http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15226962
Claims that 40% of foreign male visitors to the Phil's are sex tourists
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-15226962
Claims that 40% of foreign male visitors to the Phil's are sex tourists
Another idiot american putting both feet in his mouth before speaking ... what a
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
This is a link off the bbc page
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-12597245
I'm shocked at this one as I lived in Olongapo itself for about 3 years (visiting the wife when I was on leave) and I honestly thought the place had been cleaned up. Alright there where a few girly nightclubs in town but nothing too major. Alot of it was out of town toward Barrio Baretto and of course Subic town further round the coast. It just shows you don't really know what you're walking past in the street, whats happening behind closed doors. Saying that I don't think the problem is as bad as in Thailand, though out there they do seem to be trying to combat this problem in a more high profile manner.
It's been emontional
I lived in Angeles City for 3 years, so what can I say ?
I also spent my last holiday at Baloy Beach, Olongapo, Subic.
The figures are probably about right.
Sorry if that upsets some people.
Here's a philosophical point; few people seem to be against either sex or tourism, so why should it be such a problem when the two are combined?
Good pointOriginally Posted by Amaw2008
Here's a philosophical point; few people seem to be against either sex or tourism, so why should it be such a problem when the two are combined?
The problem comes when it is the younger girls (underage) that get pushed into it.
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
That is true Steve....and totally abhorrent wherever in the world it occurs.
Oh, and I should have said 6 years in AC, when I add some of the times together, just that I was working away in Hong Kong for some of the time.
Did I tell you that once I punched a bloke on the jaw in Angeles for whispering 'f'ing pedo' as I was passing by with my OWN SON ?
My Filipina step-daughter often accompanied me on shopping trips too, so easy for people to get the WRONG idea.
Lots of expats with their own kids there.
Quite justified too GrahamDid I tell you that once I punched a bloke on the jaw in Angeles for whispering 'f'ing pedo' as I was passing by with my OWN SON ?
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
if anything the 40 per cent figure is on the low side as far as I'm concerned. 40% might be about right for those seeking adult entertainment in places like Angeles, though don't forget such entertainment is available in every city in the Philippines of any size and even very small towns. If you include the men chasing online webcam phantoms and the 'fiance' and 'marriage' tourists who are also surely sex tourists by any objective standard, then the figure is probably closer to 70% - at least when it comes to men from the west.
though the sex tourism figure for men from countries in Asia, who comfortably outnumber the western tourists, is also high, a lot of them might just go for a week or two with their families from places like Korea which freeze in winter. When was the last time you saw a western family with three children on holday in the Philippines? I've seen plenty of Korean, Hong Kong, and Japanese fanilies, but as for western ones with no familial connection to the Philippines, and coming from outside Asia, I don't think I've ever seen it once. The place scares them. I see two white adults with young children all the time in Thailand. In the Philippines - never.
fact is there are comparitively few reasons why anybody would want to go to the Philippines as opposed to other countries in the SEAsian region for any reason other than sex or 'romance', even Thailand, which is supposed to be the bigger sex tourist destination.
the weather is bad, and the food is worse.
the cultural 'attractions' aren't all that appealing to most. Most westerners aren't all that keen on videoke to say the least, cockfighting is not something they are likely to embrace with gusto, and the Wowowee-type shows on the television 24/7 aren't likely to cause an artistic Damascene conversion. There is this feeling that somebody from a Christian country anyway, and who is used to seeing churches everywhere, is going to be far less impressed by a 350 year old Catholic church, than a Buddhist temple which they may never have seen anything like.
the infrastructure, and especially the tourist infrastucture, in the Philippines is terrible.
it's expensive to get to, and when you do get there, you find that they want double what everyone else in south east Asia wants for a room.
the corruption and level of (non) law enforcement is so terrible it can be downright dangerous, as that busload of Hong Kong tourists found out to their cost in 2010.
when you come right down to it, there aren't all that many men from the western countries who would possibly want to go to the Philippines for any reason other than sex or romance.
It is amazing how people can form a view of a complete stranger in the street just by the location they're in and who they're walking with. Graham is a good example of being a victim of this. When the whole Gary glitter thing kick off in Vietnam I remember seeing a report on the beeb of a brit expat out there with a family, wife and kids, and he said he was getting pheado comments walking down the street with his own daughter!!! Unfortunately these are the times we live in where its all to easy to jump to conclusions about a person with no evidence about them at all
It's been emontional
Unfortunately most people have this impression that a man going to Asia on his own has to be a sex tourist
Good post Callippo.
Sounds like callippo has only visited areas of the R.P associated with bars and "sex tourism".. If the cap fits..wear it I guess.
Certainly sounds like he knows his subject matter!!
Where we live those type of bars are outlawed and always have been for as long as I can remember..(and thats all of Bohol)
For starters,go to Alona beach or BBC beach in high season and you will find plenty of western couples with kids on holiday.The malls here and in Cebu are also full of them,spending money as tourists.. Many other areas of the R.P that I could mention with the same qualities.
callippo..Probably not your cup of tea..Right?..
