Introduction to The Philippines With more than seven thousand islands, sixty percent of them uninhabited, it's hardly surprising that most tourists visit the Philippines for sand and sea, for secluded tropical islets where you might be the only visitor and for world-class scuba diving among dazzling marine life. This is a diverse country in a small package, where a day's travel will take you from the unearthly tribal villages of the north to the idyllic islands of the Visayas. Landscapes range from sweeping rice plains to jungled peaks, from razor-sharp cliffs enclosing placid lagoons to shining ribbons of sand. If you're ready to explore – and willing to cope with some eccentric infrastructure and a very laidback attitude to time – you're in for a rewarding trip.
The country is broadly divided into three main areas: Luzon, where the frenetic capital Manila is located; the scattered islands of the Visayas; and massive Mindanao. Luzon's two great mountain ranges, the Cordilleras and the Sierra Madre, both run north– south and act as natural impediments to travel, with the few roads that do penetrate the mountains in poor condition. Nowhere in the country are there any sweeping motorways or freeways, but the good news is that, as well as a decent domestic plane network, there's an intricate tracery of ferry routes that links the clamorous cities with the most far-flung little islands. Many of these ferries don't run to a tight schedule, and some are badly equipped and poorly maintained, but whichever island you want to visit, there will be a boat that can take you there.
| Fact file |
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• The Philippines consists of 7107 islands covering 300,000 square kilometres (slightly larger than Arizona) and with a coastline longer than America's. There are 73 provinces and 61 cities.
• The population is 85 million, 83 percent of which is Roman Catholic, 9 percent Protestant, 5 percent Muslim and 3 percent Buddhist, animist and other religions. The bulk of the population – more than ninety percent – is of the same stock as the Malays of Malaysia, with a small minority of Chinese.
• There are more than 150 languages and dialects. The main languages are Tagalog, English, Cebuano (spoken in Cebu), Ilocano (northern Luzon), Ilonggo (around Iloilo), Bicol (the Bicol region), Waray (Leyte), Pampango and Pangasinense (both Luzon).
• The country is a republic, modelled on the US system of government, with separation of powers between the executive presidency, bicameral legislature and an independent judiciary.
• Major industries are textiles, pharmaceuticals, chemicals, wood products, food processing, electronics assembly, petroleum refining and fishing. Agricultural products include rice, coconuts, corn, sugar cane, bananas, pineapples and mangoes. The most important sectors of the economy are farming and light industries such as food processing, textiles and garments, electronics and car parts.
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This is a country rich in flora and fauna – a thousand kinds of orchid, and forests that are home to macaques, spotted deer, boars, giant bats, pythons and cobras. There are so many types of butterfly and bird that they haven't all been documented, but you're likely to see bleeding-heart pigeons, green kingfishers darting through rainforest greenery, stately whistling herons with their melodious call and, circling above the jungle canopy, a dozen sorts of raptors, including the tiny Philippine falconet. The world's smallest fish, the pondoka pygmaea, inhabits the surrounding waters, as does the largest, the whale shark.
Diversity also characterizes the people, who speak more than 150 language and dialects and are variously descended from early Malay settlers, Muslim Sufis from the Middle East, Spanish conquistadors and friars, Mongoloid tribes from China who arrived 15,000 years ago and later Chinese traders. Indeed, it's the unaffected and gregarious inhabitants that often provide a visitor's enduring memory of the country. It's a hoary old cliché, but largely true: Filipinos take pride in making visitors welcome, even in the most rustic barrio home. Equally important is the culture of entertaining, evident in the hundreds of colourful fiestas that are held throughout the country, most of them essentially religious in nature – this is, after all, the only predominantly Roman Catholic country in Asia – but with a lively secular element of pageantry, street dancing and singing.
| Beauty pageants |
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It's somehow fitting that Imelda Marcos began her rise to power by winning a beauty pageant. Thousands of young Filipinas see these pageants – held in every city, town and barrio around the country – as a similar opportunity to make a fortune, without the prohibitive expense of struggling through school and college. The biggest nationwide contest is the annual Binibining Pilipinas (Binibining is the formal Tagalog for "Miss"). The winner is guaranteed advertising contracts, her face glowing from billboards around the country advertising shampoo, soap and skin-whitening lotion. After that, if she's got the nous, it's TV work and big-peso movie deals. Sometimes success comes in reverse, with expatriate Filipinas winning competitions in the US or Canada and using their success as an introduction to the showbiz circuit back home. Take Joyce Jimenez, who won a contest in the late nineties in Los Angeles and promptly headed to Manila, deciding she'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than struggle for fame in America. She has now become the Philippines' leading soft-porn star, with her own range of lingerie to boot.
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Even the politics is rich in showmanship and pizzazz, masking a deplorable lack of substance. From Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos to the "housewife President" Cory Aquino and tough-guy movie actor Joseph Estrada, the country's leaders have never been short on charisma, but all have conspicuously failed to help the country shed its developing-nation status. Grinding poverty, visible everywhere you go in the shanty towns and rickety barrios, can be traced as far back as Spanish rule, when friars appropriated farmland, leaving locals with nothing. Inequality of land ownership still exists, but these days it's also the economy's inability to grow that perpetuates poverty.
Ordinary people, however, somehow remain stoical in the face of these problems, infectiously optimistic and upbeat. This determination to enjoy life is a national characteristic, encapsulated in the common Tagalog phrase bahala na – "what will be will be". For Filipinos, there's simply no excuse not to have fun.
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