The contrasts of Manila.

As already mentioned, Manila is a motley city in terms of its buildings. There’s the full range – from favelas to neatly manicured well-to-do districts. When sitting in a restaurant in the latter, you could be forgiven for thinking you’re in Singapore (especially if you take no notice of passing Jeepneys and tuk-tuks). Here for example is the view out of my hotel window:

And here are some street views in the old town:

One of my pet hates is here in abundance – dense webs of overhead cables ->

Regarding Manila’s historical center, and also tourism in general in the city, I have an announcement to make: if there’s no special reason to partake in a spot of historical tourism here, then don’t. For it’s really, really hot! And anyway, the historical tourism to be had isn’t all that interesting; it centers, btw, around Fort Santiago…

To be absurdly brief, the fort was built by the Spanish in the second half of the 16^th century; it was later destroyed in an earthquake. It was rebuilt afterward, but then, in 1945 during the liberation of Manila from the Japanese occupation, the fort was once again practically completely destroyed, after which, in the 1950s it was rebuilt once again.

The full length of the wall can be walked along, but it’s three kilometers, and that’s a long distance when you consider that you start to sweat in the sweltering heat after just a hundred meters.

The views along the way go something like this:

The water in the fort’s moat is greener than the grass nearby! ->

The main gate:

And the exit out toward the river. In one direction – all very nice:

In the other – somewhat more industrial ->

…Industrial and slummish:

Cathedral: impressive.

And that was about all the historical tourism we could bear given the heat. Time to wrap it up. While waiting for our car to collect us, another take on the jeepney artform passed us by ) ->

That’s Manila, folks.

Briefly about the business part of our Philippines trip…

We were here for a very important event: the announcement of our partnership with the Philippine telecoms company PLDT (here’s a news item about it), which will start distributing out products through their channels.

We were also here to meet up with our regional partners, which we did in a mini-partner conference. There were assorted other business bits and bobs we did too. In short – we weren’t bored in Manila!

Here are some photos of our press conference with PLDT:

And our mini-partner-conference:

And that was that for my first trip to the Philippines, but I assured everyone I’d be back: there’s lots more business to be done, and there’s so much more nature-tourism to be checked out!…

The rest of the photos from the Philippines are here.