My girl friend and I recently stayed at the Sandals Royal Caribbean from and unfortunately, we had a negative experience when we first arrived. When I originally booked this trip, I reserved the Royal Grande Luxe Beachfront room. Approximately a week before our trip, Tim from Sandals emailed and called me to tell me that we could upgrade our room to the Royal Honeymoon Luxury Beachfront Concierge Room for the length of our stay for $150. I told him that it was very important to us that the upgraded room was “beachfront” and had an “ocean view”. He assured me that it was. I asked if he was sure because “beachfront” and “ocean view” were our priority. He assured me again that it was. Well, it was not. The room overlooked the pool and was not even close to the beach. In fact, the only way you could see the beach or the ocean was to walk out on the balcony, hang your head over the rail and look 90 degrees to the right. I told the representative that this room was unacceptable and that we would like to have the Royal Grand Luxe Beachfront room that we had originally booked. They said that this room was unavailable. I asked to speak to the manager. After a very long delay, a manager finally came in. He repeated that this room was unavailable. After a very long, uncomfortable, stressful and frankly angry discussion, they “found” the room that we originally booked. I then asked for the upgrade charge to be refunded. The manager said that it was unrefundable. This is when I really got upset. We had now been there for over two hours, our hopes of getting on the beach the first day were gone. We had to fight to get the room that we originally booked and now I was told that after all of this, my $150 was not going to be refunded. I was so about to leave Sandals and go to the Ritz.


















The manager offered to give me a $150 hotel credit. I said I just wanted a refund. They refused. We were at a standoff. I was upset. My girlfriend was upset. This was ruining our vacation. The manager finally said that he would “give” us concierge service in our room. This was not what I wanted, but I told him fine, just so we could end this unpleasantness. This really left a sour taste in our mouths for the rest of our time there. I wrote to the Sandals home office, hoping that they would do the right thing. They did not respond to my first letter at all. I wrote to them again and almost two months later they responded. They refused to do anything and the letter was very condescending. As a result, I will never go to a Sandals again. They are liars and thieves, plain and simple. Sandals...I hope you enjoy the $150 you stole from me. You have a new enemy.

At first sight Manila (in this book, the word refers to the whole conurbation) is intimidating: noisy, unkempt and with appalling traffic. There are few open spaces and only a handful of remarkable buildings. Signposting has improved in recent years, but is still woefully inadequate or misleading. Finding your way around is made even more difficult by the absence of significant modern or historical landmarks – most of the buildings are low concrete structures built in a hurry since the end of World War II. Skyscrapers have gone up in some of the business districts, but none is as notable as Hong Kong's Bank of China or Kuala Lumpur's Petronas Towers.

Manila has no proper city centre. To some Manileños, the central business district of Makati is the city centre, to others it might be Quezon City or the Roxas Boulevard/Manila Bay area. Each is a city in its own right. Roads run everywhere like capillaries, and suburbs act as connecting tissue between new centres of population. It is this apparent lack of order, though, that imbues Manila with character. Its flaws are what make the city human, giving it an anarchic charm that sweeps you along. Manila is also a city of striking emotional counterpoint. Frothy mansions belonging to tycoons and politicians fight for space with squalid shantytowns built along railway tracks. One of the problems Manila faces is the unceasing influx of provincianos, people from the provinces who believe the streets are paved with gold, most of whom end up squatting illegally on any spare scrap of land they can find. The fight for space is intensified by the city's apparently insatiable appetite for shopping malls.

To understand Manila completely, to get under its skin, you need a grasp of its complex and sometimes tragi-burlesque history. It has been razed by an earthquake, bombed, occupied, bombed again and rebuilt. It has expanded inexorably, but public services have not kept pace. The result is a rakish megalopolis that lives on its wits and maintains a frenetic pace 24 hours a day just so it can get things done. The roads are always busy and the buses always full, but in Manila you learn to go with the flow, never worrying about whether you'll be late or whether your taxi is going the wrong way down a one-way street. The Filipino maxim bahala na – what will be will be – applies as much to Manila as it does to life.

Despite its problems and troubled history, Manila is a sociable city, with a populace who take pride in their cultural affinities to the West and their embrace of all things American. Most tourists, however, use Manila as a transit point, a place to spend a day or two on the way to the islands and beaches of the south or the mountainous tribal areas of the north. A couple of days is all you really need to explore the key sights in and around Intramuros, the city's only notable historical enclave, its stone houses and grassy courtyards much as they were when the Spanish regime came to an end in the nineteenth century. If you've got a bit more time on your hands, take a wander through nearby Binondo – Chinatown – or head out of the city on a day-trip. There's plenty to see and do in the vicinity of the capital, from the Manila Bay island of Corregidor, a fascinating reminder of the horrors of war, to the rapids and waterfalls at Pagsanjan.
Manila also prides itself on the quality of its nightlife and the ability of its residents to kick up a good time. For many tourists, this will be their enduring memory of the place: funky bars and nightclubs in areas such as Malate and Makati whose attraction stems from their egalitarian nature. It doesn't matter who you are or what you are, you will have fun in Manila. All you have to do is take a deep breath and dive in