Is Travel to the Philippines Safe?

All right, lets see a show of hands-who out there has considered going to the Philippines? Yeah, me neither. That is one country that has a bit of a marketing problem on its hands (terrorism and poverty come to mind). It wasn't exactly a place I thought my passport needed a stamp from.

That was until my husband had been sent there several times for military exercises and sort of fell in love with the country. "You would love it," he told me. I continued to stand firm that we no longer had the luxury of being impulsive, fancy-free travelers. Gone were the days of bouncing from one third-world country to the next- now we had a child to think about when making travel plans.

My idea of a vacation was a place I'd be able to live to tell about, not a place that had imminent threat associated with it. "But oh the adventure," I kept thinking to myself. Ultimately, I came to this conclusion: I want to live life on my terms. If I'm going to go, at least let it be doing something I love. Better that then to live in fear.

We spent a week in the Manila area and here I am, alive to tell about it. As long as you are a smart traveler I think you are as safe there as you are in any big city. Furthermore, the whole country gets a bad wrap for problems that are mainly isolated to the southern areas. I have been to several other countries in Asia, but I found myself being most humbled by what I saw in the Philippines. As an American I found it difficult to comprehend the widespread poverty.

We have poverty in the United States, but its not to the same degree or extent as it is there. We don't have entire neighborhoods made of scrap metal shacks. We don't have children bathing in filthy rainwater that has collected on the side of the street. And we don't make common practice of throwing our trash out of a kitchen window letting it fall into the river below, along with everyone else's refuse, creating a colorful blanket of trash floating downstream.