verging_on_random

A few facts about the Philippines

I’m too tired to write anything serious about my trip so that will have to wait until tomorrow. In the mean time, here are some random thoughts about the Philippines:

• Filipinos are addicted to noise. There’s an old Spinal Tap line about amplifiers going all the way up to 11 … amplifiers in the Philippines only have 11. All the time. Any restaurant, mall or social gathering has music (live or recorded) blasting out loud enough to make your ears bleed. I don’t know why the whole nation isn’t deaf.
• People shudder at the thought of driving in the Philippines. I don’t know why - they must suffer from an obsessive need for rules and regulations. Once I got the hang of it I kind of enjoyed the way Filipinos drive. It’s like the way a big crowd of people make their way to different destinations on foot: if there’s a gap you move into it, and if someone gets there before you well you just wait your turn. I guess people who think lane lines on the road are important would freak out a bit but when you think about it, if a road is wide enough for five cars why force the traffic into three lanes? It just wastes space. I’d be happy to drive in the Philippines … though perhaps not in an expensive shiny new car.
• Whenever you meet new people, expect to have to eat food, and not just a token snack either. Our habit of offering tea or coffee or a drink is perhaps stingier, but much less fattening.
• Most people are bilingual. My friend from Iloilo only has a high school education but speaks three languages.
• The public transport system is staggeringly efficient and cheap. Jeepneys (covered utilities that seat about 14 people) run more or less constantly on all main roads and taxis are everywhere. The longest I had to wait for a ride was about five minutes, and that was late at night. Usually it was a matter of walking a minute or two to a main road and hailing a passing jeepney or taxi straight away. Twice I caught buses to cities that were respectively two and five hours away from where I was staying. We just rode to the bus station, got on a comfortable air-conditioned bus and it left within half an hour. If I lived in the Philippines I doubt that I would bother owning a car.
• I did most of the things tourists are advised not to do and lived to tell the tale … DFAT has an advisory warning against catching ferries in the Philippines because one sank in 2004. I wonder if its equivalent in other countries warns people against catching trains in Australia because one crashed a few years ago … and never stay in a backpackers’ hostel cos they have lots of fires. I felt just as safe in the Philippines as in Australia (more so actually - the last time I was seriously concerned about my safety was in Rundle Mall, Adelaide, about 9 pm on a week night).

I liked the country and the people I met very much and I will certainly be going back as often as I can. Over the next few weeks I’ll be telling some stories about the people I met and describing how I intend to try to provide some practical help to a school in a remote area. I hope that some people who read might want to help too.

Tomorrow: Rex’s story.