General Info

[QUOTE=RedKilt;2226158]I A G. That is simply not true, as validated by evidence from the Phils Dept of Tourism. Filipinos LOVE to travel.

I was a speaker recently at a "roundtable" session and the DOT representative said that on last year's data 74% of hotel rooms across the Philippines were booked by locals. He indicated that it is a myth that the Phils depends on international visitors for room occupancies.

.....[/QUOTE]That has been my observation as well. Now I don't stay at the real high end 5 star places but I am often the only foreigner at breakfast in many of the places I've stayed. If there is another foreigner he is a monger with a pina at his side, just like me.

Every girl I have discussed traveling with was all for it, no hesitation just eagerness to go as long as work and family allowed for it to happen. Every bus trip I was the only foreigner and most airplane rides in country are full of locals not foreigners. Look around the airport next time you are on a local trip, the place will not be overrun with foreigners.

I think that the 74% number would be higher except that locals will stay with family or friends and / or pack more people into a hotel room than foreigners will. Foreigners also will travel singly or in pairs while here whole families will travel together.

Is it possible to CC other threads so posts and replies appear in both without having two disconnected comment trails?

I've written and read a few that are relevant to multiple threads eg using chat rooms in Cebu, AC vs Pattaya, travel PI to LOS etc.

[QUOTE=RedKilt;2226158]

The Philippines demographic is changing as more and more people are getting better incomes (through call centers for example). The increased FOREX rate for pesos (to the USD) from OFW remittances has also allowed a windfall for many families.[/QUOTE]Bill Maher has a segment on his show called "I can't prove it but I know it's true," and this applies to the point RK makes above with which I concur. The demographic has changed, and it's changing further. My recent internal flights have been 98% occupied by Filipinos, as was the case in the hotels in which I've stayed recently. Even locally, I've noticed that more and more Filipinos constitute the majority of customers at the higher end restaurants in Davao. I cannot substantiate this with statistics, and I've seen no recent analyses of rising incomes, but I infer that it's true based on my own observations, which echo those of RK and KG.

GE.

This is unbelievable.

[URL]https://ph.news.yahoo.com/dpwh-close-estrella-bridge-010010313.html[/URL]

It means an additional 100,000 vehicles return to EDSA while bridge is replaced.

Commuters from AC to Manila and then to airport be warned.

Now you might get 15% of all tourism is sex tourism depending on how you define sex tourism and what costs you allocate to sex tourism but I think that even that would be a bit of a stretch. 15% of 12% of the GDP works out to about 1. 8%. If we assume that a sex worker makes 4 times the average per capita GDP then we would get somewhere around (100 milliuon x 15% x 12% /4) 450,000 sex workers in the economy. Best guesses is less than 500,000 full time sex workers in the Philippines, but those serve locals as well as foreigners.

[URL]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_in_the_Philippines[/URL]

I was doing some searches on this a while ago and I came across one web site that defined sex tourism as any time a tourist had sex with someone other than his spouse. (yes even if a unmarried couple traveled together by this definition if they had sex on the trip than that was sex tourism.) This site also advocated castration for all sex tourists. Other sites defined sex tourism as trips with the sole purpose of engaging in sex with multiple partners.

We all know that the reality is somewhere in between. We travel to have a lot of varied experiences. We go to the beach, go scuba diving, tour different places and then have sex with a local. Do you charge diving costs to it being a sex tourism trip? What if your intent was to go diving and you just got lucky with a local who sweetly asked for "taxi money" in the morning? Is the whole cost of the trip to be allocated to sex tourism or just the taxi money?

I don't think you would ever get everyone to agree on an objective definition of what constituted sex tourism and in the case of trips for sightseeing and sex, what should be the allocation of costs between the two types of travel.

Even if you got general agreement on definitions, I doubt if you would ever get good data from the field. If someone asked me at the airport was I here on a sex tourism trip. I'the so no.

The best you could ever do would be to make an educated guess as to what the foreign / local sex trade was worth. You could count the people at places like Burgos Street, estimate how often a girl took a guy back to a room, average BF and tip amounts and then look at the number of local hotels, count how many guys bring girls back etc. And then basically take a wild ass guess at extrapolating the total to include AC, ESDA and other places.

[QUOTE=RedKilt;2228252]This is unbelievable.

