The journey seemed to be taking forever. Manila, I was realising, is huge. It's strange that such a major city is off the radar for most people I know; no one thinks a visit is worth the effort.
I was in a taxi going from my hotel in Makati to downtown, on Roxas Boulevard - not some Frenchified thing, by the way, but a full-blown motorway. On my right was a cliff of reasonably high-rise towers (Manila can't seem to work up the energy to go really high) and on my left, well, something like salvation. For beyond the traffic and assorted obstacles I could make out the Manila Hotel, the modernist masterpiece of the Cultural Centre of the Philippines and, for moments, the sea beyond.
But first I had to see some 'sights'. Manila's old town, Intramuros, is home to the cathedral, the San Agustin Church, Fort Santiago and plazas and monuments that hark back to the city's Hispanic legacy.
The Manila Galleon is such a historical aberration, and yet is still there in the surnames, the streets, the collective memory. As I strolled down some remarkably quiet backstreets, I felt I was on a heritage island stranded in a city bent on new-build and road-build. But the blazing sunshine and humidity soon began to get to me, as I walked from bastion to bastion, tracing the old walls around the city, and something other than the heat pressed in on me - alienation, perhaps, and a sense of displacement.
Enigmas in travel are few and far between, especially when it comes to big cities. Most are overexposed in the media (New York, London, Paris), wrapped up in cliches (Edinburgh, Los Angeles, Vienna) or rammed with tourists (Bangkok, Barcelona, all of the aforementioned).
But Manila is associated with a complex set of unknowns. You arrive asking: 'Will it be safe?' The Hong Kong government has still not lowered its black travel alert on the Philippines that has been in place since the August 2010 tourist bus hijacking by a disgruntled former policeman in which eight Hongkongers died.