The Philippines are a typical winter travel destination for tourists. The official high season runs from December to April, with December and January being the months with the highest number of tourists.
Best Time to Travel
In terms of weather, from January to Aprili is also the driest time in the Philippines. I would also call this the best time to travel to the Philippines. Temperatures fluctuate throughout the year, around 30 ° C during the day, with peaks of up to 38 ° in the months of May to July. At night it cools down a bit, to around 26 ° or 27 ° C. A rain shower in the evenings can ensure that it can get a degree or two colder.
Water Temperature
The water temperatures in flat coastal areas reach around 27 ° whereby cooler deep water, which is flushed up by water movements, can sometimes provide a refreshing, cool current. You can eaily notice this when scuba-diving when you are suddenly surrounded by a colder layer of water.
The Philippines are hit by several typhoons each year, usually in the period from July to October. This is also called the Typhoon Season . During the rest of the year, typhoons are rather rare. The typhoons almost always originate from the sea, southeast of the Philippines, in the Pacific Ocean.
Typhoon Season
Warm air rises above the (warm) sea and takes huge amounts of water with it. Then the whole thing begins to turn and so becomes a typhoon which then moves towards the Philippines with strong winds and extreme rainfall.
The typhoons almost always have landfall in the Philippines in the area around Leyte and Surigao and move diagonally across the Philippines in a northwest direction.
There are some areas in the Philippines that are almost never affected by typhoons, such as the island of Bohol, on which I live. On the other sinde there are areas that "take" almost every typhoon, such as Leyte or Manila, the capital of the Philippines.
Sunrise & Sunset
Sunrise in the Philippines is around 5:30 a.m. and sunset is around 6:00 p.m. This remains almost the same throughout the year and, depending on the season, only moves a few minutes forwards or backwards.
As everywhere in the tropics or near the equator, there are no long summer nights in the Philippines, where it is still fairly bright until 10:00 p.m. The transition from day to night is very quick. You just watch the sunset over the sea and a quarter of an hour later it is already deep black night.
The rural population therefore goes to bed already at 8:00 p.m. to get up very early the next morning, and to use the cool, early morning hours for some work...
...and then doze off the rest of the day when it's too hot to work.
