FIELD TRIP

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Well, my third entry brings a field trip. Thailand issues 60 day visas and since my stay is for 73 days, I had to exit the country to return. Since I had never been to the Philippines, I decided that would make a nice trip. I boarded in BKK and headed for Manila the other day to spend a week on the islands.

Take everything that I said about traffic in Bangkok and forget it - Manila doesn’t seem to have any lanes, any traffic lights, any traffic signs and few rules except survival of the fittest. I have respect for taxi drivers in the Philippines, and even greater respect for bus drivers.

I noticed that most buildings and many corners have armed guards - many carrying what appear to be sawed-off shotguns. Even last night when I went to Pizza Hut for dinner, there was an armed guard who had to let me into the restaurant. One is patted-down to get into the malls. I inquired if the area was really this unsafe and I was told that this is a relatively new thing - just in the past few years, after the Muslim extremists have increased power in the southern part of the country.

The most heavily guarded area is the US Embassy. There are police, military and security guards everyplace. I tried to take a picture of a Banyan tree outside the embassy and was told that I could not even take a picture of a tree - outside of the complex.

Yesterday I took a boat out to the island of Batangas for the day. The beach was nice - but small, and a little dirty. The taxi drivers, boat drivers, etc all try to charge the “Americano” more money. Beggars and street vendors are everywhere trying to sell their cards, tickets, watches, sunglasses - anything they can get their hands on. They are aggressive - somewhat like Peru was.

Well, back to Thailand.

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