Ready for Your Next Great Travel Adventure?
To help get you started, and to set the scene, below are descriptions from my books of some of the world’s most amazing destinations. These clips are to help you learn about the location, prep for your travels and drive up your excitement about a specific place.
Manila
…to land at the doorstep of the Cathedral in Manila, the capital of The Philippines. “The Spanish were here for three centuries and left the religion, making for one large Catholic country in Asia.” I remarked as we walked into the travertine stone building less popularly called Manila Metropolitan Cathedral-Basilica of the Immaculate Conception. “Here at Christmas they hang giant cutouts of baby [Jesus] from office buildings. I’ve never seen anything like it…At Easter, men re-enact the crucifixion taking real nails through their hands and are hung from crosses in places like Pampanga. This is an Asian country with few traces of Latin culture that a Spaniard would recognize beyond the family names. It’s a singular legacy, Indonesia is mostly Muslim not Calvinist, Laos is Buddhist not Catholic, but here in most of The Philippines, the conquerors religion stayed, held tight and remains imbedded.”
After admiring the carved statues and stained glass windows of the Cathedral, we wandered into the Intramuros historical district where the crumbling walls contained the quiet, slow streets of a forgotten time. This was once the center of Spain’s Asian power but now the broken sidewalks reflected little of the wealth, order and glare of a booming city. Manila was teeming with pockets of organized infrastructure portraying the semblance of rising incomes, but the overwhelming omnipresence in these busy streets was the struggle for development. “This is an endlessly emerging market,” I remarked. “Despite English language skills and a hard-working population, you can find Filipinos doing all manner of work all over the world. But here at home, this economy trails behind all its neighbors. It’s still a struggle to move forward, still not a surprise when it doesn’t…we passed corrugated steel and cardboard shantytowns…in Manila, they were the frame of our vision on every street we passed.
Now we were in growing Asia, not the organized wealth of Japan or the forced order of China, south and eastern Asia operated on a scale outside the patterns of the rest of the world. By numbers alone, by a wasting terrain, by a battle between a modern survival and an ancient deterioration, we were now seeing the other half of the world in its pounding, biting, tear soaked habitat and it was the real truth of the way life evolves for the many…
…as we strolled into Rizal Park, the Luneta as the locals called it…We were walking among the people in Manila’s tightly packed neighborhoods. The sights pounded us, the tropical oppressive pace of hardship. “In these neighborhoods, people come to live within a city where they see the opportunity to make money, any money to survive…
– Describing Manila, The Philippines in Walking with J by Karsten Quarters
Place: Republika ng Pilipinas, the Republic of the Philippines, in southeast Asia
Visited: Home for two years on a diplomatic posting
Most Recent Visit: 1992
Original sites: Manageable
Familiarity: High
English usage: Often
Surprise: The terrain, more beautiful natural sites to see than perhaps expected
For Rising Entrepreneurs Expanding to Global Markets: Although the middle class market is small compared to their neighbors, it is much more accessible, and entree into the Asian economy.
Country Details: U.N. Country Data Stats for The Philippines
Reading Recommendations (click the book cover to learn more)
Want more details about visiting The Philippines: contactcase(at)readyentrepreneur(dot)com
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