Intramuros, where a buffet in the popular tourist restaurant Barbara’s was included in our tour. Neither of wanted to eat a lot but we took some salad items, and I later went back for a small dessert of flan con leche. Musicians were wandering the tables playing an odd assortment of songs, from La Bamba to La Vie en Rose!

While we were in the restaurant there was the first of several heavy rainstorms, so we felt we had timed the meal well. When we emerged it was to find the rain all but stopped so we were ready to explore Intramuros.

The name Intramuros means ‘within the walls’ or ‘inside the walls’, for this is the small historic walled area where the city began. Any settlement beyond its fortifications was considered to be extramuros, a separate town or community. Many of the buildings in Intramuros were badly damaged or destroyed at the end of WW2, when the Americans battled to liberate Manila from Japanese occupation. The Japanese army retreated here and was heavily shelled by US troops. At the end of the battle only 5% of the buildings here were left standing, more than 16,665 Japanese were killed, and over 100,000 Filipino men, women and children died too.

Consequently the historical structures we visited here were nearly all either reconstructions or complete rebuilds. Just next to Barbara’s restaurant is Casa Manila, a copy of an 1850s colonial house constructed in the 1980s. It serves as a museum depicting the lifestyle of an affluent Filipino family during the late Spanish colonial period. The interior décor of the house demonstrates the typical tastes of the late 19th century when furniture and furnishings were sourced from Europe and China.

As we toured the house Frank talked about how the rooms would have been used. On the lower floor we saw the despacho or office where the owner would conduct business. Up an impressive stairway there is a series of grand reception rooms where he and his family would receive guests (the caida or antesala and beyond that the sala). There were also bedrooms, including two for the children (the boys’ overlooking the street, the girls’ a more secluded courtyard) and the kitchen and servants’ areas. Photos were allowed throughout but not always easy to capture in sometimes cramped corners and with other visitors ‘spoiling’ the historic effect.

Church and cathedral

The only church to have survived World War Two, San Augustin, is also near here so we went in for a quick look around. The church is UNESCO listed and is one of the few Baroque churches in the Philippines. It was the third church to have been built on this site and was completed in 1607, making it the oldest stone church in the country. The church has a museum of religious art, but we skipped that having spent a long while at some other sites.

Instead we walked along some of the streets to reach the cathedral, properly known as the Minor Basilica and Metropolitan Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, was destroyed during the battle, so today’s is a 1950s reconstruction of the previous building dating from 1879. Not realising this at first, I was struck immediately by the contrast and vibrancy of the modern stained-glass windows, which I loved.

With the exception of the glass the current building is a close copy of the previous one I believe. And it is the eighth cathedral to stand here, each in turn adapting the style of the previous to fit the taste of the age in which it was built. Why so many iterations of the same building? One word: earthquakes. While it was war that destroyed cathedral number seven, and fire that destroyed the first, the others were all lost to earthquake damage.

Fort Santiago

Out last stop on the tour was to be Fort Santiago, a short walk away. This was built to protect colonial Manila from attack via the Pasig River. As we walked there were some spots of rain in the air again, which soon after we entered the fort became a torrential downpour. Fortuitously there is a small room here showing a film about the history of Intramuros which provided us with somewhere to wait out the worst of the downpour. We saw how the fort and most of the surrounding area was bombarded by US forces during the Battle of Manila and how it had since been partially rebuilt. Many parts however still stand in ruins, including various storehouses and the former American Barracks which once held the Filipino president Elpidio Quirino prisoner.

One of the barracks has however been restored and today serves as a museum and shrine dedicated to José Rizal, one of the Philippines’ national heroes. I confess I knew nothing about him prior to visiting this museum, but here we learned how his writings had inspired the Filipino people to rebel against the Spanish colonial rule. He was imprisoned in this building and here was tried before a court-martial for rebellion, sedition and conspiracy, and convicted on all three charges. He was sentenced to death, a sentence which was carried out by a Filipino firing squad (with regular Spanish Army troops standing ready to shoot them if they should fail to carry out the execution).

The museum tells Rizla’s story through various artefacts such as letters, clothing, and even one of his vertebrae bearing the mark of a bullet. The room where he was held prisoner has been reconstructed as has the room of his trial.

The rain held off long enough for us to take a few photos in the grounds and even to feel some warm sun, before starting again as George drove us back to the hotel. We said our goodbyes and thank yous to him and to Frank and had a couple of hours chilling in our room.

The Filling Station

In the evening we went to the Filling Station, an over the top US 1950s diner themed restaurant a few blocks from our hotel. OK we were in the Philippines and should perhaps have been sampling our first Filipino dishes, but we had plenty of time ahead of us to do that and this looked like exactly our sort of place, which indeed it was. We loved the décor, with so much to look at in every jam-packed corner.

We enjoyed the burgers, the beers and a shared ice cream sundae (though the latter didn’t quite match the quality of the main courses). And we enjoyed watching the wait staff, dressed in a variety of costumes that we at first filed to make the links between, when they paused their regular duties to give an animated rendition of a medley of Village People favourites!