No secret that many roads in the Philippines are bad … and stories about the traffic can sometimes reach legendary proportions.  I wrote one I particulate back about "Three-lined Streets".  But to leave you thinking I go through that nonsense every day would be a failure to present the whole picture.

Tuesday last we drove up to one of my sisters-in-law’s home in Pangasinan Province, a trip of almost exactly 200 kilometers (about 124 miles for the "thinking impaired").  We trawled first on our local town roads to the entrance of the NLEX (North Luzon Expressway), about 2km from our house.

The NLEX is a greet private enterprise-government coop success story.  The was atoll road (sometimes called the North Diversion Road) that had been built by the government years ago.  It was cheap, and it was a mess … humps, potholed, people driving on the shoulders, swerving cross all lanes of traffic, etc.  Someone had a brilliant idea.  They turned the whole mess over to one of the "ruling families" who formed a corporation, got foreign investors in on the deal and rebuilt the road to essentially US tollway standards.  It cost more these days … PhP 180 ($4.23 USD at today’s rate) for the complete 80 km distance, but a fantastic time saver … you can drive end-to-end in an hour, even obeying the speed limit (I know, who does that? ).  What’s more important, it has an ongoing maintenance budget and makes money for its investors.  They even dropped the tools last year because they were making money and paying off the investors far ahead of schedule.

We then transitioned to the new SCTeX (Subic, Clark, Tarlac expressway). This is also a joint venture with private industry … a Japanese investment consortium provided funds to build the system and a private corporation will operate, maintain and pay back investors with profits.  The system goes in two directions from where we entered, southeast to the Subic Freeport (55 km, toll PhP 110), and north to the city of Tarlac, on the main route north to Baguio … the way we traveled to reach Pangasinan.  We hung a   right at the junction in the picture.  (that’s the Zambales Mountains, Mt. Pinatubo in the left background, by the way)

All good things come to an end, though, so we finished the trip to Pangasinan on a national road (roughly equivalent to a state highway).  You can see how the roads, outside the towns, look in the last picture.  This is MacArthur Highway which actually runs the entire length of the Philippines from north to south.  Yes, that MacArthur, many people in the US won’t even remember the name any more but you won’t find many Filipinos who don’t know about "Doug".

Anyway, that’s a little about how trips go here on Luzon … paradise it is not, but in many places the roads are very good and the driving is pleasant.  People who have the preconceived notion that foreigners can’t or shouldn’t drive in the Philippines sort of amaze me a bit.  I’ve been driving all my life and have pretty much always had a car available to go where and when I wanted to, I really see no reason not to do the same here in the Philippines.

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