Philippines

One of Harry’s favourite countries to date, and the subject of a long vlog series. His enthusiasm is consistent; his reservations are practical.

Observations

From Honest Filipino Street Vendor Gets A Reward 💰🇵🇭

• Overall: he names it one of his favourite countries so far. Whether he could live there is a separate question — he’d want the coast, somewhere like Moalboal, but rules it out on infrastructure.
• Connectivity: wi-fi in coastal towns is poor enough to be disqualifying for him; Cebu City and Manila are fine.
• Tourism: even the country’s most touristy spots are, by his measure, far less developed than the equivalent in Thailand.
• Typhoon damage: Cebu was among the areas hit, something Harry hadn’t realised until he was there. Months on, sellers were still working from stalls with no doors, covering their goods overnight.
• Money and costs: a Western-style café breakfast ran to 580 (from video – unverified), noticeably expensive by local standards; real farmed pearls sold roadside at about 100 pesos each. A gift of 5,000 pesos was, to the family who received it, about a month’s supply of rice.
• People: relentlessly friendly, and Harry notes Filipinos have unusually distinctive names. The vendor he met also picked his British accent correctly, which he says almost nobody does — most guess American.

From Inside the Terror City of the Philippines 🇵🇭

• Conflict and its aftermath: in 2017 pro-ISIS militants seized Marawi in Mindanao and fought government forces for five months, displacing 98% of the population — around 350,000 people — and killing over a thousand including civilians. Harry’s reaction is that ISIS operating in Asia is not something that comes to mind. Six years on, the centre remained a ruin with unexploded ordnance still in it.
• Displacement: “temporary” shelters run on five-year contracts, after which the landowner reclaims the houses. Permanent housing awarded in 2020 was still unfinished and largely empty. Residents described electricity but no running water, no income, no food supplies for almost two years, and paperwork to return home that requires rebuilding money they don’t have.
• Safety and reputation: advice about Mindanao splits roughly evenly between fine and don’t go. Harry walked Marawi at night and found it peaceful — see judge a place for yourself.
• Language and religion: Bisaya rather than Tagalog on the route south, and Marawi is a Muslim city where greetings are Islamic.
• Transport: long-distance buses are air-conditioned and show films, but tickets are handwritten on paper — Harry notes there’s still no online booking. Davao to Marawi was 700 pesos.
• Money and costs: a clean hotel room in Marawi ran to $30 a night.
• Hospitality: his local contact, whose own house had been destroyed in the siege, refused to let Harry pay for that hotel.

From I Survived 24 Hours in the Philippines with No Money 🇵🇭

• Generosity: the defining observation of the trip. Asking strangers for a single peso in Manila produced 100 within two minutes; a bakery fed him for free; a woman in a settlement gave him chicken adobo unprompted. Harry notes more than once that it was the first person he asked.
• Inequality: Bonifacio Global City’s towers stand directly against a self-built settlement. A hotel room on one side was 16,000 pesos a night and a guesthouse room on the other 400. He was told the settlement used to be larger before a shopping mall went up, and wondered aloud where those residents went.
• Money and costs: bottled water wholesales at about 7 pesos and resells at 50 in BGC; a day’s improvised trading netted 410 pesos, just over $7. A settlement guesthouse charged 300 pesos for three hours or 700 overnight.
• Street trading: selling in BGC requires renting a pitch, and an administrator will move you on without one.
• Living conditions: in the settlement, extreme density and no personal space, cooking over firewood, improvised sewage and water pipes, and unreliable power — a fire days before Harry’s visit had burned out the wiring. Residents told him the hardest part is earning money.
• Transport: Joyride motorbike riders serve as informal taxis.
• Climate: around 35°C, hot enough that Harry sweats through the filming.

