1995 Range Rover P38 4.6 HSE - Cool Running

Okay, you asked for it.

First a little background. I started coming to the Philippines and Tondo specifically around eight or nine years ago, mainly for the Sto. Niño (pronounced Santo Ninio) festival with the new girlfriend, who was born there. Since then, we’ve bought a house, with a small shop attached for the family and as we have now moved to Manila the missus has two houses there that she rents rooms out in, a water purification shop and a rice business. Consequently, I know it reasonably well, probably better than most “foreigners” and maybe a good few Filipinos too! I haven’t used many pictures as the LfM is privately circulated and the pics I use are probably copyrighted not for public display. Mine were lost in a computer crash a few years ago, must get some more. Just type “Tondo, Manila” into Google Images if you want to see. I started writing the "Letter from Manila" in 2012, for my mates and family around the world. This is an excerpt and no, they're not all this serious! 

Anyway, without further ado, I give you…

Letter from Manila – Special Christmas Tondo Edition

Okay, so I was asked a while back by one of our readers what Tondo was actually like, as opposed to the slightly fluffy, romanticised version that often appears in the LfM. So here we go, a short, nitty-gritty, no-holds barred, White Guy’s view. Possibly a more serious than normal version of the “Letter” about what is without doubt the most crowded and reputedly, most violent part of the great conglomeration that makes up Metro Manila.

If it’s slightly disjointed, I make no apologies; it’s a mind blowing place and that makes it difficult for an outsider like yours truly to keep things on the straight and narrow. This will probably wind up like its subject, unplanned and unstructured. I’ll try to keep impersonal, but probably fail miserably; it’s just not somewhere you can remain apart from, so please bear with me.

Tondo – that jewel in Manila’s CROWN. I seem to remember calling it the Venice of Manila at some point, due to the similar predilection to smell and the crumbling state of the buildings. This isn’t strictly fair. There are no Italians in Tondo. Not live ones anyway.

Think of all those documentaries you’ve seen featuring the Favelas in Brazil, Villas Miseria in Argentina, the Barrios de invasión in Colombia and you’re starting to get the picture. Now, of course, not all of Tondo is like this, but a hell of a lot of it is. Shacks built from corrugated iron, tyres and pallets lean up against the more solid buildings, perched atop each other and wherever there’s room, there’s a shanty. On first glance, it could appear to you to be home to millions of people, and you’d be nearly right. The City of Manila (as opposed to Metro Manila which comprises Manila and the 15 surrounding cities) has a population heading towards 2 million and, because of its small size, is the most densely populated city in the world. Tondo, one of its 16 districts, at only around 9sqkm, is home to about 38% of that total number which makes it the most heavily populated place on the planet. See? It is better than other places at something, even if it’s only overcrowding.

Dylan Thomas, in “Under Milkwood” evocatively described the sea at night around his small Welsh town of Llareggub, as “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack”. He should have stopped drinking for half an hour and come here, it could equally apply to the sea by Tondo at bleedin’ midday. But I digress.

Tondo is a place apart. Within, yet somehow without, Manila. One of the oldest parts of the city and across the river from the original Spanish fort of Intramuros, which it predates, it sits at the northern end of the metropolis nestling up to Manila North Cemetery. It is also the location of the city’s main slaughterhouse, Manila North Harbour and what was the largest landfill site in the Philippines, the romantic sounding and now closed, Smokey Mountain, which was once home to some of the worst of the worst slums occupied, then, by some 30,000 people. Yup, that’s thirty thousand living on a rubbish tip. So to sum up, a lovely location.

Tondo is also home to one of the oldest and, amazingly, most visited churches in the Philippines, that of Sto Niño, which also gives its name to the completely alcoholic, not-to-be-missed festival held in every third weekend of January. Originally built between 1611 and 1695, it has suffered its fair share of destruction from earthquakes, the Japanese and the Americans – who between them generally did a lot of destructing when they were last here. The present building was completed after the Second World War and inside, as is normal here, is opulent to the point of gaudy, presumably to keep the uneducated population in awe and stop them from asking too many uncomfortable questions about birth control.

Other Manila-ites – if that’s their proper name – avoid Tondo where possible. When you talk to them, they all seem to know someone who knew someone whose cousin’s friend went there once and never came back. There could be some truth in there, but if you believe all the stories, the rest of Metro Manila would be completely de-populated and Tondo full of corpses. However, given the traffic in Makati and the fact I can walk down the lovely Tagumpay Street swilling a cold one without falling over bodies, this is obviously not the case. However, the stories are believed and so Tondo is generally shunned by the rest of the city and probably by some of the very people who could do the most good here by bringing jobs and opportunity to the area. As a consequence, both city and federal governments seem merely to pay Tondo lip service as well, and it was only a short couple of years ago that 24/7 clean running water finally became available to some. Prior to that, if you were connected to the mains, you got supply only two hours a day, some days and no choice about the colour. A trickle of water from the tap was a signal to fill every barrel and bucket around and it’s amazing how quickly you can get through 50 gallons of the stuff. Power showers were right out. Even now, those away from mains water still use hand pumps and get their slightly revolting liquid from wells, presumably bored decades ago into the Pasig River water table, more of which later.

