MANILA (AFP) – The Philippines on Monday defended its new peso notes, mocked by critics for featuring error-strewn maps of the country and apparently inventing a new species of parrot.
The central bank started shipping the bills to banks last Friday and they should be publicly available by Christmas, deputy governor Diwa Gunigundo said.
He defended the artistic rendition of Philippine maps appearing on the 20-, 50-, 100-, 200-, 500-, and 1,000-peso notes (45 US cents-22.59 dollars), which excluded the Batanes islands near Taiwan and misplaced some of the country’s top tourist draws.
“If we want to make the Philippine map that specific and accurate we would have had to draw all 7,000 islands,” Gunigundo said in an interview on DZBB radio.
“What we wanted to do was abstract the general location of all these important parts of the Philippines,” he said.
Map makers, including one of the experts drafted to delineate the boundaries of the Tubbataha Reefs natural park in 1994, have pointed out that the spectacular coral formation was misplaced by hundreds of kilometres (miles).
Source: http://news.yahoo.com
