HELLO. I’m Atom, and you’ve received my Travel Notes. By subscribing, you can expect to receive my ‘Travel Notes’ once a week, every week:
→ On the weeks I travel, I share stories, reflections, and lessons.
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My goal here is to bring you with me to all 82 provinces of the Philippines. Solo travel can be thrilling, but I enjoy my travels more when I have someone to share it with.
80% of travel is a commute. It’s waiting. It’s boring. It’s tiring.
But it’s also this shared suffering that makes a trip.
I share this because Holy Week is coming up, and I imagine many of you will be going on trips with terribly long commutes and unexpected wait times (in my case, I’m expecting a 3-hour road trip + a 12-hour boat ride to get to Sibuyan Island).
Don’t waste the opportunity of your shared suffering by tuning out the pain with your phones.
How about turning them into the highlight of your trip instead?
01 First Last Best Worst
This is great when waiting for your order to arrive in a restaurant.
The game starts with one player suggesting a prompt, e.g., ‘pandemic hobby.’
Each player then takes turns to give their first, last, best, and worst versions of the prompt.
For example, my...
First pandemic hobby was reading
Last pandemic hobby was crochet
Best pandemic hobby was writing online
Worst pandemic hobby was investing
Once everyone has answered, another person can suggest a new prompt, and the cycle repeats.
We played this a lot on my last trip to Cebu. With so many people in the province for the Sinulog Festival, it seemed service was poor across all restauratns. Here were some of the prompts we njoyed the most: trip without family, Philippine beaches, drunk story.
02 Ten-Minute Rules
This is great for nights you plan to draw out until sunrise.
The game starts by setting a timer for ten minutes.
One player then thinks of a rule, and if anyone breaks said rule, that person must drink.
For example, consider this rule: everyone must have a nickname, and they can only be called by that nickname.
Juan is now Johnnyboy
Jose is now Boyjohnny
Maria is now Gabriela
Gabriela is now Maria
If I accidentally ask “Juan” to pass me the water, I must drink.
Once the ten minutes are up, a new player can suggest a new rule to govern the next ten minutes.
I went on my first scuba diving trip last Novemeber to Sogod Bay in Southern Leyte. We played this game and this exactly rule on our last night of the trip. The catch? Your nickname had to be something you saw on one of our dives (you had to call me Spider Crab hahaha). Here are other rules to play with: no one can show their teeth, cheers with someone before you drink, only hold your glass with your nondominant hand, all glasses at least half full.
03 Mental Photo Contest
This is great for long waits in one spot.
Choose one player to start.
Their goal is to remember as many details around them within one minute.
Each remaining player gets to ask three questions about the surroundings. The team's goal is to spot details outside the chosen player’s mental picture.
For example, if Maria was the chosen player and I was Juan, I can ask…
On which hand am I wearing my watch?
How many trees are there around us?
What is the color of the ceiling?
The player who gets the most questions right wins.
The beautiful thing about this game is it increases visual awareness of your surroundings. I remember first playing this game on an 8-hour boat ride to Jomalig Island in Quezon. It’s been 7 years already since that boat ride, but I can still remember the features of the boat and the people we were with.
04 Poetry for Neanderthals
This is great for dumb fun.
Poetry for Neanderthals was originally a board game designed by the creators of Exploding Kittens, but it could be played without the accompanying toys (although it would be loads more fun if you had them).
The game's goal is to describe a word with only one-syllable words.
Start by splitting the group into two, say team A and team B.
Team A will start by choosing one person to describe a word chosen by Team B.
For example, if I was part of team A and the word given to me by team B was ‘octopus,’ then I might say, “This thing live in sea. Has eight leg. And big soft head.”
The rest of team A will need to guess the word ‘octopus’ within three minutes.
I’ll be honest: I haven’t played this game on a trip yet, but I’m very excited to try it out. Here are 30 words you can start with.
05 Who can lie better?
This is great for a slow afternoon on the beach.
One player begins by telling a story, and the job of the other players is to say whether this is a true story or a lie. Each player is allowed two follow-up questions before making a decision.
Thinking up stories can be difficult, so to make things simple, each round can be governed by a prompt similar to ‘First Last Best Worst.’
For example, if the prompt were ‘pandemic hobbies,’ I would say, “I wanted to get better at speaking Filipino, so every morning for 30 days, I pulled out an article from the Inquirer and recorded myself reading it aloud.”
True or false?
: )
I first played this game with some childhood friends when we visited San Vicente, Palawan some six years ago. It’s more difficult to think of false stories than you think, but what you uncover about yourself and your friends will surely be worth the effort. I can tell you this: I didn’t know my friends as well as I thought.
06 Thirty-Six Questions That Lead to Love
This is great for the long drive home (seal that bond forged through the adventure).
In 1997, Arthur Aaron published a paper entitled, ‘The Experimental Generation of Interpersonal Closeness: A Procedure and Some Preliminary Findings.’
What resulted was a practical methodology for generating closeness in the form of 36 questions.
In Holy Week last year, I visited Cagbalete Island with the same group of childhood friends. We were expecting a six hour drive back to Manila, but two hours in, Waze was still giving us an ETA of six hours (that’s Manila-bound Holy Week traffic for you). So we decided to try these 36 questions, and—wow—did those six hours fly by. Not only that, I ended up giving everyone in the group a tight hug when we arrived in Manila. The questions work.
07 Or keep it simple... Ask me a question
This is especially great for hikes and long walks.
Here are some of my favorite questions to ping-pong around a group:
Tell me about a person you met only once that made a significant impact on you.
Who gave you your most memorable gift?
What’s the worst relationship advice you’ve ever been given?
If your life story is 300 pages long — what’s on page 283?
What are you looking forward to right now?
What was your best buy this year?
What is the dumbest thing you made your parents buy for you as a kid?
We have five physical senses: smell, touch, taste, touch, and sound. Which of these five is your most sensitive? And your least sensitive?
What dream have you never forgotten?
Tell me something I don’t know about you.
What question do you wish you were asked more often?
What is the last thing you tried to learn?
If you had to give a TED talk in 10 minutes, what would you talk about?
How did you end up in your current career?
If everything in your life went well, where would you be in 5 years? 10 years? 30 years?
Follow up: Revel in that feeling of success 30 years from now. . . Is there anything you can do right now to recreate that feeling? Not the successes. Just the feeling.
If you could relive one day of this year, what day would that be?
If you could live anywhere in the world, what landscape would you choose? City? Beach? Mountain? Forest?
Try this out!! I made a spreadsheet to simulate having these questions as a deck of cards.
Until next week,
Atom
P.S. Special thanks to Nirelle, AJ, and Joanne for feedback on earlier drafts of this post.
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