Driving in The Philippines
I’ve been driving in The Philippines for several months now, primarily on a 2007 Honda Wave 125. Although I also have a 2007 Honda XRM 110, I rarely ride it. This past weekend was the St. John’s Fiesta in Jimenez, Misamis Occidental. This was to be my third visit to Jimenez, where my father-in-law is from. The last two times I went there I rented a van. Vans here come with a driver, and the cost is about PHP 2000 per day (about $43 USD), including the pay for the driver. Of course, you still have to feed the driver and provide him a place to sleep.
This time, I decided I wanted to drive myself, but the only vehicle I could find to rent, without a driver, cost PHP 2700 per day (about $57 USD), and was much smaller than a van. From Avis Rent-a-Car, I had my choice of a 2003 Toyota Corolla (which was only PHP 2000 per day), or a 2005 Toyota Vios. I chose the Vios, which is a pretty popular car in The Philippines.
This was the likely the cheapest Vios ever made. They come with two engine sizes, a 1.3 liter and a 1.5 liter. This one has the 1.3. It had power nothing. Manual windows, locks, etc., I even had to put the key in the door to unlock it. This car did not even have a heater. Have you ever tried to de-fog a windshield with no heat?
The air conditioner bogged this car down considerably. It was only medium peppy without the air conditioner, but with it running full bore, the car was outright sluggish. To compensate, on the ride to Jimenez, to keep the pace, I kept the engine in the mid-to-high powerband the whole way. That is, I did a lot of shifting. I only used 5th gear once on the way there, and that was just to get a feel for it. The car appeared to have zero acceleration in 5th gear, so I just did without it.
I was not concerned with gas mileage. Fuel costs are about the same in The Philippines as they are in The States. However, since Filipinos only earn about 12% of what Americans make, on average, fuel can be quite expensive for Filipinos and as a result they are quite thrifty with the petrol. I was not concerned. I was shifting gears almost constantly, both up and down the tree. I probably could not have gotten worse fuel mileage.
I don’t think anyone in the car had ever seen driving like that before. It was just so thoroughly un-Filipino.
Some of the roads here are wonderful to drive on. I seen some brand new and smooth, with lines down the center, along both sides, with plenty of room to pull the vehicle all the way off the road, and even with reflectors marking the edge of the road bed, along the edge of the pull-over area. At other times, I have seen concrete roads so cracked and fragmented that the car veer to one side or the other, and there is no warning for these type events. At other times there are areas of road repair, and there’s no “road construction 500 meters ahead” signs. You either know about because you’ve been past it before, or you better slow down in a hurry. Sometimes road repairs may be so serious that there’s nothing but muddy-gravel pot-holed road to go over.
Even is the road is perfectly surfaced, it’s still an obstacle course, with bicycles, tricycles, low-powered (low speed) scooters, pedestrians and the occasional caribo (water buffalo) pulling a cart on skids. Oh, and don’t forget the jeepneys, which will stop in the middle if the road without notice if the driver even smells a 5-peso coin, or if he’s low on fuel and needs to fill up again with 2 more liters of that home-made bio-diesel that’s sold along the roads. Did I mention there are no stop signs in The Philippines? They aren’t needed. Most people stop at intersections because they know they could very easily get killed if they pull out into another road without looking. The vast minority are ignorant of this train of thought. We don’t need no stinking stop signs. There are three kinds of drivers in The Philippines. Those that stop at intersections, those that don’t and get killed, and those that kill them. I have seen many a jeepney barrel through a blind intersection with so much speed they couldn’t stop in the length of one city block, even if they hit another jeepney to help slow them down.
When we set out for Jimenez it was late afternoon, and we hit the ferry port East of Ozamiz at about dark-thirty. Because it was late in the day, and on the weekend, most of traffic was off the road and I was able to set a pretty blistering pace as the road hazards were far and few between, relatively speaking. When I say “blistering pace” I do not mean that I was going 100 mph. I did see the speedometer as high as 120 kph (about 72 mph), and perhaps it got as high as 140 kph (88 mpg) when I wasn’t looking, but that would have only been on a long stretch of good road with nothing else on the road. I mean “blistering pace” in Filipino standards. I mean that if a jeepney was doing 40 kph I would downshift to 2nd gear and blast up close to redline before shifting. and then stomp 3rd on up to 100 kph or so. I will sheepishly admit I hit the rev-limiter in 2nd gear one time, and suffered what was to me an embarrassing total lose of power for a moment until I had 3rd gear fully engaged.
There are no pursuit police patrol cars here. I don’t recall seeing any speed limit signs, although there are plenty of signs that say “slow down”. The thought occurred to me that a person who liked to speed could pretty much do so with impunity here, but that’s not the case because there are road blocks and barricades to slow traffic all over the place. In one stretch of road of about 40 miles, between Iligan and Cagayan de Oro City I took photos of 18 of these various barricades. Most of these were in front of schools. However it wouldn’t be much of a deal for a policeman to text message or telephone the next town and tell them to stop a vehicle heading that way.