My first run-in with the LAW!

I wrote a detailed description in my previous post about getting our driving licenses so that you could appreciate this post. :)

Today we left Manila to spend a few days resting at a guest facility in Baguio, a city in the mountains in the Philippines. Everything was going great! We made it out of Manila and onto the toll road in an hour! It was smooth sailing on the toll road! We made good time to where the toll road ended in the town of Tarloc . As we were weaving our way through the maze of the town looking for our road to Baguio, we saw a group of people harvesting rice in a field. Of course, we stopped to take some pictures. It really is fascinating, and I sure appreciate rice so much more now.

Continuing on, we found our road. This road was basically a four-lane road, two-lanes going each direction; however, I noticed that most of the traffic was keeping to the two middle lanes, leaving the two outside lanes open. As we headed up a hill, I decided to pass a truck in the outside (right) lane as I had observed others doing. As I did, I saw a police check point ahead! Oh drat! I am confident that I don’t understand all the road rules here yet. Sure enough, the cop waved us over.

Over here, many times you get stopped because of the color of your skin. There is an assumption that white people are wealthy, and in the past, corruption was bad with cops often stopping people to get bribes. We have heard that this is improving.

Our cop pointed out that Kris had forgotten to put his seat belt back on. He asked for my license, asked where we lived. We told him that we had only been in the country a short while. He told us that he actually could take my license away, making me pay more money to get it back and a LOT of hassle! I begged him to please not do that! He asked where we were going, and we told him Baguio and that we had never been there before. Then he asked why Kris wasn’t driving. We told him that Kris is not feeling well, so I was driving. (Afterwards, we were discussing what a funny questions that was… maybe there are not a lot of women drivers in that town. ) Finally, he told us that he was a nice cop and would have mercy on us. I can’t tell you how relieved I was… for Pete’s sake, I haven’t even had my license for a week! :)