When did backpacking become boring? I stood on top of Tikal’s Temple IV, staring at the miles of treetops that overrun the thousand-year-old Mayan city. “Star Wars’” iconic Millennium Falcon landing in the Yavin 4 jungle base was filmed from where I stood. I unthinkingly said to myself, “There’s not much to see,” and the Guatemalan-American beside me whirled in disbelief.
I moved to London and saw the disclaimers that visas cannot be issued in 48 hours to those from North Korea, Iraq and the Philippines. Egypt was the nearest of the visa-free. I signed up with Budget Travel, which prohibits wheeled luggage, for a third of the normal tour. I knew I chose right when the Canadian masseuse in our group offered me a back rub as I watched retirees on cruise ships pass our tiny sailboat in the sunset. She and her bikini then jumped into the Nile, and we all followed, knowing that it is one of the world’s most polluted rivers. My half-Jewish, half-Egyptian roommates, a medical and a law student, and I searched for the best falafel in Cairo.
I never went on another organized tour, saving even more dozens of “Lonely Planet” guidebooks later. I booked a boat to the Galapagos Islands two-thirds off, two weeks before the high season. I spent a USD25 night in a former archbishop’s mansion in Peru and a GBP25 night in a retired actor’s bed-and-breakfast in Stratford-Upon-Avon (with free home-cooked full English breakfast). And many of the world’s most amazing sights are free.
I have visited countless archeological wonders: Borobodur, Stonehenge, Bhaktapur, Ephesus, and Inca, Mayan and Khmer sites beyond Machu Picchu, Chichen Itza and Angkor Wat. I ate raw fish (hoe) killed in front of one in a Korean fishing village, five-rupee potato stew served in leaves in an alley near the Taj Mahal, and whale steak and reindeer sausage in Reykjavik. I watched a sumo wrestling tournament, shadow puppets and Norwegian girls walk in miniskirts and eat ice cream in the dead of winter. I snowmobiled on a glacier, used an
elephant’s trunk for a shower, took a sunrise ATV joyride through Goreme’s bizarre rock formations, dived into cenotes, surfed down sand dunes, joined a biologist into the Amazon’s heart, stayed on an artificial reed island in Lake Titicaca, bathed in a mixed-sex spa in Baden-Baden, walked through lava tubes and a Vietcong tunnel, watched cremations along the Ganges, sat meters from a lion, and woke up meters from a naked girl in a New Orleans dorm the day after Mardi Gras. I have a formidable collection of sunset selfies and memories of vile alcoholic beverages (such as Bamberg’s bacon-flavored rauchbier).
But one remembers the people most, especially that same simple dignity in developing countries around the world. On a train from Hallstatt, the student beside me struck up a conversation about how Austrians forget who Adolf Hitler was and how Filipinos forget who Ferdinand Marcos was. In a Seville flamenco show, the music student beside me said he wanted to change how the Andalucian is too often the houseboy and rural hick in a Spanish sitcom. In Mexico, many voiced respect for Manny Pacquiao’s prefight signs of the cross and hate for Floyd Mayweather’s arrogance.
From youth members of the Chinese Communist Party to Ivy League-educated Southeast Asian bankers, the Third World’s young all talked of someday elevating their countries to their place in the world. And one will curse one’s University of the Philippines professors, but this kernel of a dream is the bittersweet twist to serial backpacking. After one’s fill of selfies, one wonders what one is flying away from and not where one is flying to. One invariably wonders why one’s country cannot have efficient public transport, clean streets, public education and healthcare, and a population that queues properly. Having seen what is possible, one cannot help but dream.
Part of me wonders, for example, if the grandest adventure of all is not that of social entrepreneurs such as Mark and Reese Ruiz of Hapinoy and Rags 2 Riches fame, or the budding Internet entrepreneurs thinking of the app that will change our lives. I watched contemporaries Al Parreno and Joemer Perez stand against much older lawyers in the last impeachment trial and felt I was missing out.
Coming back to the Philippines is not simple, however. A lawyer who has worked on billion-dollar transactions may readily find his knowledge dismissed by someone with no training in his field, and the example translates to academia, banking, engineering, design and the hard sciences. The same highly trained professional, however, may realize he needs to relearn the simple task of how to talk to three secretaries to set a meeting. The reverse culture shock is exponentially but inversely related to how little white hair one has, and Malcolm Gladwell cited the Philippines as one of the world’s most hierarchical cultures.
In an ancient Chinese parable, a wood doll laughs at a clay doll, telling him that he will disintegrate when the floods come. The clay doll laughs that at least he will sink back to the earth he came from, while the wood doll has no idea where he will wash up. The greatest adventure, the one that cannot end with a plane ride home, springs from how every generation of Filipinos has to believe that it will be the one that changes the country. Those coming home hope that their beloved motherland will offer its restless, wayward young more than the satisfaction of knowing that at least they know where they want to die.
Oscar Franklin Tan (@oscarfbtan, facebook.com/OscarFranklinTan) cochairs the Philippine Bar Association Committee on Constitutional Law and teaches at the University of the East.