Week 9 -- Heaven and Hell

I started writing another update about the debaucheries of Manila, but the topic has, frankly, worn thin, and I felt disgusted enough with myself to start over. It will suffice to say that one of my friends from Menlo, Steve Golod, showed up here last Thursday for a manic weekend in all the hotspots: Jools, Athena, V, Greenbelt, et cetera, and that he will validate all my claims about this great city. At 6AM on Tuesday, two hours before his flight, he stumbled, completely hammered, into my room (where I was fast asleep awaiting work at 9AM), vowing gravely that his ticket must be extended, that he did not want to leave. That was about the last I saw of him.

One Hundred Islands

Steve and I traveled to the 100 Islands Region four hours north of Manila. Many Americans I have talked to find it difficult to believe that one hundred deserted islands exist anywhere in the world, let alone in one country, in one chain, only a few hundred kilometers from the capital city. Traveling here is really quite distinct from the California mentality, which distinguishes trips to exotic locales as more than weekend fare – to go to Tahoe or Yosemite or L.A. or Mexico is a big deal; it requires planning, scheduling, reservations, friends, credit, notification, not to mention transportation. In Manila someone just says “lets get out of town” and you hop in a car with a couple thousand pesos, and you’re there.

This, of anywhere I have been in the world, approximated Eden; I will let the pictures speak for themselves. One rents a boat and is left to explore any island in the chain – each one an uninhabited, volcanic formation lipped with sandy beaches and crowned by jungle. Ironically, after five or six hours in the chain, we realized that life on a sandy beach surrounded by palm trees is actually a very boring affair, and we packed up and went back to Manila. But that sensation of riding out – the wind off the boat, the spray, the smokestacked cost receding behind, the open islands ahead – that is the true heaven of the south Pacific. It is not the hours that follow, and it is a very fleeting thing, but it is worth the journey. People often romanticize the castaway, but in reality he is a very listless man; he watches for the ship his entire day – he is driven only by ennui and the inflated faith in a home that exists only in his mind. But on those first hours in the wild he is truly Adam, cut from every responsibility and worry, released only to care about the sun, surf, and sand. And getting drunk to chase hookers around a bachelor party.


Unnamed Island, 100 Islands Region


Steve ponders starboard


"HECCCTORRRR!!!!"



Smoky Mountain

There is in Manila a placed called Smoky Mountain. It is, by one story, a dumping site for organic and metal waste in Tondo Sector 7 on the north side of the city. Its location moves every few years, but only by a few blocks; sometimes it moves several feet a day. Sometimes it collapses and kills a few of the thousands of squatters that crawl through it like perpetual fleas, picking through the rubbish for a few pesos of scrap metal, erecting shanties from old bins and tires, shitting, fucking, murdering, and creating every kind of misery. Smoky Mountain is Hell, pure and simple. It is the most toxic, burning place that I have ever been, and it is one of the only things in the world that has struck me as truly evil.

I am not a moralist. I do not believe in a metaphysical right and wrong; I do not believe in a deific God with any interest in mankind; in fact, I do not believe in any good but the elimination of ignorance (even this, for me, is a questionable good if hastily completed or in the hands of the wrong people).

Smoky Mountain is evil because it is a foundry of the worst kind of ignorance: it makes whoever goes there ignore the human condition. I did not pity the people I saw living there – revulsion is a more appropriate term, although contempt and hatred come close. I wanted to burn the entire place to the ground. There were no humans there. The creatures living in the trash had been reduced so far from their origin that they were beneath dogs, beneath rats. Covered in shit, shambling monsters lurch around through the rubble, playing basketball, squatting in groups, plucking lice from their hair, speaking in guttural tongues. They stare at you like you are insane.

Even this is bearable. Then you roll down your window to take a picture, and the horrible, raking stench of a thousand bags of flesh, shit, and bile moldering in that ancient sun blows eagerly off the Mountain into your lungs. In an instant, you realize what Hell is – the hot wind blows all year; it never gets cool, and it is always humid; it runs miles and miles around the Mountain; it creates cancer, infection, and pollution; it renders all water impotable and all food spoiled; it kills by the hundreds; it drives the people who live there, day by stinking day, year by fetid year, utterly mad. It convinces you that the things living there are not humans, but demons – and that is the evil in Smoky Mountain. I lasted about three seconds before wanting to vomit.


Will gather dung for food


About as close as you can get without puking


Rubble tilling: consumer surplus at its finest