Detours

I don’t know why but I find strange comfort travelling at night; the uncertainty, the prospect of discovery, and the melancholy of the trip itself takes me back to a time when me and my Papa would go on a long drive to Baguio in the wee hours of the morning to get to the old, ancestral house on Gen. Lim St. as the sun broke the fog drifting over the view deck at the top of Kennon Road.

Most of the trips I enjoyed were in the cover of darkness, long after the world has gone off to dream land and there is that sense that you are in the only vehicle that's on the highway or in the air.

I remember, when I worked in Malacañan, the long waits at the airport boarding lounge, reading a book or fidgeting with a phone as other passengers break out blankets or throw on warm clothes and hunker down to catch some Z’s.

It was two decades back when I first saw the world below at night, from 30,000 feet as we took off from the Mactan International in Cebu. I have seen many nights like it, when my thoughts drifted out to the blackness and mystery of life as an explorer of oneself.

During my trips by land, my soul would project itself far off into the rice or corn fields of Central Luzon or the coconut plantations of Laguna and Batangas. I would savor the smell of poultry or tobacco plants as the bus takes short stop overs long enough for me to enjoy a cup of instant coffee and a Marlboro.

And I would watch people as they scramble down from the bus and into the pay public toilets, light up their favorite smokes or grab snacks. I can’t help but wonder where each one was truly headed. I know that there are few like me who travel for the sake of taking the trip, never caring about the destination.

I have known myself to hop on a bus or train not knowing at which stop to disembark. I have watched the moon reflect on a quiet sea from the deck of both military and commercial ships. I travel to listen to the silence of an empty airport lounge or bus terminal, the drone of a diesel engine, the nipping cold of a bus or plane cabin, the sight of farmland bathed in moonlight.

I look forward to the ambiguity of a road trip in inclement weather. Once, while doing a recce for a shoot, I hopped into a Land Cruiser after midnight and travelled north while a storm raged and an old acacia tree fell and cracked part of the windshield and one headlight.

I love being away from the comfort of my bed late at night, far away from home. I enjoyed watching the sea that separated the base I was bunked in from Samal Island while I was in Davao. I enjoyed watching Taal Volcano sending a plume of sulfuric exhaust under the partially moonlit night while the cold air bit into my bones. I love watching the western part of the city drift off to sleep from the slopes of Antipolo while sipping a cold beer. I most enjoyed watching a lighthouse high on a hill in Basco at midnight while being stranded in Batanes. One of my most memorable adventures was watching and filming the breaking dawn from up top a hill in Culion, Palawan where the historical marker of the former leper colony sits. 

Though I’ve been around much of the country, I have yet to leave the archipelago but I never tire of the places these islands have to offer. I am a wanderer and until now, a lost soul looking for home. It is yet unclear to me when that will be but for now, the journey is all that matters.