Buy Now, Trust Later

Most people buy a car within a short drive of home. Usually within the same state, and certainly within the same country. I flew to Manila to buy mine.

The brief was simple: find the perfect vehicle for a road trip halfway around the world. The only complication was that I had no real way of recognising that perfect vehicle, other than a quiet confidence I’d know it on sight.

Why the Philippines?

A fair question, and one I asked myself more than once on the flight over. The planned route — Cambodia, Laos, China, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Europe — they all drive on the right, which requires a left-hand-drive vehicle. Of course, Australia drives on the left, which neatly rules out everything available within 2,000km.

I’d considered the obvious alternatives and discarded them. Shipping my own car from home meant driving the whole route on the wrong side. Buying in Europe meant starting at the wrong end. Vietnam and Laos wouldn’t let me register the vehicle as a foreigner, leaving just one solution: The Philippines. Close enough to the start line, full of left-hand-drive vehicles, and within budget.

There was one detail I chose not to dwell on. The Philippines is a country made of islands, and I was planning to drive across a continent. Those two facts would need reconciling at some point, but not yet.

The Search

What I hadn’t appreciated before arriving in Manila, is that a car dealership is only an option if you’re buying new. Walk into a Toyota or Ford showroom and you’ll find rows of gleaming utes under fluttering flags, the salesman ambling over before you’ve even opened the door. But step outside new-car territory and that whole apparatus disappears. There’s not really an equivalent for used vehicles — no used lots, no dealerships. The odd trade-in gets quietly resold, but the used market runs almost entirely on private sales — which in practice means one thing: Facebook Marketplace.

So instead of walking the car yards, I scrolled.

Hundreds of ads for the same car, trying to be sold by competing agents. All with limited photos, usually taken at dusk, accompanied by descriptions which omit the important details like model, kilometers or price. Instead, each car was described with the same list of adjectives and plenty of emojis — “well maintained,” “rush sale,” “no issues” doing a lot of quiet, unverifiable work.

Then came the messaging. Chatting to strangers online turns out to be its own particular skill, somewhere between vetting a used car and vetting a blind date. Is this person real? Is the truck real? Will either of us actually show up to a meeting? I quickly picked up the local lingo of buying cars. “Hm po?” — how much, please. “Last price?” — the question every seller expects and every seller answers with a number that isn’t actually their last price. By day two I could open with the right phrases before the seller had finished sizing up whether the foreigner in front of them knew what he was doing.

Then came the inspections. Meeting a stranger in a shopping centre carpark feels a little strange at first, but it’s how the used car market works. Over two days I chased listings the length of the metro area — north to Quezon City, south to Muntinlupa, visiting every mall car park in between, meeting sellers wherever happened to be roughly convenient to both of us. I’d take the keys, do a few laps, but not dare leave the safety of the car park to emerge into the crazy Manila traffic.

Then, in a car park somewhere near the end of that second day, there he sat. A Toyota Hilux Conquest V, 4×4, black, with the faintly smug look of a vehicle that hadn’t yet been told what I had planned for it.

Meet the Hilux

He ticked every box, most of which I’d made up earlier that morning. Four-wheel drive, diesel, a clean interior, and of course, Apple CarPlay to stream my tunes for the next 40,000 kilometers.

I opened the front-right door, climbed in, reached for the steering wheel, then glanced over my left shoulder at the empty driver’s seat. As an Australian, it’s a mistake I’ll be sure to make at least another fifty times.

The paperwork was the part nobody warns you about, and the part nobody ever asks about. Buying privately from a stranger in a car park is the easy bit — a deed of sale, a handshake, a risky international money transfer as a deposit. Getting that same vehicle registered in your name as a foreigner is a different exercise entirely: a tour of several offices with different layers of bureaucracy, with each queue unaware that the others exist.

The Keys

Forty-eight hours after I first laid eyes on him, I was handed a set of keys. And suddenly, this silly idea became real. For more than a decade it had sat in a dark corner of my mind — costing nothing, committing me to nothing. Now I was the proud owner of a ute in a Manila car park, registered in my name, with a full tank and nowhere in particular to be. The idea had quietly become a reality, and reality is much harder to ignore than fantasy.

Which left only the detail I’d been ignoring until now. To begin an overland journey across the largest landmass on the planet, I first had to get my newly acquired vehicle off the island. The first leg of the great drive to Europe, it turned out, would not be a drive at all.

It would be a boat.