[URL]https://ph.news.yahoo.com/dpwh-close-estrella-bridge-010010313.html[/URL]

It means an additional 100,000 vehicles return to EDSA while bridge is replaced.

Commuters from AC to Manila and then to airport be warned.[/QUOTE]I can confirm that it is closed, I was by there today. I had to detour to the Makati Street Bridge.

Any suggestion on a quick weekend away from Manila for a bit of diving and relaxing with a bit of P2 P on the side? I am thinking of going to Coron or Cebu?

[QUOTE=RedKilt;2228252]This is unbelievable.

[URL]https://ph.news.yahoo.com/dpwh-close-estrella-bridge-010010313.html[/URL]

It means an additional 100,000 vehicles return to EDSA while bridge is replaced.

Commuters from AC to Manila and then to airport be warned.[/QUOTE]I don't know what the normal usable life of a bridge is, but it sure ain't 9 years. The construction I'm guessing was crap, and now they're afraid of a serious mishap.

The only good news is that it's going to be built with Chinese money, so that means it's likely that a Chinese firm will build it, which also means it likely will be finished a lot more quickly than if DPWH was in charge.

GE.

[QUOTE=MarlboroRed;2228316]Any suggestion on a quick weekend away from Manila for a bit of diving and relaxing with a bit of P2 P on the side? I am thinking of going to Coron or Cebu?[/QUOTE]Coron is good diving but BYO GFE.

Cebu had everything but I wouldn't call it quiet.

Sabang is only 2 hrs from Manila and might fit your needs.

Or Subic.

[QUOTE=MarlboroRed;2228316]Any suggestion on a quick weekend away from Manila for a bit of diving and relaxing with a bit of P2 P on the side? I am thinking of going to Coron or Cebu?[/QUOTE]No brainer.

[QUOTE=GoodEnough;2228360]I don't know what the normal usable life of a bridge is, but it sure ain't 9 years. The construction I'm guessing was crap, and now they're afraid of a serious mishap.

....[/QUOTE]Typical design life span of a bridge is 50 years but they can last a lot longer than that if maintained. A lot of bridges are replaced because the traffic conditions change and they are undersized for the new demands. Also lack of maintenance or a disaster (accident or natural) can shorten a bridge's lifespan significantly.

The article that RK references says that it is due to the bridge being undersized for current traffic demands, it will expand from a 2 lane to a 4 lane bridge.

I used to walk across this often on my way to and from Mandaluyong City to Abacca Spa so I hope that they put in a proper pedestrian walkway, The old one was two narrow to meet anyone without someone stepping onto the roadway. I liked walking on the left bank of the river since it was more shaded but the right bank has a nice walkway to Makati Ave bridge.

[QUOTE=KabulGuy;2228600]Typical design life span of a bridge is 50 years but they can last a lot longer than that if maintained.

(snip)

I used to walk across this often on my way to and from Mandaluyong City to Abacca Spa so I hope that they put in a proper pedestrian walkway, [/QUOTE]But is 50 years a North American / European standard? The comparison may be inappropriate, but I have watched Filipinos constructing a small concrete block building under government contract. The precast blocks were far from uniform in shape, and the workers' standards for mortar left numerous very large gaps among the blocks. Eventually the gaps were concealed by a stucco covering inside and out. I don't recall whether they dropped rebar into any of the vertical columns in the blocks. And if they did, were they overlapped and wired together?

As is often done in the Philippines, mortar was mixed on the ground, since they didn't have a concrete mixer. They mound it up like a pile of mashed potatoes, make a depression in the middle for adding water, and then work it up with a hoe. Workers come by and grab mortar on their mortar boards, and when the mixed up mortar runs low, they add water, sand (or maybe it was some other other kind of aggregate) and dry mix as needed, and work up some more. You have to wonder about what gets mixed in from the ground in addition to mortar dry mix, and (presumably) washed sand. And as to consistent stiffness of the mortar, it's anybody's guess.

What I am getting at is the question of construction quality standards. Presumably ready mix is used for roads and bridges, but under what quality standards? Slump tests? Rust-resistant coatings on ironwork? Inspection of materials and workmanship? Etc.

Pedestrian walkway? Are you holding your breath?

