Row over Philippines sex tourism remark

[callippo]

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.

[Steve.r]

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

[callippo]

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.

[callippo]

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.