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The high-wheeled horse-drawn calesas of old Manila, with their tasseled canopies and courtly cocheros, have given way to the ubiquitous Jeepney, a freelance taxicab that typically sports a high-gloss enamel finish in rainbow hues, Playboy-bunny mudguards, pink-fringed roof, and a sign that reads "God Is My Copilot." Crammed with such passengers as pigs, chickens, guitarists and call girls, and plagued with an absence of brakes and springs, the Jeepney needs celestial guidance.
So does Manila (pop. 1,300,000), where the polarities of the nation are reflected in microcosm. Sprawled on both sides of the sluggish Pasig River, the city straddles a grey-green current that carries both sewage and water lilies into Manila Bay. Many of its streets are potholed; rats chitter behind the wainscoting of its finest restaurants; street urchins peddle everything from lottery tickets to fragrant sampaguita garlands —all at outrageous prices. The current craze requires shops to have a D apostrophe preceding the English names, as in D'Artland Gallery, D'Elegant Theater, D'Stag Cocktail Lounge and D'Best Furniture Store. Why? "It's classy," explains a Filipino. "It's French."
"Little Viet Nam." Forbes Park, in Manila's southern suburbs, is known as the "millionaires' barrio"; here curved streets wend gracefully beneath towering acacia trees, and deep-piled lawns run down to Rorschach-shaped swimming pools. Armed guards stop every car without a Forbes Park sticker, and the suburb's residents—mostly Americans and Filipinos who earn more than 5,000 pesos ($1,250) a month—have their own golf course and polo club.
In stark contrast is the Tondo slum on Manila's northern waterfront — a maze of alleys, mud-floored huts, hovels built from packing cases. Some 8,000 pushcarts roll through Tondo in search of trash and scrap paper, the collection of which is the district's principal occupation. Tondo's kids are a combination of the worst in American and Asian street gangs: the "Canto Boys," with their distinctive madre tattoos, would as soon knife a stranger as zip-gun a passing police car.
Penchant for Violence. Behind broad Roxas Boulevard, where young hot-rodders zigzag furiously among the Jeepneys, is Manila's commercial heart: boutiques, which attract American wives all the way from Hong Kong, stand side by side with gun shops that sell everything from matchbox-sized pistols to M-16 automatic rifles. Manila's private citizenry owns more weapons (365,000) than the entire military and police forces, and it is a rare Filipino whose frilly barong tagalog shirt does not bulge with hardware. Nightclubs, bars, and even the Supreme Court mount signs reading: "Check Your Firearms Before Entering." No self-respecting lawless Filipino would think of complying.