Callippo, you make some very good and interesting points in your posts. I completely agree with you regarding the poor infrastructure, food, corruption lack of law enforcement and relative high costs of a holiday in Ph compared to other SEA countries. I still believe that the sex tourism thing is restricted to those parts of the country that have built their tourist industry around it. As Fred says, Alona Beach on Panglao and the Bohol area in general are nothing like AC, they are very tourist friendly places with lots of western families there. Similarly, Palawan and Caramoan are also like Panglao. I've seen most of the major Ph tourist hotspots in the last couple of years, and even Puerto Galera and Boracay have done a lot to clean themselves up and attract real tourists.
Some single men who travel to the Phil's and SEA are plain and simple travellers or adventurers, scuba divers, mountaineers, trekkers who like to see a different side of the world, if they happen to meet an Asian girl on their travels and form a relationship does that make them a sex tourist
Unfortunately, people only see what they want to see. I have not travelled extensively around Phils like some, but I have not seen the seedy things that have been described. But dont these things happen in any major city in the world. You can walk around Bournemouth, Bristol any town pretty much and find sex workers. Just because it is highly reported in Asia we all assume it is a haven for those wanting sordid sex. Like Ian says, many travellors are there to experience a differnt culture and what it has to offer. If they have a holday romance so what?? Thats how I met my wife.
Reports about the sex industry in Asia just goes to back up the age old sterio-typical views of the 'West' about Asia.
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
the substandard by international standards malls in Cebu are definitely not 'full' of western tourists with children, that is just not true. Why are you making stuff up.
Even young western couples without children are quite an unusual sight in Cebu, the few you see are just passing through, possibly on their way to Malapascua or Bantayan, though it is true you will see a few of those in Boracay and Alona - minus the toddlers though.
you will just never see the large numbers of European families with small blond haired and blue eyed children in the Philippines that swarm the resorts in southern Thailand year after year (repeat business is high), even in Alona and Boracay. It just doesn't happen.
the only families you ever see in the Philippines on holiday, without a single Filipino member in the group are Asian ones.
just look at the advertisements relating to south east Asia in the UK newspapers. None of them ever mention the Philippines. All they mention are Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam.
even Burma gets more exposure and advertising than the Philippines. When was the last time you saw an advertisement urging somebody to 'GO TO THE PHILIPPINES' except on a dating website?
as far as tourism goes, you'd think that the Philippines didn't exist as far a mainstream tourism goes. For the 12th most populous nation state in the world, the country is invisible. I've never seen a single travel brochure selling family holidays to the Philippines and I challenge anyone else to say truthfully that they have either.
meanwhile, packages for couples and families to Thailand and Malaysia are all over the UK high street. Long haul destinations a long way behind Spain and Greece of course in terms of sales to families of course - but they're there, for sale, on every high street in the country.
travel agents don't like booking to the Philippines.
they've had too many complaints in the past, and the country has now gotten itself a bad reputation in the industry.
it never ceases to amaze me the level of denial that goes on forums related to westerners and the Philippines.
the main area of denial is this refusal to accept that somebody who has been chatting to some online phantom on the internet for months and then comes out the Philippines and marries them, which any messed up, inadequate slob can do anytime they want, or someone else who's purpose is to aquire what used to be called pre-internet a mail order bride to ship back home, is just as much of a sex tourist as some other messed up, inadequate slob that spends all their time with an SML in front of them in a bikini bar.
Some single men who travel to the Phil's and SEA are plain and simple travellers or adventurers, scuba divers, mountaineers, trekkers who like to see a different side of the world, if they happen to meet an Asian girl on their travels and form a relationship does that make them a sex tourist.
I agree with this and no it doesn't. I recognise that this group does exist.
but to suggest that sex tourism is confined to only a few areas of the country like Angeles or Subic is well wide of the mark.
Cebu is crawling with them, and I'm not just talking about the habitues of the bars on Mango. Even the smaller cities like Cagayan de Oro have their share. The kind of slobs who sit around drinking themselves into a blob all day while there's a pool of mostly bored out of their minds professional foreigner-shagging girls, some of whom some of them may have married, in attendance.
then there's the online daters, or 'marriage tourists', come to the Philippines to meet women. That's why they've come. Any other reason they've come is purely ancillary. This makes them primarily sex tourists. The Philippines, unlike families with children, who are conspicuous by their almost total absence, is full of them.
you might think, oh they dated only one, or only a few women, and then ended up marrying one. That's not a sex tourist.
but where do you draw the line? One? Five? Twenty? Fifty? A hundred?
I saw this today, just coincidental timing I guess:-..... I've never seen a single travel brochure selling family holidays to the Philippines and I challenge anyone else to say truthfully that they have either....
Bohol Holiday Package
Not that the price is so attractive
Sexy picture too.
lol stop acting like you were just browsing through a UK national newspaper and happened to come across that advert, like you see packages for Thailand and Malaysia advertised, or saw it on the side of a bus, like you see Egypt advertised on the side of buses.
you had to dig around on the web to find that.
just out of interest, I called them up about it.
some guy with an Indian accent picked up the phone in London.
notice there's no reference number in the advert, like you would see in similar packages that actually ARE advertised in the national print press for destinations like Phuket.
hence it was really laborious trying to get the guy to understand what holiday I was interested in. He'd never of Bohol obviously, despite being employed in the travel industry. I had to spell it out to him.
finally the penny dropped for him and he found it. All he could tell me so far was that the initial flight leaves from Gatwick.
but that was it so far. He says he's going to call back 'later'.
