The early days of June found me combing the sands of Palawan, an island-province that many consider the best in the world. Like many of my recent trips, it was a strictly-for-work affair; days simply drifted in a series of client meetings, hotel rooms, and endless shutter flicks. Routine transforms to reflex as we board one vehicle to the next: a plane from Manila to Puerto Princesa, a night bus to El Nido, one tricycle after another from point A to B. There is constant movement and little time for reflections.
But all that blur of travel and work is a privilege I will always be thankful for.
I say privilege.
There are those who argue that viewing travel as such is smug and oppressive. But you see, I have held both ends of the rope.
Ten years ago, traveling was only a dream. My mind sailed to beaches while angry customers berated entry-level-customer-support-me over the phone. As monitors beeped, doctors in the OR ordered, “Scalpel, please“, and my student-nurse spirit cried, “This is not what I want, but my family needs it”, I self-appeased with the thought of having enough money to purchase bus rides across the country. In times when my stomach gurgled, and there’s only two cans of cheap, unpalatable corned beef to last for a week, I wandered to mountains and seas in my sleep.
My stories are often birthed from polar perspectives: one from that of a person who sleeps in warm beds I photograph and write about, and the other from that of a person who steps out into the cold, unwelcoming streets to find the homeless scrounging for scraps and children carrying the weight of books and poverty, against searing heat, they tread kilometers-long muddy roads to redemption.
Home. I have called so many such, that it almost feels callous, a disservice to those who don’t have my reality, to claim that traveling is always a choice and anyone can do it.
Being able to do what I love and telling stories about it often feel too surreal – even more so when I’m up in the clouds, seated among strangers on a vehicle that transports not just bodies but also dreams and hopes.
During the flight from El Nido to chaotic NAIA, I found myself tearing up as my client watched My Big Fat Greek Wedding 2. Staring out the window, the clouds reminded me of home and how, only minutes ago, I was in El Nido and three days prior, in Puerto Princesa. It wasn’t like this 10 years ago in those frenetic yet lonely call center cubicles or in the OR. Not even close. Yet here I am now, leaving another home hundreds of miles away from another.
Now, I am coming home yet again, to my daughter, where my rebel heart says I belong the most.
Flying humbles me. Amid whir and clouds, the reality that I have been welcomed in so many homes below, however temporal, hits hard. Homes on water, homes on land. In conversations with strangers, amid oceans of unknown names and opposing realities.
Plane rides remind me that hands bigger than mine are always at work. They remind me that a dream-come-true always begins from a place of love, sacrifice, and modest beginnings. That this place is one that, wherever my feet land, however promising it may be, I must not forget and abandon, for it was a place that welcomed me in its arms on cold, hungry, and desolate nights. It, too, was once my home.
