A casino sits where my elementary school once stood.
The theater where I used to catch Saturday afternoon matinees is now a dingy nightclub.
The house I lived in has been turned into a rental unit inside a gated resort community.
Bowling alley where I attended other kids' birthday parties? Torn down.
The jungle -- and various squatters -- has reclaimed the hospital where I was treated for pneumonia.
****
Last Saturday I set foot on Clark Air Base, in the Phillipines province of Pampanga, for the first time in over 20 years.
Of course, it's not Clark Air Base anymore. The American military installation -- where I lived from 1980 to 1983 -- was evacuated on June 10, 1991, when nearby volcano Mt. Pinatubo began to erupt. The U.S. relinquished control of the base soon after.
I wasn't sure I'd ever get a chance to visit again. But then my friend Anthony -- whom I've known since our days at Radford High School in Hawaii -- and his fiancee Candice decided to get married in the Philippines. Both of them now live here, in L.A. But most of her family is still in Manila, while Anthony's parents also hail from there.
It sounded crazy -- we could just celebrate their marriage when they returned here to L.A. And Maria and I had flown to Italy just a few months ago -- were we up for another trip? But the call of nostalgia was just too strong. When else would we have such a good excuse to brave the 17-hour trip?
And it would be a walk down childhood lane for both of us. Maria had last visited the Philippines in 1995, but had not seen several childhood friends in over 20 years. This was a chance for her to reconnect with several old pals.
We found a reasonably priced fare via Cathay Pacific, and headed out the night of Feb. 5. Which means we touched down in Manila the morning of Feb. 7 (gotta love the International Date Line -- for us, Feb. 6 did not exist!) after a brief layover in Hong Kong.
(An aside: While the rest of the world is on to the Bird Flu frenzy, airports in Asia haven't forgotten about last year's SARS mania. Immediately off the planes in both Hong Kong and Manila, workers shot a thermometer towards our foreheads, just to make sure we weren't harboring some illness.)
Maria's childhood friend Gege picked us up at Ninoy Aquino International Airport, and kindly ferried us to our hotel in Makati -- the business hub of the Philippines, and one of the cities that make up Metro Manila. We checked in and scored a room on the 26th floor of the Shangri-La hotel, affording us amazing views of the city skyline.
After a quick shower, we hopped down the street to the ultramodern Greenbelt shopping complex. Lots of upscale shopping -- Prada, Salvatore Ferragamo, etc. But that wasn't what caught our eye. We stepped off an escalator, and there it was.
The Coffee Bean and Tea Leaf.
Now, given the world dominance of Starbucks, we weren't surprised to see one on virtually every corner in Manila. But finding a Coffee Bean, which are hard to locate outside Los Angeles in the U.S., let alone the Philippines, surprised both of us. (And made us feel right at home. We're major proponents of the Bean's White Chocolate Dream and Vanilla Lattes, after all.)
Conveniently, the Greenbelt shopping center also boasts an outdoor church in a grassy courtyard, overlooking Starbucks and several stores. It was Saturday night, so we made like good Catholics and attended Mass.
Later, after dinner (Yellow Cab Pizza -- yum!) and drinks (Oakwood Premier-- where controversial TV host Kris Aquino lives, and near where a non-violent attempted coup took place last year), I headed off to Anthony's bachelor party.
The next day (what? You wanted details? Sorry. On we go.) Gege, her husband Tuks and their pal Raymund went beyond the call of friendship and drove us on the four-lane freeway up to Pampanga, so that I could indulge in some reminiscing.
Clutching a 1986 map of Clark Air Base, and a recent, 2001 color map of the region -- now known as the Clark Special Economic Zone -- I sat in the passenger seat and tried to pinpoint where things once existed.
Today Clark is a surreal place to visit. The Clark Development Corp. has been charged with revitalizing the area, but its use post-U.S. base has been met with mixed results.
Parts of what was once the Air Force's largest base have been converted into resorts; the runways, into an international air field; other buildings, into duty free shopping. But most of Clark is now a ghost town -- one that, in the 12 years since it was abandoned, has slowly been reclaimed by the wilderness.
