The Philippines Experiment, Track Two

If you know who I am or have been reading this blog, you are probably aware that I spent two and half years of my life living in the Philippines. Now I'm back, and I'm going to attempt to chronicle the entire experience as best as my vague recollection allows.

Kanye West f. Paul Wall & GLC - Drive Slow

I wasn’t going to exceedingly shake up my world unplanned; obviously, I had to take care of a handful of things before I left Canada: paid off my student loans, obtained dual citizenship/Filipino passport, got a full medical check-up, downloaded every episode of Lost, Entourage, and The Office, networked with a few Filipino people who knew people to try to acquire an acceptable job over there (wishful thinking), lost 15 pounds so that I can rock a beach body, and saved up more than enough money for necessities and luxuries. I also set aside a portion of that chunk of change so that I can buy a car right away.


It’s pretty much impossible to get around in Edmonton without a car. Well, let me rephrase that. The feasibility of public transportation depends on your threshold for delay, trouble, or suffering. When it’s during the eight winter months or you’re not going downtown or U of A or the nearest bus stop is two blocks from your house or it’s late at night, commuting is a tremendous inconvenience in Edmo. That’s why owning a vehicle has always been understood as a necessity here. Commuting in the Philippines, on the other hand, is cake. You can ride a jeepney, a pimped-out US military vehicle originally from World War II that has a specific route and holds 10 to 20 people. You can catch a tricycle, a motorcycle with a rickshaw-like sidecar, if you’re in a bit of a hurry. If you’re in the Subic Bay Freeport (*), you can grab a taxi, and you can ask for the driver’s cellphone number just in case you need someone to pick you up or if you want a new textmate. Add to the fact that all of them run 24 hours a day and the fares are extremely cheap (7.50 php for the jeep, 20 php for the tricycle depending on how far you need to go, 100 php is the most I’ve paid for a cab ride in SBF), there’s no need to drive on a Filipino road.

(*) Subic Bay Freeport is an area adjacent to Olongapo City, which was formerly a US Naval facility. Because of its ability to attract investors like FedEx, Coastal Petroleum, and Acer, pretty much everyone eligible (or motivated) to work in Olongapo is employed in a factory, company, or establishment in SBF. Also, because of its tourist spots, it also has better clubs, hotels, restaurants, beaches, and basketball courts than Olongapo. Because it doesn’t allow jeeps and tricycles through its gates, its streets are much less congested.

With all that said, I got myself a car.

I got it as soon as possible, in fact. I couldn’t resist. Not even 24 hours upon my arrival, I was getting my picture taken for a Filipino driver’s license. After three months of searching and test-driving, I bought myself this car for half of my intended budget. As much fun I was having commuting around town, there were still drawbacks. First of all, there were the harsh weather conditions, and your very own automobile has two tools to combat the country’s two extreme climates: air-conditioning against the heat and a roof and windows against the rain. If you have to go somewhere you need to look your best in, like a job interview or Saturday night at the discotheque, you can rely on your car to get you there so fresh and so clean. Second of all, you obviously get to places faster if you control the route and velocity. With your own car, jeeps stopping at every corner to pick up passengers and trikes traveling 25 km/h would not be at the helm of your trip. Third of all, there are occasions when you need one for cargo reasons, like after a trip to the groceries or when picking up a succulent pig to roast.

Fourth of all, a car in the Philippines is like an anabolic steroid for your social status. I was only hitting the freeways with a humble ’96 Lancer, far from something you’d flaunt in a car show, but if you plan to be in the business of stockpiling club-going socialites in our country, any car is better than no car. I risk being labeled a sexist while I say this, but there are way too many pieces of information to validate my claim. I remember a family friend saying during a Filipino gathering here in Canada that if he had his Lincoln Navigator with him during a vacation to the Motherland, he can get girls by simply parking his ride somewhere near a college campus. I remember a friend in the Philippines cockily saying something that roughly translates into “God is fair, because if he had given me a car, then I would get every girl in the world”. I remember my cousin would regularly have his car keys in his hand whenever we would go barhopping, even when he didn’t drive. Me? Everyone who knows me very well can attest to my modesty. You would never catch me stuntin’, but I’m guilty of offering a few rides home back in my bachelor days.

It took me a while to get used to driving in the Philippines. They need to invent a new word to call Manila traffic because the breadth of the word “traffic” is not enough to illustrate how bad it is. Imagine Edmonton’s worst bumper-to-bumper gridlock during its snowiest day, then make it five hundred times worse. Eager drivers trying to be creative turn three-lane streets into six-lane entanglement. The notions of signaling, waving, and allowing drivers ahead of you are useless. The school of thought for lane changing is “survival of the fittest”; buses and jeepneys weave in and out of lanes whenever they want, so you have to make room or get run off the road. Olongapo driving is not as bad, simply because it’s not as populated, but you still have to deal with narrow roads, maneuverable scooters, and stray dogs crossing the streets without warning. That’s why I refrained from getting a car with manual transmission—my plate’s already full with all these problems on the road, why would I want to toss in one more task like shifting just for the shit of it?

With all the excitement about driving, I stupidly underestimated the maintenance cost of owning a car in the Philippines. I loved Christian-888, don’t get me wrong, but that car made me want to pull my hair out on so many occasions—from fender benders, to overheating radiators, to floodwater infiltrating the engine, to brake pads falling off while crossing an intersection, to a stolen audio system, to stuck power windows, to someone etching the eloquent phrase “fuck u” on the passenger seat window. If you include registration, insurance, and instances when I had to pay off traffic cops for infractions such as illegal parking, beating the red light, and overtaking, I almost coughed up the same amount of money to fix the goddamn thing as I did to purchase it. I had to sacrifice my plan to customize it with candy gloss, Racing Hart rims, and suicide doors. Alas, my dream to star in the Filipino version of Cribs was going to have to be compromised.