Into the Wild

I just woke up from my first full night's sleep since I started the trip.  It feels good to have slept, but I feel like I drank beer last night--not a hangover, mind you, but the feeling that if I woke up feeling like this every morning, I would have that beer fluff that bros and frat boys get.  Gross.  What felt better was the shower I took yesterday, also the first of the trip.  I don't know why, but traveling always makes you so dirty, even if you're confined to the sterilized environment of an airplane cabin.  I'd gone from L.A. to Tokyo (13 hours), Tokyo to Manila (5 hours), Manila to Tacloban (1 hour), and then Tacloban to Borongan (5 hours) in a van with a broken air conditioner.  

The flight from Manila to Tacloban is always beautiful; it's one of the few flights on which I ask for a window seat.  The filthy squalor and vast urban sprawl of Metro Manila stretches for miles, and there's no better vantage point for taking in the gross incongruities inherent in a capitalist society; pristine skyscrapers stand guard over a sea of shanty towns, like awful trees of steel and glass that have reached the canopy by choking out all life beneath them.  But the city gradually fades away.  The colorful mosaic of urban sprawl becomes the monochromatic tropical green of jungle foliage.  The murky water of the city--a disgusting grayish, brownish, pukish color like the one you got when you mixed all the paints together in art class--becomes a deep natural blue, fading to a bright, idyllic turquoise near the shore.  This time, I saw a rainbow below us, and it almost made a complete circle, disappearing somewhere around the 330th degree.  It was vivid, the way rainbows are in dreams, and on one side it was bordered by another rainbow, faint like a shadow.

Now, anyone who knows me will tell you I'm not one to complain about the lack of Western creature comforts, but the problem with the aircon in the van was not so much that it didn't work, but that it worked for about 3 minutes of every 30, and so we kept chugging along with the windows up as though all was well.  I just told myself I was doing a sweat lodge, penance paid for the extreme pleasure to be granted me upon my arrival.  It was a little harder to consider myself a self-castigating pilgrim when we came upon two men on the road, one of them carrying a large wooden cross.  But around the next bend, I saw the rest of their party, smoking cigarettes beside a van with the words "God hates sin" printed on the back.  I imagined their routine--walk a kilometer with the cross so people could see them, hop in the van, move on down the road, repeat.  They'll cover more ground that way.  More exposure.  I mean, just imagine if Jesus and his disciples had matching T-shirts and an internal-combustion engine.  No, on second thought, don't imagine that.

When I finally arrived in Borongan, I dumped my things in my room, took off my clothes, crawled under the cold water flowing from the showerhead and laughed uncontrollably for about 10 minutes.  I don't really mind being dirty, but it felt so good to wash off the travel scum.  Plus, it was probably about 83 degrees outside, and closer to 100 in the van I'd been trapped in for the past 5 hours, so cold water was exactly what I needed.

Once clean and fed (I hadn't eaten since I left Nanay's house at 6am; it was 5pm when I got to Borongan), we headed just down the street to meet up with some of my uncles, throw back some San Mig, and sing some videoke.  Actually, beer, karaoke, and uncles are pretty much an everday occurence, so that's not so noteworthy.  At one point, this drunk guy kept flashing his pistol, which seemed to put everybody on edge.  It sounds strange to me as I say it, because I'm quite the yellow-belly when it comes to weapons and violence, but I didn't feel the slightest bit uneasy.  I could see that the clip was out, but still, normally even the thought of a pistol makes me cringe.  Maybe I feel like a cowboy here.  That could be dangerous.  Apparently, my aunt said she was worried because he kept looking at me, but then, I'm flattered by drunk middle-aged men checking me out as they fondle their piece.  That made me laugh right now so I wrote it.  Fuck you.

So the drunkenness led to some profound, heart-to-heart conversations with my uncles and especially with my dad.  I feel more connected with my family here than I ever have, and I'm excited about the opportunity to reconnect with my Filipino culture in meaningful ways.  Two week vacations can only do so much.  Three month vacations are better, but right now I've got the feeling that this trip is going to be a lot longer than that.

There's so much for me to write and there's no possible way I'm going to capture everything.  I'd have to be writing everywhere I went, and then I'd miss out on the living part.  Conscious of that limitation, I'll just do my best to present rough sketches and brief impressions, like the firing of synapses in your cerebral cortex during R.E.M.  Or like an acid flashback.  Hasta la próxima.