Blame it partly on Mother Nature. "The Perfect Storm" was child's play compared to what happened in the region that spring of 1991. Long considered harmless, Mt. Pinatubo stunned everyone -- even the most knowledgable of geologists -- when it began to emit puffs of smoke. For weeks, everyone in the region -- including the commanders at Clark Air Base -- sat on edge, not sure what to do. Evacuate? Hope that the danger will pass?
Finally, Pinatubo belched enough ash on June 9, 1991, that the entire Clark Air Base (minus a few "essential personnel" and police needed to secure the base) was dramatically evacuated and sent west to another U.S. installation, Subic Naval Base. (Not an easy feat, considering Clark housed almost 20,000 military people and dependents). Turns out they'd never return. Pinatubo erupted in a firey cloud of ash and rock on June 15 -- and in a horrible bout of coincidence, a major typhoon was approaching the area at the same time. The mix of volcanic ash, torrential downpour and intermittent earthquakes made the place hell on earth. And pretty much hit most of Clark and the surrounding region (Angeles, Macabalat, Dau) hard.
Fast forward 13 years. Countless homes and barracks are hollow shells, windows and fixtures long gone and weeds growing over them. Streets now lead to nowhere. It's stunning to think this was once a bustling American installation.
We entered the front gate, and almost immediately encountered the military cemetery. As a Cub Scout, I'd plant flags there on Veteran's Day. Thousands of U.S. and Filipino vets, mostly from WWII, are buried there. Philippine and American flags fly there side-by-side, the only place in the Philippines other than the U.S. Embassy where an American flag is positioned 365 days a year.
Driving closer to the heart of the base, it all came flooding back to me. There's the Bobbitt Theater -- now a nightclub called "The Forbidden City." The Base Exchange -- which now appears to be a warehouse. And even the walls have disappeared from the large base hospital, now an eerie shell of a building.
We drove closer to my old housing area. Unlike several housing areas, which have been stripped clean and left to rot in the growing jungle, where I used to live is now part of something known as Fontana Leisure Park.
We drove in through the Fontana gate and up to my old street.
An aside: Most of the American-named streets on Clark ("Anderson," "Dyess Highway," etc.) have been renamed after Filipino figures ("Roxas," "Quezon," etc.) But the street I used to live on, Masbate St. -- named after an island in the Philippine Visayan islands -- has now been given a Western name. That's because the streets inside the Fontana Resort are named after European resort towns. Go figure!
First thing I noticed: The houses have been changed. The outside facades have been spruced up. And the houses now serving as rental units inside the Fontana Resort, not all of them were occupied. Actually, it appeared that very few were in use. (But perhaps a random weekend in February isn't a heavy time for the area.)
We stopped on the Street Formerly Known as Masbate. There I saw it. My old house. Although, it was kind of hard to tell. See, houses in military neighborhoods, by design, all look exactly the same. So it's not easy to figure out which one's yours after 20 years.
But this one was it. And people were walking in and out, loading up their truck after a weekend at the resort. They noticed me taking a huge amount of photos. Maria and Gege walked up to the man loading his vehicle and asked if we could peer inside. We did. The layout of the homes had changed, but this was it. I took more photos, and we hopped back in the car.
But as we edged to the other side of the Street Formerly Known as Masbate, I realized I'd made a mistake. There was my old house! Not the one with the people we just met. I'd had my bearings off. This was it. I retraced my steps. Yup, here was the route I'd walk to school. This was the backyard where my friends and I had attempted to build a fort one summer. There was the house next door, where I got stung by a bee for the first and last time in my life. This was the portion of the street where I'd ride my bike. And where I learned to roller skate.
20 years later, the streets seem smaller. Hell, the streets have completely different names. The community where I lived doesn't exist anymore -- it ceased to exist on June 15, 1991. But there it was -- the home where I lived. Still standing.
Links are from other sources -- I haven't had the chance to post many of our photos yet. But start checking out our Franklin Avenue Buzznet site and to the "recent photos" column at right. I'll be posting new trip shots on a daily basis.
And keep reading -- more posts from our Philippines visit to come!
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