[QUOTE=SoapySmith;2228816]But is 50 years a North American / European standard? ......

What I am getting at is the question of construction quality standards. Presumably ready mix is used for roads and bridges, but under what quality standards? Slump tests? Rust-resistant coatings on ironwork? Inspection of materials and workmanship? Etc.

Pedestrian walkway? Are you holding your breath?[/QUOTE]I have worked with Filipino engineers in Afghanistan on major construction projects. They are as good if not better than a lot of North American engineers and follow north american construction standards completely. One friend is a structural designer and she is now working on the design of some major projects to be constructed in the USA.

They are capable of following North American / European construction standards. I believe that they generally do on major projects that are inspected and controlled. Small buildings are your local guys just trying to make a buck with poor workmanship standards, just like I see at home in a lot of residential construction where the inspection is not that stringent.

I was staying a few days in an Airbnb that looked down on a high rise just starting construction, I say work that looked from a distance to be well organized and appeared to be progressing well. I did see field tests being done on the mixer trucks as they came into deliver concrete. There were inspection and delivery tags on the rebar assemblies as they were delivered. Overall it looked like a normal major construction project that we would see back home.

Just as you cannot extrapolate the shoddy workmanship and failure to follow design standards at home in the residential / small commercial market, you cannot make the same extrapolations here from small construction to major projects. There will be some size threshold that once exceeded the inspection and quality control will become much stricter and they will generally follow proper procedures, just as they will in NA / Europe. I would guess that that threshold is much lower in NA / Europe than here though and would also extend outside the major cities more than here.

[QUOTE=KabulGuy;2228917]I have worked with Filipino engineers in Afghanistan on major construction projects. They are as good if not better than a lot of North American engineers and follow north american construction standards completely. One friend is a structural designer and she is now working on the design of some major projects to be constructed in the USA.

They are capable of following North American / European construction standards. I believe that they generally do on major projects that are inspected and controlled. Small buildings are your local guys just trying to make a buck with poor workmanship standards, just like I see at home in a lot of residential construction where the inspection is not that stringent.

I was staying a few days in an Airbnb that looked down on a high rise just starting construction, I say work that looked from a distance to be well organized and appeared to be progressing well. I did see field tests being done on the mixer trucks as they came into deliver concrete. There were inspection and delivery tags on the rebar assemblies as they were delivered. Overall it looked like a normal major construction project that we would see back home.

Just as you cannot extrapolate the shoddy workmanship and failure to follow design standards at home in the residential / small commercial market, you cannot make the same extrapolations here from small construction to major projects. There will be some size threshold that once exceeded the inspection and quality control will become much stricter and they will generally follow proper procedures, just as they will in NA / Europe. I would guess that that threshold is much lower in NA / Europe than here though and would also extend outside the major cities more than here.[/QUOTE]I've worked with engineers here for years on various development projects and I don't dispute what KG said regarding the quality of the engineering. I have learned though that it's important to differentiate between construction projects, whether large or small, financed (and overseen) by private developers and development agencies, and projects financed and implemented by DPWH or other government agencies. In the case of the former, when not only construction standards, but also the flow of money is controlled directly by non-government entities, the quality of works is typically fine: appropriate quantities and qualities of materials are used, and projects are built to spec. In the case of government financed / supervised works however, the outcomes can be quite different. In many such cases, by the time politicians have received their cuts up and down the line, there's simply not enough money to build to spec and corners start being cut. In such cases (at least with roads) quality is always sacrificed, at least in my experience. So the problem is not one of lack of engineering talent or lack of appropriate construction standards, but one of corruption.

GE.

Golden Gate Bridge opened May 27,1937. Sydney Harbour Bridge opened on 19 March 1932. Brooklyn Bridge opened on May 24,1883. London's Tower Bridge opened on 30 June 1894. New York's George Washington Bridge is the busiest bridge in the world. It was opened on October 24 1931. Thew world famous Howrah Bridge in Bengal, West India, was opened on February 3, 1943.

Though the Ponte Morandi was opened in Genoa, Italy on 4 September 1967, the bridge partially collapsed on 14 August 2018, killing 43 people. Sub-standard materials supplied by the Mafia, who would find the Philippines and their bridges too corrupt for them, are the suspected culprits.

If you want standards, avoid the Philippines (and Italy).