One of the largest English-speaking nations in the world is a distant, little-known Republic which, after 48 years of American occupation and two decades of independence, seems a bridge between East and West. Some 7,000 Pacific islands together make up Asia's freest Democracy. It is at once a familiar and a very strange land indeed... Each year in the Republic of the Philippines there are 16,000 murders, and smugglers rob the Treasury of almost half its National Budget - some £80 million.