While Manila and the Philippines are great tourist destinations it can be easy to forget the real inequalities of the country, which is why once a year I take a trip to the Manila slums, namely Smokey Mountain and Happy Land.
Why yearly? We’ll partly because I do like to remind myself how the other half live, particularly as my life gets better, but mainly because it forms a nuclear for the end of our Extreme Philippines Tour.
Click to see why I call it the Extreme Philippines Tour.
What the Slums of Manila
The thing about the slums in the Philippines is that they’re not hidden. You’ll see them on the ride in from the airport—lining the train tracks, hugging the rivers, growing up around garbage dumps and under bridges. Manila especially wears its inequality on its sleeve. One minute you’re in a mall with aircon and security guards, the next you’re in a barangay where a family of five lives in a tin shack the size of a bathroom.
But what hits you most isn’t the poverty—it’s the noise, the hustle, the life. Kids playing basketball with no shoes. Roosters in cages. Street vendors selling banana cue and instant noodles. You can’t romanticise it, but you can’t ignore it either. There’s a rough beauty to the place, and a kind of resilience that slaps you in the face. You’ll see more reality in five minutes here than in a week in Makati.
What the Happy Land
Happyland. The name’s a cruel joke, because there’s nothing happy about it. Also in Tondo, it’s one of Manila’s grimmest slums, home to tens of thousands crammed into an area with little clean water, no proper drainage, and almost no jobs. It’s here you find pagpag—fast food leftovers pulled from the trash, washed, fried, and resold to those too poor for anything else.
There are children here who’ve never known a day outside of this chaos. But somehow, people get on with it. It’s raw, it’s unforgiving—but it’s home for a lot of Manila’s forgotten.
What the Smokey Mountain
Smokey Mountain isn’t just a name—it was once an actual mountain of burning trash in Tondo. Thousands of people lived on and around it, making a living by sorting through the garbage. The mountain has mostly gone now, officially shut down and redeveloped, but the community remains.
Some of the original scavengers still live there, now in concrete housing, but the conditions haven’t changed much. Jobs are scarce, sanitation is a mess, and the smell still lingers. It’s a place people come from, not somewhere they stay if they have any other choice.
Living In The Slums
I will not wax lyrical ans call living in the slums good, because it is not. Life here is not just extremely hard, but almost impossible to escape from as well, no matter how much charities try. What I will say though is that what suppress me most about the Manila slums is how much normality there is, as well as the capitalistic ingenuity that means almost everything you would want is available.
Electricity for the most part is stolen from the power grid, while there are hops and entering,ney venues, and shops to serve the masses. These include places for kids to do their work, as well as rent by the minute wi-fi. And all of this is supported largely by the economy which is based around scavebnging through trash.
Yet while there are positives about the human condition there is also a lot of bad going on. Human traficig of females as well as child sex workers are rife in the area, while the drug problem cannot be ignored, In the Duterte era many people were shot for use of, or suspected use f Shabu. Thankfully there are charities trying to hel[p her, such as Save the Children, but it truly is pissing in the wind.
STreet Food Manila Slums
When it comes to street food in the Manila slums the first thing that comes to people minds is Pag-Pag, now I have written an in depth article here, but to sum up it is leftover food from KFC, McDonalds and Jolibee that is cleaned recooked and sold. This very cheap cusisne for me at least epitomizes everything that is simultaneously good and bad about the Manila slums, as well as how bad capitalism can become.
And while Pag-Pag is not unique to the slums of Manila this is the place that made it most famous. Personally I am yet to try Pag-Pag, but in all honesty I would give it a crack, one day at least. The most famous chef of the genre, namely (add name) cooks within the area.
Street food in. The sums doe snot just stop at PagPag with there also being a number of BBQ joints, as well as small Filipino restaurants serving up food at extremely cheap prices. I personally also like the sugary water drinks that are freshly made and quite literally does for pennies, a true lifesaver in the intense heat of a Manila summer.
Conclusion on the Manila Slums
While I enjoy visiting the Manila slums this is not due to some kind of disaster porn, or voyerism, but rather because I like to check my privilege form time to time, as well as heighten my political ideals. And what are these ideals? Well quite honestly I no longer know with my options having moved from slightly fey of Lenin to being more pragmatic nowadays.
Oner thing I do still think though and something that only grows when I see he Manila slums is that unvetted capitalism is quite simply cruel and that the political system of the Philippines needs to be smacked from within so that a more just system can be put its place. This is probably not all that different to the policies of the New Peoples Army.
Click the link to see my Philippines Tours with Young Pioneer Tours.