From Looking For Love in the Philippines! 🇵🇭

• Colonial history, as Harry narrates it while walking: Spanish conquistadors colonised the islands and spread Christianity, building the walled city of Intramuros in the 1500s along with seven churches in that quarter alone. Jose Rizal, the nationalist who fought Spanish rule, gives his name to Rizal Park. The Americans then took over via the Treaty of Paris, bringing public education and infrastructure, followed by a Japanese occupation, with full independence in 1946.
• Poverty and inequality: 5.4 million families live in poverty in Manila out of 25 million people, and the average national wage is around $12 a day (from video – unverified). Harry walks from settlements with no personal space into the financial district of Makati within the same day.
• Transport: jeepneys, left behind by the Americans, are the everyday public transport. Pedicab tours run about 100 pesos an hour. Manila itself is not pedestrian-friendly — long stretches have no pavement.
• Reputation vs reality: Tondo’s notoriety dates from the 1970s and 80s rather than the present. Harry found it the friendliest and most entertaining district in the city.
• Food and prices: a Filipino-Chinese meal in Binondo — which he calls the oldest Chinatown in the world — came to 596 for chow mein, dumplings and beef tendon, the last being the softest beef he’s eaten. Street food runs about 5 pesos a piece; a Shake Shack burger in BGC was 650. Jollibee outlets are everywhere — he counted ten on one stretch.
• Street sellers: expect offers of counterfeit sunglasses, Viagra, and in the Malate red-light area, prostitution.
• Social life: basketball courts are the centre of neighbourhood life, and strangers pull passers-by into weddings and parties.

From $1000 USD Street Food in a Philippines Hood 🇵🇭

• Entrepreneurship: what Harry admires most in Tondo is that the stalls are businesses people started rather than jobs they took — dotted along the roads, often branded, with social accounts, and reinvested in. One ice cream vendor’s machine had cost 90k.
• Street food value: a sari-sari store cheeseburger at 35 pesos — under half a dollar — which he judged as good as a ten-dollar Shake Shack burger. Mango shake 60, shawarma 100, a Magnum 140. Stalls will let you eat first and pay after.
• Working hours: the people he tipped were working six days a week, or from early morning until 10pm, at shops that in one case had traded since 1993.
• Giving in public: word travels fast. The donut giveaway drew a crowd the moment one person heard, and by the end of the tipping run Harry was being followed and cut the day short. He also pushes back on commenters who assume vendors are scamming him.
• Local origins: everyone he met on the stalls was from Manila rather than an outside province.
• Language: English is uneven, and Harry twice told stall holders off for laughing at a colleague’s attempts at it.

From I Promise You it’s More Fun in the Philippines🇵🇭

• The tourist-trap question: Boracay is the island everyone warned him about. He found the beach selling relentless and good-humoured rather than predatory, and rated the island the nicest place he’d been.
• Luxury tier: the country’s top hotels run $550–600 a night, resort-scale — 219 rooms, four restaurants, two private beaches — and include private speedboat transfers where the airport is off-island. Harry stayed one night and moved somewhere cheaper rather than pay it twice.
• Money and costs: a private island boat opens at 7,000 pesos and settles around 4,000; a beach mango shake 140; a carved leather wallet 50; a pearl necklace 150; flipper rental from 500, negotiable to half that; a traditional hilot massage 1,800 at a five-star spa.
• Haggling style: beach sellers negotiate hard, fast and with heavy banter, and expect it back. Naming an expensive hotel as your destination raises your price.
• Hilot: the traditional Filipino massage, focused on the back and incorporating stretching, distinct from the Swedish option on the same menu.
• Conservation: sea turtle nests on Boracay are fenced and protected, which Harry credits as unusual for a fast-developing destination, though restaurant lighting still draws hatchlings inland.
• Service culture: staff at every level recognised him from YouTube, and hotel check-in was handled without the usual passport-copying rigmarole.

From I Investigated The World’s Oldest Tattoo Artist

• Tribal north: the mountains of northern Luzon isolated tribes from one another for centuries, which is why so many distinct local languages developed there, and head-hunting was practised — rival tribes killed and their heads displayed as a warning. The batok tattoo tradition comes from that history, marking heroism for the men.
• Living tradition: Buscalan now runs on tattoo pilgrimage to Apo Whang-Od, taking several hundred visitors a day — overwhelmingly Filipino rather than foreign. Her granddaughters have learned the art, so it survives her.
• Distances: the north is a two-day drive from Manila, roughly ten hours on the first day alone. Harry’s taxi driver put Manila traffic at eight to ten hours a day.
• Terrain and access: mountain villages can be reached by public zip lines — free infrastructure rather than tourist attractions — followed by hikes of around forty minutes. Ancient rice terraces around Sagada are irrigation systems for farming the slopes.
• Baguio City is known as the summer capital, for its climate.
• Booking: Harry travelled two days without booking accommodation either night and found rooms on arrival both times.

