A Passage to the Philippines

My final Southeast Asian trip of the year took me to the Philippines. I left Bangkok just before two o’clock in the afternoon on a flight bound for Manila: I could have taken a direct flight to Cebu, but all of them were scheduled for the wee hours of the morning, and I did not want to feel tired given the strenuous week ahead. The plane’s touchdown at Ninoy Aquino Airport gave me my first flavour of Filipino culture. The sound of seatbelt buckles unclasping, overhead compartments opening, and people fumbling about only got louder upon the attendant’s request that everyone remain seated until the plane finishes moving.

The transfer to domestic flights took more time than I had expected. As I found out at the information desk, I was to complete immigration, walk out of the terminal, and catch the airport shuttle to Terminal 2, where I had to pass through security again. Still, my transfer was long enough to allow for almost two hours of undisturbed reading at a charging station.

Contrary to all expectations, my plane made it to Cebu Airport early, and I arrived at my hotel just before eleven o’clock. Cebu Airport itself – I was surprised to find out – does not lie on the island of Cebu but on the nearby island of Mactan, which is connected to Cebu by two bridges. Mactan’s main claim to fame, however, is not the airport but the Battle of Mactan, in which the forces of local ruler Lapulapu killed the Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan in 1521. Fittingly, cars pass through Lapu-Lapu City before ascending the bridge across the strait to Cebu.

Despite my jet lag, which should have woken me up at around eight, I was already awake at six o’clock, as Cebu is a ceaselessly noisy city. I noted during my Grab ride to my hotel that even at eleven o’clock, the traffic was as dense as I would expect it to be in daytime. Nevertheless, I tried to at least stay in bed with my eyes closed until closer to seven, when I finally gave up and got myself some breakfast.

The first stop on my itinerary was Magellan’s Cross Pavillion. On the pavilion’s ceiling, which dates to the first half of the nineteenth century, a mural depicts the scene of Christianity’s first contact with the Philippines: Before being hit in the leg with a poisoned arrow and getting hacked to pieces, Magellan is said to have planted a cross in the soil of Cebu. Allegedly, this cross has survived to this day and is protected by a cross-shaped wooden casing within the pavilion. It is a striking memorial, no doubt, but I am not quite sure how this simple wooden cross is supposed to have survived the elements and local enmity until Miguel López de Legazpi led the Spanish back to Cebu in 1565.

Cebu’s historical centre is tiny and walkable. Just two or three minutes from the pavilion stands the Minor Basilica of the Holy Child, known locally under its abbreviated Spanish name, Santo Niño. The church is the oldest in the Philippines, dating to the year 1565, but the icon of the Holy Child is said to predate it. Allegedly, Ferdinand Magellan gifted the figure to the chief consort of Rajah Humabon during her baptism in 1521, and the image was rediscovered in a wooden box on the site of a village destroyed by Legazpi forty years later. Despite or perhaps because of this unlikely origin story, the Santo Niño receives an incredible amount of veneration. An apparently inexhaustible queue snakes its way around the church’s arcades all the way to the chapel, where one by one, worshippers walk up to the icon and commune with its spirit for several seconds by putting their hands on the glass casing.

I watched this ritual unfold as I sat in the arcades waiting for mass to finish, for I had been sternly warned by one of the guards that no pictures are allowed during worship. The prohibition extends to the plaza in front of the church as well. Probably due to the large number of worshippers, the priest stands not behind the altar inside the church, but across the plaza opposite the church, with part of the congregation gathering in the more modern arcades outside. This arrangement leads to a bizarre sight in the church building itself: those listening to mass face the priest, while others face the altar.

I waited for a good half an hour for mass to finish, but right after the congregation received the host, another mass began in Tagalog. All the scenes I had sat through before – people waving one hand to the most popular Christian banger, people singing hymns dedicated to the Santo Niño, people walking down the aisle on their knees – were now repeating gesture by gesture, just in another language. Extracting assurances from another guard that there would be a pause in around forty minutes, I left to see Cebu’s other sights.

The next place on my itinerary was the Metropolitan Cathedral, but of course a mass was taking place there as well. After hanging around for a moment, I proceeded to the Heritage of Cebu Monument, which depicts some of Cebu’s most famous contributions to Philippine and world history, such as the Battle of Mactan or the inauguration of Cebu native Sergio Osmeña as President of the Philippines. I then visited two house museums: the Casa Gorordo and the Yap-San Diego Ancestral House. The latter was especially interesting for presenting a window into the home life of a Christianised Chinese family, which built the house in the late seventeenth century.

I returned to the Santo Niño in due course, but either the same mass was still going on or the worshippers had switched to Cebuano – I cannot yet tell the difference. This time, however, my waiting paid off, and in the five minutes between the end of one mass and the start of another, I took a few pictures of the church from the outside. Having accomplished this task, I figured I would make a visit to the National Museum, which is housed in the giant former customs house. While the bottom floor is dedicated to the ancient history, geology, and wildlife of Cebu, the upper level contains a gallery of nineteenth-century paintings by Filipino artists and a few exhibits dedicated to the Spanish period.

The rest of my time in Cebu was quite leisurely. I was in no hurry to get to Bohol as I had no plans there, so I sauntered about all the sites one more time. In part, I was hoping that mass in the cathedral would finish at some point, but I was mistaken. With some difficulty, I eventually found a restaurant that could make me a vegetarian meal by removing chicken from a pasta dish with vegetables. With that task accomplished, I went over to my last stop, the Fort of San Pedro. The stone structure was built in 1738 over an earlier wooden fort erected by Legazpi to defend against Muslim raiders and nowadays, it overlooks a large plaza where young people meet to practice synchronised dances.

Buying a ticket for the ferry to Tagbilaran was relatively simple. Ignoring the various hawkers asking me where I wanted to go, I took my place in line and waited for my turn at the ticket counter. The process afterwards was a little more complicated. For instance, I had not been warned that I would be paying another nominal fee for using the ferry terminal – something that sounds like a scam but was clearly not. I also went through security just as I would at an airport and was assigned a seat at a check-in counter. The journey itself took almost two hours, and it must have rained at some point because the city in which we arrived was very wet, to the point that on the way to my hotel, I could hardly find my way across a road that had been entirely flooded.