Zen, Sex Tourism, and My Toenails

When my friends and I started looking for a vacation over our Chinese New Year break places like Thailand and Singapore came to mind. When we realized that the entire damn continent travels during our break we found the cheapest place to go was the Philippines. I’m not gonna lie, I had no previous desire to go there, and hadn’t really heard anything encouraging about the country. But, it was cheap, and I wasn’t about to pass up another stamp on my passport.

If you haven’t noticed from my previous posts, I enjoy planning trips out to the very last detail. For some reason I decided that my enthusiastic friends would be better suited to figure everything out. We thus landed around four AM at Cebu International Airport without a damn clue as to what we were doing or where we were really going.

Our enterprising cab driver paid off the police to fit all of us into his cab, and took about five minutes to convince us to go to another island than we had previously decided on. As we had no idea what we were doing, we thus began an epic three-hour cab ride to the island of Malapascua.

Our first cab ride was without a doubt my favorite part of the trip. Allow me to set the stage. It was five in the morning. One of my friends was turning 21 that day. Our cab driver was also a drag racer (and drove like one as he utilized both lanes to speed around cars). At the driver’s suggestion we were drinking Filipino beer. The sun was rising over the Pacific. I was the only person not squeezed into the back seat. The fresh, albeit smoky, air was billowing in through the open window. And, a collection of Queen’s greatest hits was playing. It was one of the few moments of Zen in my life in which I can say I was truly happy.

Upon arriving at the northern tip of Cebu Island we started a weird process of negotiating the time and fare of our boat ride to the island of Malapascua. We ended up paying about $2.50 USD for the half hour trip, and wouldn’t you know it I managed to get a little sun burned at 9 AM. I looooove being white.

Finding a hotel was just as odd as the boat. Our cab driver (who came along) was obviously leading us to all the places he would receive a commission on, and we eventually decided on a decent place with gorgeous views of the beach. It was also $10 USD a night ☺

The next few days were spent doing the usual touristy crap like snorkeling, swimming at the beach, and enjoying cheap everything. That being said, I did overpay for a bottle of SPF 50 sunscreen from Germany that I was constantly lathered in thanks to my awesome Northern European genes.

I’m not at all a beach person, and my general view is that they are hot, full of people with darker skin than me, and essentially where land meets water. Gimme snow and asphalt any day. Despite my Debbie Downer point of view, a few things about the place were really cool. To begin, our hotel was next to a small cemetery. Usually that’s no big deal, except that there was a skull and bones in a bucket that was right next to the path we took to the beach. Far from being weirded out, we took pictures with the remains, and will probably rot in hell for it. (We tried to take pics at night too but realized the insane amount of cockroaches and ran away like girls)

We found a great place for dinner at another resort nearby. Beer there is about a dollar, and the waitresses learned our names (that is when they weren’t drinking and playing foosball). My favorite was the one who called me Tommm tomtomtomtomtommmm. On the food note, I had one of the best seafood dishes I have ever tasted in my life. I am a total food snob, and thanks to my wonderful parents I have the experience to back it up. The Filipino dish of Kinilaw blew me away. The dish is the Philippines’ take on ceviche. Essentially it is raw fish (local barracuda in my case) that has been cubed and marinated in vinegar, lemon, ginger, onions, and a variety of other peppers and local spices. Sitting at the seaside restaurant, with my feet in the sand and a cold Coke I could eat Kinilaw forever.

The island of Malapascua is tiny, and thus has no ATMs (the island is also run on a generator that needs to ‘rest’ everyday according to a sign in our hotel). Since I still did not have a new credit card from my incident in Beijing this did not matter to me, except that I essentially lived off of other people’s cards. As it turns out, every one of us budgeted teeeeerribly for the trip, and we had to constantly watch what we spent. This sucked since everything in the Philippines is dirt-cheap. We did manage to have a good time though, and after two days we were all ready to go back to the city of Cebu.

Cebu is the fifth largest city in the Philippines, and is among the sketchiest places I have ever been in my life. We found a nice cheap hotel in the center of the city and basked in the glory that is air conditioning upon our arrival. After a few hours of resting (and introducing my best friend from France to the amazingness that is the show Cops) we tried to get some dinner. Our concierge recommended we go to the Ayala Mall and nowhere else. Apparently the city is too dangerous for the likes of us to walk around finding food.

I must say I agreed completely. Thinking back to our cab rides we saw a country and walked a fine line between third world and developing. I saw people riding on top of speeding buses, little girls pumping water out of the ground, locals herding cows everywhere, and a duo on a mini bike that had dead chickens hanging from both sides. When I asked our driver about the small fires everywhere he replied that people there simply burn their garbage to get rid of it. In the short time I had been in the city I realized that it was not a place for my skinny white self to wander around at night (that is of course unless I was going between strip clubs).

