After 15 hours up in the air with Cathay Pacific, we arrived perfectly on time at Manila airport. We were promptly taken to Fort Bonifacio in the Global City, a new high-rise financial centre still under construction.
Thanks to the generosity of one of our supporters, we have been given the use of an amazing apartment at the Pacific Plaza as our base, so, in stark contrast to previous fieldtrips for Prospero, (which once included an emergency sheet-buying episode) we will be staying on the 43rd floor in a twin block of blue-glazed skyscrapers, in which well-heeled ex-pats, Filipino filmstars and politicians live. From the sitting room one looks across the golf course, an enormous green swathe leading to the Makati district, once the site of Manila’s airport and now a commercial centre. Beyond that, the grey blur of the sea lined with the ghost of steamships.