The streets are narrow, crowded, noisy and the centre of the Tondo universe. Everything happens alfresco. Indoors is for sleeping, outside is for living! Cooking, weddings, eating, funerals, family parties, drinking, children playing, festivals, arguments, canoodling, fights, the whole nine yards take place in full view. There are no secrets here, nothing hidden, what you see is what you get. A true people watchers paradise.

Public healthcare in Tondo is a fine oxymoron. About once a year, a clinic is set up in the basketball court across the road from our house. A real one-stop shop. You can get your baby, granny and even the dog looked over at the same time. Everything from barbers, to doctors, dentists, massage and a vet. All free…unless you actually need something. As ever, babies outnumber ants here and there are millions of them turn out. This being the Philippines, nothing happens quietly so, rather bizarrely, there is a disco in the middle of all this as well. Just the place for boys to meet girls with the result of yet more babies. I know of one mother-to-be who’s just about to turn eleven, but at least the doctors here will never be out of work.

The public hospitals are somewhere you get carried from as it’s unlikely you’ll ever walk out and you certainly wouldn’t voluntarily walk in. With no glazed windows, the wards are full of mosquitos and flies crawling everywhere after blood. Beds are so crammed together that visitors have to stand at the end, along with the cockroaches. The patient has only a tatty sheet as a cover and no pillow unless a relative brings one. The dying lie next to the living – a bit like the squatters in the cemetery really. You provide your own food and medicine is available on a pay-as-you-drip basis. No pay? No pill. Organ sales were banned in the Philippines in 2009 but still the hospitals get patients who have flogged a kidney turning up when things have gone a bit wrong, must be desperate. Most people in Europe will generally agree that they don’t like the smell of hospitals. Try one here and get ready to revise those opinions. The staff do their best but with virtually zero funding, what more can they do? And yes, I lost two potential God-children (twin girls) in a place like this, we were in KL and no-one thought to tell us until we arrived too late. The staff were so busy delivering live babies that the two little bodies had been left on the bed with their Mother until we could get there and have them properly removed for burial. The moral? Don’t get sick with no cash!

Public transport, as most of us know it, is pretty non-existent in Tondo, the streets are too small for buses and very few have a private car, so the main way of getting around is by trike, a contraption made by bolting a sidecar onto either a reinforced BMX cycle or, if you’re posh, a motorbike and in which you pay a few Peso to ride. Oh, and Jeepneys. Go down to the square outside Sto Niño and it’s solid Jeepneys, sitting in a huge, diesel smoke belching jam, whilst trikes, spitting two stroke fumes, scuttle in and out carrying everything from your old mum, coconuts and steel bar, to what looks like a precariously balanced ton of rice. It literally does make your eyes water.


A Tondo Trike. Guess who used to own this one? The money it earned fed a family of six and sent two kids to school. We’ve still got one, but upgraded to four stroke powwwwarrrr!

And the people? Who lives in this place? What are they like? Well, without making sweeping generalisations, I’ve met some of the nicest, kindest (they are great believers in karma) and most fun loving people ever in Tondo. And the noisiest. There’s a huge sense of community here and yes, there’s a fair few scoundrels, footpads, ruffians and general bad ba5tards, but on the whole, it’s 24/7 party town, or would be given the money. Many places I’ve been where large numbers of poor congregate, I’m thinking Mexico City, bits of Jamaica, and parts of New York here, seem to have a slightly menacing undercurrent of violence, especially towards a foreigner. It’s not always blatant, but always there. In Tondo, I get nothing of the sort and I tend to stand out as the White Guy. That said, it’s hardly likely to feature on any travel programmes any time soon. In the main, people have nowt, but they do like to have fun and an excuse for breaking out the Red Horse and a videoke machine is never far away. There’s no gangs hanging around street corners or drive by shootings (no cars, remember?) and I’ve hardly ever seen any trouble even under the most excessive of alcoholic provocation. Handbags at dawn stuff yes, serious damage? No. I took my son and his girlfriend there earlier this year and we spent two days being followed everywhere. Why? She is a blonde with blue eyes and this had never been seen outside American films. A real celebrity!

This is not to say that Tondo is all sweetness and light, in just November this year there were 5 reported fatal shootings, mainly over drugs and that’s without my dead mugger friend from the other week. Knowing the place, there were probably many more and quieter murders that went unreported. The police are generally seen as corrupt representatives of an uncaring state and whilst there’s no real open hostility, there’s little in the way of co-operation either. In addition, due to the fact that a fair chunk of the population is transient, drawn to Manila from t’provinces by the lure of fame and fortune, not to mention those poor souls driven here because they have lost everything, including hope, due to the natural disasters that regularly beset the country, there’s a good chance that no-one knew the victim anyway. So why bother reporting it? Heave the body into the Pasig River and feed the fish – which will need to be anaerobic and with good teeth. Weapons are easily available here from your simple off-the-shelf machete through shotguns, .45 pistols up to AKs, I’ve been offered the lot, so it’s surprising that there’s not actually more gun crime than there is. Then again, I suppose virtually no-one’s got anything worth nicking.