From $2000 Reward for Hardworking Filipinos 🇵🇭

• Two Manilas: Harry’s preference is explicit — the chaotic market districts like Quiapo over BGC and Makati, because the people are friendlier and more interesting. He still rates BGC nicer than most cities in the UK.
• English: spoken essentially everywhere, which he singles out as a relief compared with much of his travel.
• Religion: strongly Christian. Church ceremonies draw crowds mid-market, a Sunday service runs inside a shopping mall, candles are sold outside churches for wishes, and Santo Niño figures for homes and businesses go for around 2,500. He contrasts it with a secular England where nobody attends.
• Earnings and hours, from people who told him directly: a bike taxi rider around 500–900 pesos a day over eight-hour days; a roadside masseur roughly 3,000 a day over twelve-hour days doing 10–15 massages; a market stallholder working 5am to 8pm; a barber of 24 years. Asked for a message to the world, the masseur said life is hard and the hardest part is the rising price of groceries and cooking oil (from video – unverified).
• Street trading is often illegal: food cart vendors keep their setups portable specifically so they can run from the police.
• Prices: roadside massage 500 against 2,000 for the same treatment in a hotel; a barber’s skin fade with hair wash, scalp treatment, facial steam and shoulder massage 1,600, cash only; palabok 35; fresh lumpia two for 50; coconuts 50.
• Transport: bike taxis are the answer to Manila traffic, saving hours over a car.
• Second-hand electronics: Greenhills Mall is Harry’s pick — cheaper than the BGC malls, no scams, and second-hand Apple goods sold with about a month’s warranty. A mint iPad Air 4 listed at 19,500 went for 13,500.
• Cockfighting: inherited from the Spanish and licensed, effectively prohibited in Manila but still watchable in Mindanao and the provinces.

From Unexpected Encounter with Filipino Police in Siargao 🇵🇭

• Police and corruption: the observation the video is built around. Stopped at a checkpoint on Siargao, Harry was asked for his licence, told to wear the helmet sitting in his basket, and waved on. He has been stopped four or five times across Asia and Africa and been asked for money every other time. He is careful to limit the claim to provincial police on the islands rather than the country as a whole.
• Province versus city: his stated preference is the provinces, and the islands are what he thinks the country is famous for. Manila he describes as loving and hating simultaneously, with the traffic as the reason.
• Island infrastructure: power cuts, unreliable plumbing and undrinkable tap water are normal on a remote island, and he treats this as the expected trade rather than a complaint — the same infrastructure reservation he raised about living on the coast at Moalboal.
• Chains as a marker: the absence of McDonald’s and Jollibee is how he reads how developed a place is, and the arrival of a big resort brand as the signal it is about to change.
• Labour mobility: staff on Siargao are largely brought over from Mindanao, because the island’s own population can’t fill the tourist trade.
• Costs outside the cities: rooms $30–100 a night, a motorbike $10 a day, western-style meals $5–10, and street prices in pesos rather than dollars — a coconut 50, roadside bread 5, a whole lechon manok 250–270.
• Typhoon exposure: residents of a mangrove stilt village put it at roughly one a year, and their houses are built to flood at high tide regardless.
• Language: Tagalog is not the first language everywhere. On Siargao it isn’t, so his Tagalog greetings register as doubly odd — see learn the local language.
• Karaoke: he claims no country in the world likes it more, having been pulled into an ABBA singalong at the roadside.

From Inside a Brutal Filipino Prison 🇵🇭

• The drug war: Harry frames the prison population against President Duterte’s 2016 crackdown on drugs, which he calls effective and controversial in the same sentence. Over a hundred of the 350 inmates at the Capiz prison are there on drug charges, and shabu — methamphetamine — is the contraband the warden names.
• Pre-trial detention: the warden’s own framing of the rehabilitation question starts from the fact that a large share of the men held are not convicted at all, but still on trial.
• Prison conditions and culture: cells at double their design capacity, bare wooden bunks, no air conditioning, inmates cooking on coal they buy themselves — alongside daily family visits, daily conjugal visits, yard access most of the day, and cell leaders elected for character rather than gangs. Harry’s summary is that the conditions are brutal and the regime is humane, and he means both.
• Staffing: five guards on duty for 350 inmates on the day he filmed, at a provincial facility with about 50 staff in total.
• Karaoke again: he calls it the national sport, and the gift the prison most wanted was a replacement machine.
• Christian calendar: December is named by an inmate as the hardest month inside, because of family — consistent with how central Christmas is elsewhere in his Philippines footage.