The mall was much like those in the US, except armed guards were at every entrance, and you have to go through metal detectors. NBD. I got a t-shirt that says The Filipino is Worth Dying For,’ some shitty mall food and went back to our hotel. That night we all discovered what drives the economy of Cebu. SEX TOURISM.

The tourist channel on our TV presented us with an interesting array of ads for the strip clubs/brothels that are everywhere. Each one spoke of gorgeous girls, dancing and showed one ubercreepy overweight white guy drinking and smiling with Filipino women that could have been his daughters. As though this wasn’t creepy enough, we had the archetype of a gross white sex tourist staying in our very hotel! This guy was gross in every sense of the word. Old, fat, balding, pasty, and in desperate need of a good back waxing is what comes to mind when I think about this guy. He stared at us a lot, and my friend overheard him asking the concierge, ‘I mean, like, if I offered you a million Pesos… You’d have sex with me right?’ Guys like this were everywhere, and I felt truly sorry for the your Filipino women who live in their midst.

The rest of our time in Cebu was filled with a smorgasbord of interesting activities. We went to a beautiful Taoist temple where the guards managed to stop even me from taking pictures. Our cab driver (who we called for all our adventures) took us on a hunt for a cockfight, but unfortunately none were going on that night. He tempted us with an illegal drag race later that night, but it was too late for our taste. Instead we got to meet his racing friends, and we got to check out some illegal racing bikes.

There is a mountain that overlooks the city, and we spent our last night at its peak. For a few dollars we had our fill of grilled sausages, pork, beer, and coconut ice cream. It was almost as satisfying and relaxing as the bottle of rum we had later that night that cost approximately $1.50 USD. I was shocked that cheap alcohol could taste so good, and equally upset that we have nothing like it in the US.

The day of our flight we had a few hours to kill before we went to the airport, so naturally we had a spa day. For a few bucks people got massages, manicures, pedicures, and their nails done. I had two women give me a pedicure. I had my toenails painted bright red and got some sweet ghetto nail art added. I know the women were making fun of my because at one point I laughed when they laughed. All of the sudden it was silent and she asked, ‘You understand Tagalog? Do you know what (some word I don’t know) means? I’m sorry!’ Obviously I’m at a point in my life where I really don’t care what other people think, and I strutted out of the hotel in flip-flops with the prettiest feet in town.

We named our trip back The Thrilla In Manila, because we had a three-hour layover in the notoriously dangerous city. My roommate and I were not satisfied with the airport food, and left everyone else to get the golden arches across the street. This was more difficult than anticipated as we had to walk through a sketchy airport parking lot, up an exit ramp, sprint across a few lanes of a highway and skirt a construction site to reach our salvation. It was totally worth it. I met THE most enthusiastic workers I have ever seen, and had a meal that hit the spot in ways that are almost inappropriate to describe.

Back in the airport we had to pay a second ridiculous ‘gate fee’ to access our gate, and went to the duty free zone to try and find a bottle of liquid fun to kill the remaining time before our flight. We all ended up with our own bottles (I got an awesome bottle of Absolut that is wrapped in a dominatrixesque leather case), and spent so much time debating what to get that we ended up drinking nothing.

The trip was an interesting experience to be sure, but I don’t think I’ll be going back to the Philippines anytime soon. If anyone out there needs a crazy cab driver, a sex bar in Cebu or the location of a good place to enjoy sex and slum tourism please lemme know. I’m all over it.

P.S. Something everyone sees in the Philippines are the ladyboys. Its pretty much what it sounds like. Men dressed as women in questionable stages of sex changes roam the islands offering their ‘services’ to foreigners like myself. The closest I came to a ladyboy was in Malapascua. I was walking back to my hotel with my roommate Nikesh using a flashlight to guide the way (since obviously there are no lights at night), and a group of people walked past us. One of them reached out and touched Nikesh’s shoulder. In a very feminine voice said hello, but then in a voice reminiscent to a badass trucker offered ‘blowjob?’ We felt sufficiently awkward, and politely declined.

P.S.S. All of Asia seems to be obsessed with karaoke, or KTV as its called here. I expected that before I came, but was mystified by the phenomenon of people getting beaten and even killed for singing My Way by Frank Sinatra. I don’t know what Filipinos have against one of my favorite songs by Ol’ Blue Eyes, but they apparently go ape shit over anyone singing this song. I asked our cabbie about it, and he clearly knew what I was talking about. Yet, he suddenly lacked the English to explain why it happened. I still don’t know why it happens, but I mentally filed it under ‘Weird Shit I See In Asia That Defies Logic.’