In amongst all this there’s the normality of the Sari-sari stalls selling the day to day requirements, mainly single nappies – you’ll never go wrong selling nappies, although up until recently it was illegal to sell condoms – rice, cigarettes by the “stick” and, of course, Red Horse – a beer famed for its ability to give a rock a hangover. Butchers, hairdressers, good schools (the girls both get an excellent education in Tondo – but it has to be paid for and whilst dirt cheap by our standards at 300 quid a year, including uniform and books, is beyond the reach of most families), hardware stalls selling tools made from cheese, a wonky table with 3 chairs in the street which means a restaurant, hairdressers and, as everywhere, internet cafes – a rather grand term for an old computer in the gutter – which allows the kids to keep in touch with a world that most will only ever dream about.

Yet for the tourist, busily avoiding Tondo, the chances are that they are in as much, or even more danger. Near the cheaper hotels and bars in Malate and Ermita, the mugging of tourists and the setting up of stings for a police reward, involving drugs, underage girls or both, are almost national hobbies. Pays yer money, takes yer choice.

And whilst were on the subject of the mighty Pasig River, and you’ll wish we weren’t, it has recently been declared by the WHO as a “health hazard” which, I think, is a distinct elevation from how anyone else would describe it. At only around 16km long it runs between the lake of Laguna de Bay and the sea at Manila Bay, but its direction of flow is as much dependent on the level of the lake as the tide, so it often carries sea water inland during dry periods when the lake is low, only to reverse when it rains. This means, to me, that the turds (and bodies) just go forever back and forth. In the 1980s, fishing was banned along the entire river and by the 1990s the Pasig was considered by experts as “biologically dead”, and whilst I don’t know the strict scientific definition of this, it doesn’t sound too hot and can’t do much for Laguna either, which is full of fish farms. Top tip: Go for the chicken.

Virtually anywhere in the Western world, apart from the Irwell of course, a riverfront property is a highly desirable bit of kit. Think of the Upper Thames, Loire, Rhine and you think of large properties with land sweeping gently down to the riverbank, chic condo developments, chateaux, upscale office accommodation. Not in Tondo you don’t. The Pasig’s canals and tributaries which crisscross the area are to be avoided at all costs, as apart from the general pollution they flood at the drop of a hat. As a consequence of no-one wanting to live in proximity they have attracted yet more squatter slums, with huts built out over the water itself where it performs the unenviable role of bath, washing machine, dustbin and sewer. As a consequence, the cycle of filth and neglect continues.

Two separate government entities have been set up over the years supposedly to “manage” the river. Millions of Pesos have disappeared and the Pasig is still as dead as a doornail.

So, what to do? Buggered if I know, I’m just a simple railway operator. We’ve got the largest density of population in the world living nearly cheek by jowl to the most affluent parts of Metro Manila, such as Makati, Taguig, Bonifacio Global City, etc., yet the former are completely disenfranchised. Most of the people in Tondo are fiercely patriotic about their country, yet their country doesn’t seem to know what to do with them. Perhaps the problem is now just too large for those in power to imagine, or see any answers to? Perhaps, they don’t care? Maybe it’s time they did?

The Mayor of Manila, apart from being an ex-film star and ex-president, overthrown and jailed on corruption charges only to be pardoned by fellow corruption-ista Gloria Arroyo, is also an ex-Tondo boy. He made much of this during his “man of the people” campaign. Let’s see if he’s got the cojones to tackle things. I suspect he doesn’t give a toss now he’s in office.

Yet amongst the flotsam and jetsam that are regularly seen on the internet and TV, are good people. Engineers, metalworkers, tilers, plumbers, decorators and people with many other skills who, because of the Philippine’s latest fixation with qualifications, can never move upwards. I know a guy who is a top electrician and he can’t even get work as a labourer on a building site without formal qualifications. Instead he makes do with jobs for people who can’t afford to pay him. A future for his family? No chance. We use him, and those like him when we can for work on the houses here. But it’s not even a dent. And there’s many more. I’ve seen the entry requirements for jobs here and 5hit, I haven’t got the qualifications to be a train driver and I’ve run curse word!ng railways! Mention Tondo as an address applying for a job? Forget it, you must be a criminal. The only real major employer in the area is the port, but that requires a relative or a “commission” to be paid to even get a sniff.

Yet despite all this, Tondo folk remain, in general, a pragmatic crowd and whilst content may not be the word then peacefully resigned to their lot is, for now, a description that could work. You do have to wonder though, how long this situation can last before it comes to bite someone on the ass.

Me? I both love and hate the place, probably with equal ferocity. No, I couldn’t live here day in day out, it’s too bleedin’ noisy and the grinding poverty of many gets you down sometimes, but it’s got a vibrancy I’ve never experienced anywhere else. You can guarantee that come Christmas, whilst Makati, Taguig and Bonifacio have light displays that would make Blackpool weep, Tondo will tie together a load of old plastic bags with wire, string ‘em over the streets for decoration, and have a ball.

Chances are, I’ll be there too. Happy Christmas!