If you’re new here — HELLO. I’m Atom, and you’re reading my monthly Travel Notes email.
Why am I writing this on top of my Monday weeklies?
I’m a very introspective guy: I love to reflect, I love to write about my reflections, and I love to talk about my reflections.
So my hope is to reach the one, two, or three of you introspective, reflective, and deeply personal types who want to see underneath my Instagram pictures and reels, who are not only after the top 10 destinations of the Philippines but also the top 10 ways travel can change you.
Boarding Time 3:35 PM.
ETA: 4:03 PM.
Or at least that’s what Waze is telling us.
It’s a Friday afternoon, traffic is worse than expected, and we are moving in the opposite direction of the airport. Papa shouts panicked orders at Joshua and me because his phone location is confused. We can’t seem to find the U-turn slot.
Fingers crossed, I message Atew and ask him if our flight is delayed. We dropped him, Mama, and Aedric off 20 minutes ago, thinking it would be wise to have eyes on the inside as we scrambled for parking.
Nope. On-time.
Damn it, CebPac.
A right turn is coming up to enter Villamor Air Base. We’re not allowed inside, but I tell Papa to try entering for a U-turn. From here, we can make a left turn back toward the airport.
It works. ETA: 3:30 PM.
I’ve been looking forward to this trip for months, a supposedly simple one by my standards, too. 2 days, 2 nights, with identical itineraries for both days: dive in the morning, then spend time with Lola Pacing in the afternoon. We were coming to surprise her for her 80th birthday.
Lola Pacing was Mama’s yaya since birth. I grew up eating her sweet hotdog-filled spaghetti, joining her to harvest malunggay leaves, and listening to her stories of Mama’s childhood. She stayed with us until 2019, when her health forced her home to Dauin, Dumaguete.
I heard Lola Pacing’s condition had worsened over the pandemic, so when I saw a seat sale last year, I immediately booked six tickets to Dumaguete.
Besides visiting Lola Pacing, I heard great things about Dauin’s marine life and dive spots. I was looking forward to one specific dive spot too, and that’s Bacong Pier, which boasts zigzagging 20-foot corral pillars teeming with rich marine life.
But first, we need to catch our flight.
Papa honks at every car in front of him as he rushes back to the airport. We eventually arrive in line for the overnight parking lot only to find it full. We ask the guard where we can go instead, and he points us to the covered parking. Thinking we can make it there faster, we take the outside lane. Bad move. It doesn’t merge into the covered parking entrance. With what I can imagine being very crazed eyes, we ask another guard.
Covered parking??? My dad practically screams.
Go around. The guard tells us we can’t park overnight there. Overnight parking is back at the entrance.
We fight, but we don’t have a choice. It’s 3:40, and Atew says they’ve opened the gates for boarding. The guard at least shows us a faster way around. We’re back at the airport entrance by 3:50 with only the vaguest sense of where to go. This is our third time in this spot, and I’m killing myself for insisting on taking the car. Because we are only staying for the weekend, I thought it would be cheaper and more convenient if we drove and then parked our car at the airport (~900 for 3 days) instead of taking a Grab (~1000 round trip). Maybe it wouldn’t have been such a bad choice if we left at 1 PM as we agreed to, but there’s nothing we can do now. Maybe if I didn’t choose this to be my first time taking a car to the airport, then it wouldn’t be such a mess. So many maybe’s.
Papa decides 10 minutes is not enough to find parking and reach our boarding gate. Defeated, Joshua and I agree to go ahead; at least we lose just one seat instead of three.
Cutting every line, we reach our gate with only two people besides my family left. Atew, Mama, and Aedric are confused. Why are there only two of us here? I break the news to them just as my dad reports that he found parking and he’s running in. I message him to hurry because he might make it. Maybe.
I’m seated on the plane when I call my dad back. He says he’s at the boarding gate, but they won’t let him in. They say the plane has left. I look around, and sure enough, the doors to the plane have closed.
I curse to myself. Maybe if I held the plane doors open or if I asked the bus to wait a little longer or if I stalled somehow. Maybe if I called my dad while I was on the bus.
Again, the maybe’s.
We land in Dumaguete an hour and a half later. It hurts to be incomplete, but my dad says he’ll catch tomorrow’s flight at 4 PM. We head to our resort and decide there’s no use ditching our plans, but every moment is bittersweet.
It’s 5:50, and we’re on the way to the airport when my dad messages to say he’s arrived
. . . In NAIA.
His plane experienced a technical difficulty that forced him back to Manila. The pilot just requested all passengers to transfer to a new plane.
New ETA: 9:00 PM.
It’s an awful three hours for me. I can’t help but think it’s all my fault. I’m the one that planned everything after all, and I’m the one that offered we take the car. So maybe if I didn’t care so much about saving money or maybe if I wasn’t so complacent in my preparation this wouldn’t have happened. Always the maybe’s. We talk about it as a family but no amount of analysis removes the fact that my dad spent the past 29 hours in the airport or some extension of it. Expecting to meet him on his sourest mood, I prepare my apology.
Eventually, my dad comes out of the airport. We embrace him as if he were the one we haven’t seen since 2019 when I notice the oddest thing. There’s a glint in his eyes that you would only see when someone has just come from a wild and rejuvinating adventure, not what you would expect from someone who suffered what he has.
In the end, I never used my apology because I never needed it. It seems suffering is the farthest thing he would call his experience. Over late dinner, he shares he found a way to get his flight rebooked for free, he shares he was able to go to Villamor Air Base’s driving range for only P300, he shares he found this amazing and authentic Chinese restaurant for dinner, and he shares he even met up with a friend while at the airport.
Here I was, stuck in my internal despair and self-loathing, while my dad turned his suffering into the wildest of airport adventures.
Until next week,
Atom
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This post was inspired by The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway. I reread it for the second time when I got home from Dumaguete only to find the old man’s internal experience of suffering to be a timely reminder for how to deal with my own. An excerpt:
But I killed the shark that hit my fish, he thought. And he was the biggest dentuso that I have ever seen. And God knows that I have seen big ones.
It was too good to last, he thought. I wish it had been a dream now and that I had never hooked the fish and was alone in bed on the newspapers.
“But man is not made for defeat,” he said. “A man can be destroyed but not defeated.” I am sorry that I killed the fish though, he thought. Now the bad time is coming and I do not even have the harpoon. The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.
“Don’t think, old man,” he said aloud. “Sail on this course and take it when it comes.”
But I must think, he thought. Because it is all I have left. That and baseball. I wonder how the great DiMaggio would have liked the way I hit him in the brain? It was no great thing, he thought. Any man could do it. But do you think my hands were as great a handicap as the bone spurs? I cannot know. I never had anything wrong with my heel except the time the sting ray stung it when I stepped on him when swimming and paralyzed the lower leg and made the unbearable pain.
Think about something cheerful, old man,” he said. “Every minute now you are closer to home. You sail lighter for the loss of forty pounds.”
He knew quite well the pattern of what could happen when he reached the inner part of the current. But there was nothing to be done now.
“Yes there is,” he said aloud. “I can lash my knife to the butt of one of the oars.”
So he did that with the tiller under his arm and the sheet of the sail under his foot.
“Now,” he said. “I am still an old man. But I am not unarmed.”
Surrender to the unexpected