Leaving Manila

SINGAPORE – They come in threes at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport’s Terminal 3.

Departing for this city-state from the NAIA-3 at around noon yesterday, I counted just three body scanners at the departure inspection zone. Of course the result was a long line to clear the area.

Past the machines, there were just three working public toilets for women. There were long waiting lines at all three.

Always curious about the state of our airport toilets, I waited in line at one of them. The line continued to snake inside; there were only three cubicles, including the one for PWDs/seniors.

A woman cleaned the cubicles regularly so it was relatively clean. There was toilet paper and the automatic flush, although not so automatic, worked. But we really have to begin upgrading the quality of our airport toilets. We need not aspire for state-of-the-art Japanese toilet gadgetry, but we should at least see to it that the automatic flush works automatically. Also, the hand towels ran out as I was washing my hands, with no replenishment in sight.

I had checked in online so I breezed through the Singapore Airlines check-in counter. The airline had emailed me an alert about two days before my flight to fill out the Singapore arrival form. But I forgot to fill out the Philippine eTravel departure form.

Fortunately, there was a guard at the entrance to the immigration area who helped me using her phone. I needed help because the signal in that part of the airport was quite weak and it was taking forever for my iPhone to access the eTravel site, despite my using both cellular data and the free NAIA3 WiFi.

Because of the weak internet connection, it took the guard about 15 minutes to complete my form.

The line at immigration was long, but actual clearing took only about two minutes. From there, the long line to the three body scanners crawled.

As usual, the air conditioning was inadequate. It had been like that since the opening of Terminal 3, even in the airport lounges, and I guess it will remain the same when the NAIA is finally turned over next month to the San Miguel Corp. group.

SMC’s Ramon Ang has raised public expectations so high that people think with the start of privatization, the NAIA would metamorphose into Seoul Incheon International practically overnight. What can prevent SMC from ending up overpromising is that the company will be working from such a low base that anything will look like an improvement.

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Waiting in line for the security inspection, with my eTravel confirmation (including photo and QR code) filed in my phone, I marveled again at how dismissed mayor Alice Guo of Bamban, Tarlac managed to elude Philippine authorities and leave the country.

Didn’t she fill out an eTravel form? Is eTravel data not linked to secure networks of the Bureau of Immigration? An immigration lookout bulletin was supposed to have been issued days before her departure on July 18 reportedly for Indonesia. Her names – both the Chinese Guo Hua Ping and the Filipino Alice Leal Guo – had been all over the news by then, together with her images taken from multiple angles. BI personnel had to be living on another planet not to be aware of those two names. Did she leave the country in disguise?

A BI official said Guo apparently left the country on a light plane, a yacht or another boat, most likely through the southern backdoor. Does the government exercise no supervision over flights using light private planes?

President Marcos, in one of his rare public displays of irritation, vowed that “heads will roll” over Guo’s departure. The insinuation in his statement is that payoffs allowed Guo to escape.

Definitely, among the heads that are expected to roll will be those at the BI. At the rate the BI is being decapitated over anomalies, the bureau might soon be left with only a skeleton crew.

People are also wondering whether the heads will include lawyers who might have lied about the whereabouts of Guo to mislead pursuing authorities.

Lawyer-client communication is supposed to be privileged. But when an arrest order for the client has been issued and widely publicized, can a lawyer be indicted for helping the wanted client escape? Isn’t that aiding and abetting, or obstruction of justice?

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My flight from Manila was delayed by about 30 minutes; we were told that the plane arrived late. But the carrier made up for it and we landed as scheduled at Changi International.

Leaving the NAIA can be particularly frustrating if your next stop is Changi, consistently rated among the best airports in the world. Singapore’s international airport looks like a mini city. There are spacious toilets at every corner, drinking fountains, walkalators and baggage carts.

It took me about 15 minutes to clear the airport and hop into a taxi – from my toilet stop (mainly to inspect the facility) to the electronic immigration arrival gate to retrieval of my check-in luggage.

At least there seems to be a record of the travels of Alice Guo to Denpasar in Indonesia (main gateway to the resort paradise of Bali), and then to Singapore, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and back again to Indonesia.

Yesterday, the Presidential Anti-Organized Crime Commission announced that Guo’s sister Sheila and an incorporator of the Philippine offshore gaming operator hub in Bamban, Cassandra Li Ong, were back in the Philippines after being intercepted in Indonesia’s Batam Island on Wednesday morning. But Alice Guo, who was reportedly with the two women, managed to escape.

For the hoi polloi, leaving Manila is an obstacle course. For wanted folks like Alice Guo, they don’t even need to clear immigration or undergo a body scan.