I can't wait.
8 days in Bohol from Gatwick and then back home. That will involve three flights to get to Tagbilaran, and then three flights back.
you know what? I hope the holiday actually means 8 nights in Bohol, and not 5 nights in transit and then 3nights in Bohol.
that sounds somewhat tiring.
it also sounds distinctly amateurish.
ithey say thet can deliver a package to Bohol including return flights, and 3 nights at the Bohol Beach Club. Great. So what about the other 5 nights? Where are we supposed to spend those? Sleeping on the street in Jagna?
can't wait for them to call back.
I got the call back and it's getting funnier and funnier.
first off it's not from Gatwick, it's from Heathrow.
it's Cathay Pacific and then onwards to Cebu.
after that he got a bit confused.
he wasn't sure whether it was a ferry (presumably the Super Cat) on to Bohol, or an internal flight.
of course, the only flight available to Bohol from Cebu is the recently introduced Mid Sea Express one, and that only runs twice a week
could be difficult to piece a scheduele together.
he's got his work out on this one. I gave him my email and he said he'll drop me the scheduele as soon as he figures it out.
You have a very cynical outlook. If it is SO bad, why do you spend so much time there? You appear to be VERY well informed about the seedy side of the Philippines.
Why dont you tell us about the good people and the nice places??
It is easy to hit a dog when it is down, I think your posts are just as bad as the American embassy official who is just perpetuating the western thoughts about people in the Philippines
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
there's some bug on this site that means I can only read the last reply in a single line of letters and it's impossible to copy and paste it onto Word. So this is a dummy reply, to enable me to read the above post.
You appear to be VERY well informed about the seedy side of the Philippines.
I'm just aware that the seedy side of the Philippines isn't confined to bikini bars in places like Balibago.
just as seedy as far as I'm concerned, are the comparitively rich (compared to Filipinos) and usually much older sex tourists that use the internet to prey on young, poor women for marriage.
of course they've deluded themselves for the most part, that their intentions are entirely honorable.
let's see how they get on chasing girls in Korea and Japan and Singapore, thirty or forty years younger than them.
they'll get called up by the girls themselves, instead of just the watching wider world, for being the pervs they are.
That's what twenty five thousand dollars, per man woman and child in the country does.
they'd better hope that the Philippines doesn't get rich like Korea did.
in the post Korean war era, Korea was like the Philippines today. In fact, fifty years ago, Korea was much poorer than the Philippines - at that time, the Philippines was almost the richest country in Asia, not all that far behind WW2 ravaged Japan.
any westerner, no matter how old or socially inept, could go to Korea in the mid 1950s and persuade some poor girl to marry them just so they could get a ticket out of there.
then Korea got rich. They overtook the Philippines in GDP and now, they're GDP per capita is $30,000.
in the Philippines, it's only fractionally more than 10% of that.
now try sending, as a 50 year old guy, a message to a Korean girl on a dating website.
she'll tell you to get stuffed.
I love the Philippines. I'm going back for two weeks for four months, just as I have for years.
but I hate the humbug and hypocrisy, typified on the internet by the obviously innacurate notion that sex tourists only inhabit the twilight world of bikini bars, and nowhere else.
If you wanted to catch all the sex tourists, or sexpats in the Philippines, you'd need to cast a far bigger net than that.
You arent going to see holiday packages to the Philippines from the UK. Its just too far. it doesnt mean that holidays cant be had. And it doesnt mean that people dont go on holiday there from abroad. It is simply just a bit too far for a family holiday, for most families.
Good point, and as it happens, I have just returned from a 'family' holiday to Phils. I took my Mum and Dad.
If you want your dreams to come true ...... first you have to wake up
Wow, you have got some thin skin there friend.
I would suggest that one reasonable way to avoid being dismissed as a troll (perhaps unfairly), is to not let how you say something take away from what you actually want to say.
they emailed the itinerary back.
it's London-Hong Kong-Tagbilaran
leaves LHR on the 2nd at 11.25
gets to TAG on the 3rd at 14.25 (35 hours later)
7 nights at the Bohol Beach Club
return journey same way takes 32 hours
price £910 pp based on two sharing
transfers from the airport to resort not included
that price is not actually too bad.
it compares pretty well to what they are charging these days for packages that are like 2 nights in Bangkok and then 6 nights in Phuket (they used to be cheaper ; they've gone up quite a bit in the past couple of years).
I've heard of Bohol Beach Club and I've passed it on the motorcycle before a few times, and it's expensive. It's a good resort with pools where the cheapest room must be at least 2,500 a night.
so it's difficult to see how they can pull it in for £910 pp for seven nights.
I'd bet they'd be really pissed off if you just hired a motorbike in Tagbilaran and arrived at the resort on it, and refused to eat or drink anything while you were staying there and just used it to sleep and hang around the pool. The holiday is room only.
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