Travel and solitude
The destination is Koh Phayam, a small island in southern Thailand facing the Andaman Sea. At the pier, the Norwegian woman who had been to the island before called it “paradise,” and the glint of excitement could be seen in her eyes even after a disorienting nine-hour bus trip.
I knew nothing about the place except that it promised quiet days in unspoiled beaches away from everything that was familiar. In that sense, to me, it could be paradise.
Several beaches ring the island but I was drawn to Ao Khao Kwai Hintalu, where hardly any manmade structure stood. There, under the shade of a tree, I would sit for hours and read a book, putting it down only when I would hear someone coming.
It was still the off-season when I came, so at any time of the day I could count on just my two hands the people who were there with me—the young couple catching the sunset with their son on my first visit, the small group of old people setting up a picnic the next day, the monks in bright orange robes giggling and taking photos of the sea one afternoon, and the man taking his dogs for a walk just before the sun set.
Most of the time it was just me, sand beneath my feet, blue skies overhead, and the waves crashing on the shore.
“Memorize this,” I told myself, like Cristina Pantoja-Hidalgo, as recounted in her memoir “Five Years in a Forgotten Land: a Burmese Notebook,” told herself after a trek to a hill overlooking Inle Lake, to “remember every detail, for you will never see it again. Even if you were to return to this country, you will not find it. It will have disappeared like all perfect things.”
People often ask me what it is like to travel alone, and always I tell them about the sense of freedom that it provides. I have found that when you always give too much of yourself, sometimes you find joy in solitude, in directing attention inward.
The idea of being on your own can be daunting. My first two days in Koh Phayam, in the empty beaches, brought feelings of loneliness; the gloomy mood was made even more difficult by days of endless thinking and not being able to talk to anyone. I struggled spending time alone until the remarks of a monk I met in Chiang Mai came to mind: “We are suffering because we are not accepting.”
I seek a certain remoteness when I travel because, for me, traveling is not just seeing the ancient temples or the grand palaces or the postcard-worthy landscapes. It is more of a journey of self-discovery that is achieved by keeping our eyes, minds and hearts wide open.
By traveling, especially when traveling alone, I learned that sometimes things don’t turn out according to plan but it is all right; that although we are so different from each other there is that one thing that connects us; and that sometimes it is in losing myself that I find myself. The more interesting aspect of travel, as Pico Iyer wrote in his book “Sun After Dark: Flights to the Foreign,” is this: “the prospect of stepping out of the daylight of everything I know, into the shadows of what I don’t know, and may never know.”
Three weeks before I came to Koh Phayam, I was in Yangon, the first stop of this trip. There, while inspecting the corners of Shwedagon pagoda one cloudy afternoon, I met a friendly face, a local with an optimism that inspired and who showed me kindness, only to find out later that all he really was after was my money.
In Chiang Mai two weeks later, finding my way to the temple at the top of the mountain, a motorcycle caught the strap of my backpack, pulling me down in a slow, terrifying fall. I walked away from the accident shaken but luckily unhurt, except for a small cut on my right leg.
Amid all the inconveniences, I still put myself out there, outside my comfort zone, because the unexpectedness that comes with traveling can also be the very thing that leaves me in awe of the people I meet, the places I find, and the stories that they all hold.
I will always remember the ingenious vendors of Bagan: The 10-year-old Burmese kid at Guni temple for his witty sales talk (such as “buy my postcards and get good sunset”); the peddlers of sand paintings who walk you through the stages in the life of Buddha as they explain the scenes depicted in their artworks; the ladies at Shwezigon pagoda who randomly pin paper butterflies on your shirt as “a gift”—actually a gesture intended to entice you to buy souvenirs from their shops.
But, perhaps, the place that moved me most was Hsipaw, a town nestled in the highlands of northeastern Burma. Hsipaw is known for its trekking routes, but it is a less popular destination compared to the “Big Four”—Bagan, Mandalay, Inle and Yangon. Its appeal grows on you and is found in unexpected things: One morning when we went around town, probably one of the last places you would expect to find something Filipino, I noticed along the main road a tarpaulin of young actress Julia Barretto endorsing a famous beauty product.
It was pouring the night we arrived, and the rain didn’t let up until the next day. The intention to hike through the surrounding hill tribe villages became impossible. Instead, we spent the next days exploring the town’s points of interest. In Hsipaw, there’s a practice of calling people based on the nature of their business. Thus, going around, we met Mr. Food, Mr. Shake, Mr. Book and Mrs. Popcorn.
But the highlight of my stay was the visit to a Shan palace, which really is a Western-style house where the last prince of Hsipaw lived before his mysterious disappearance decades ago at the height of military rule.
We huddled in the living room and introduced ourselves to each other and to our host, the wife of the last Shan prince’s nephew. At one point in our conversation, she said her family would write the government every year to ask where they could find the last prince of Hsipaw, or his remains, if indeed he was dead.
I will never forget what she said next: “We don’t want revenge. We just want to know.”
I left home for this particular trip looking for an escape, hoping, like Sebald’s narrator in “Vertigo,” that “a change of place would help me get over a particularly difficult period in my life,” and, in a way, it did. I came to realize that the distance and space had allowed me to examine my life closely and carefully, so that I may fill up what I found was lacking and leave behind all that were unnecessary.
This is what travel can give us. It lets us take notice of the little things that we so often take for granted, it lets us test our resilience when confronted by a place completely foreign to us, and finally, it lets us find meaning, emotion and truth that sometimes get lost in the sameness of our lives.
Ana Roa, 27, is a researcher at the Philippine Daily Inquirer.
