Detours and Decisions: Why the Philippines Came First

The country’s history is long and, in large stretches, not what was done to it by people who cared about it. Spain arrived in 1565 under Miguel López de Legazpi, establishing a colonial administration that would last three hundred and thirty-three years, long enough to convert most of the population to Catholicism, impose the encomienda system of tribute and forced labour that extracted agricultural wealth from the islands and sent it to Madrid, and produce the particular hybrid culture, part Malay, part Spanish Catholic, part something that is entirely itself, that characterises the Philippines today. Manila’s old walled city of Intramuros, built by the Spanish in 1571, still stands in recognisable form in the middle of the modern metropolis. The name of the country is a tribute to Philip II of Spain, which is the kind of naming convention that colonial powers applied without much concern for how it might look to subsequent generations.

The Americans arrived in 1898 following the Spanish-American War, acquiring the Philippines from Spain for twenty million dollars under the Treaty of Paris, a transaction conducted without the involvement of the Filipinos themselves. The Philippine-American War that followed, largely forgotten outside the Philippines and the United States, killed somewhere between two hundred thousand and one million Filipino civilians between 1899 and 1913, depending on whose accounting you accept, with the American military employing counterinsurgency methods that included the concentration of civilian populations in camps and the widespread burning of villages suspected of supporting the insurgents. The United States built roads and schools and a public health infrastructure and administered the islands until granting independence in 1946, one day after the Fourth of July, a date chosen with a symbolism that the Filipinos were perhaps entitled to find slightly on the nose.

The post-independence period produced Ferdinand Marcos, who was elected president in 1965 and declared martial law in 1972, ruling by decree until 1986. The Marcos years combined a specific form of kleptocracy, estimates of assets stolen from the state range from five to ten billion US dollars, with a genuine modernisation programme that built infrastructure the country needed while simultaneously borrowing the money for it from international creditors who were not always rigorous about where it ended up. When Marcos fled in February 1986, prompted by the People Power Revolution that filled the streets of Manila with millions of people and made military intervention politically impossible, he took with him among other things approximately twelve hundred pairs of his wife Imelda’s shoes and a quantity of the national treasury that the Philippines spent the following decades attempting to recover. The country is still paying down the debts of his administration.

None of this context is why I added the Philippines to the itinerary, if I’m being straightforward. I added it because the photographs looked like the Maldives and the beer cost forty-five pence. These are not serious reasons. The Philippines then has a way of delivering something considerably larger than you came for, which is probably what travel is supposed to do and which the serious reasons don’t always guarantee.

So the route has changed. Japan for ten days, then the Philippines for three to four weeks, then China. The total distance for the first section, Barnsley to Cairns, is approximately twenty-five thousand miles. The whole trip will cover roughly double that. The Spanish I keep meaning to learn remains theoretical. The flights to Manila are booked.

There are also some things I have learned about the Philippines that I did not know before I started reading, which is the point of reading. One of them is that the jeepneys that serve as the country’s primary form of public transport are former American military vehicles, left behind after the Second World War, that Filipino craftsmen have decorated with an exuberance of chrome and paint and religious iconography that transforms a piece of military surplus into something else entirely. The country has a habit of doing this: taking what was left by the people who occupied it and making something that is entirely its own. That, I think, is probably worth seeing.