Changing the name for Filipino spirits: Don Papa rum
(Picture: Press handout)In the Philippines, there is an island called Negros. It is the country’s fourth largest, not a podium finish but a decent placing, behind three but ahead of 7,637 others. Roads run endlessly on — it is about the size of Jamaica, with a side of Tahiti — and somewhere on a drive there is a sign for the Upper East Side. In place of Madison Avenue skyscrapers are shops with roofs woven from palm leaves, brown and straw-like in deference to the endless sun, where they sell crisps and phone cards. Humming by are skinny Honda bikes with covered sidecars welded on, or maybe they’re tuk-tuks with bikes banded to them. These are the Philippines tricycles and have room for two or three, but it’s more usual to see them with five or six people apiece, or loaded with crates of Cola bottles, empty and glinting. The road signs don’t warn to drive safe, but to drive friendly.
Past the palm-roofed shops, fields of sugar cane start. In them are towers like lighthouses; men climb them to sit and watch. Perhaps they are looking for the fantasy houses, some shells and some not, where the sugar barons used to live. Perhaps they aren’t. The fields stretch on and on, a rug endlessly unfurled; all that breaks them up are stalls by the side of the road selling tombstones, and great steel and glass mills where the cane is processed. In and out of these mills pickup trucks bounce, coming with hand-hacked stems and leaving empty to collect more, their routine broken only by the diesel cough of the bigger lorries doing the same, but doing more.
