only one night into our trip to the philippines and i knew it would not be the vacation that i had envisioned. i'm not sure exactly what i was expecting, but i think it was something befitting our eco-destination. dirty jeans, muddy shoes, busted-up knuckles and skinned-up knees. something purely non-korean, meaning something without an interior and disconnected from any kind of network, social or wired. but i guess the one general rule applied to expectations is that you can always expect them to be broken (see: seneca's theories on human anger). and sure enough, for better or worse, mine were.
i'm not sure where my initial expectations came from; the very nature of our trip was that it was so loosely stitched together that there would be no room for frustration if some preconceived plan fell through, because there was simply no plan to fall away from. the only thing we planned in advance was a ticket from manila to dumaguete that departed 6 hours after we arrived in the capital city (a decision that was probably pretty wise from all the shit-hole stories we heard about manila), and a ticket from cebu to manila the day before we were to depart (and actually this would be changed later due to laziness and uncertain ferry schedules). we had a vague idea of islands to hit and sights to see, but time frames were non-existent as were hostel bookings or ferry ticket purchases.
sometime after 28 hours of travel we arrived in our first destination: dumaguete. dumaguete is an old spanish fort town that has since been converted into a decent sized college community. its not oppressively big but it has a lot of the comforts and amenities westerners desire and is central to many of negros' eco-attractions. from the combined influence of our lonely planet guide and the buskers' t-shirts at the airport, we decided to book a room at harold's mansion - and with that decision, what we thought we be a couple of nights in this little college town turned into ten days. i guess this was broken expectation number 1. there are literally thousands of islands in the philippines, and to think that we would spend over half our vacation settled on not only one of them, but in one city on one island, would have blown my mind pre-trip. certainly there are plenty of things to do on negros, as its one of the biggest islands in the visayas region of the philippines, but again, there are thousands of islands to explore! thousands!
so why did we seemingly waste so much time in dumaguete? well, i guess there's a few reasons. the first is because, as i said, there's a lot to do in the area. between the world class diving, waterfall exploration, twin crater lakes, cockfighting arenas and, obviously, beaches, you can easily spend a good week in the area. and a lot of our time spent there we did just that (including all of the things mentioned above). the second reason is the weather. for the first week of our trip the weather was perfect. the winter winds from the north blow down on the philippines ever so slightly to create a nice gentle breeze in these late/early months of the year. unfortunately, this is also part of the rainy season, so whereas our trip started out beautifully, the second half was plagued by showers on and off throughout the day. even when it didn't rain it was overcast. it didn't spoil the trip by any means but it ruined those picture perfect beach photos i was hoping to send into conde nast traveler (have they folded yet?). more importantly it made for unreliable ferry schedules. twice we tried to leave and twice we were turned away due to large impassable waves. the third, and probably most influential reason, were the people we met at the hostel.
harold's mansion is an iconic hostel in that it's a melting pot of nationalities, personalities, and sexualities. there we met, among the often friendly philippino staff (including harold himself), guests from the four corners of europe, parts of asia, french from the hat of america, post-and-currently-serving peace corps volunteers, and even fellow teachers from korea. the main players were the two peace corps volunteers who would become our unofficial guides to the area, two bleached-blonde girls from california who were living in harold's beach house for a month, harold (a late 30's philippino who lived in california for a stint), and eventually some french canadians and a (really lovely) tv journalist from sweden. initially i was skeptical. i saw all these people as an affront to my enjoyment. boys with european accents and dusty tans just meant one thing to me, that our party of four was about to be whittled down to a party of me, and the hospitality of knowledagble peace corps volunteers was only a thinly-veiled strategy to get into passing tourists pants. how am i so jaded at such an early age of my young life? anyways, this was my quickly formulated expectation of the rest of our trip which just goes to show how big of an ass i am.
as it turned out, our motley crew grew into a surprisingly comfortable close knit group of friends. the hostel hostilities that i had imagined turned out to be all in my head. people were generally nice. they invited us to communal events. they shared their food and...other things that weren't food. we bummed with them at beach houses. we marvelled with them at cockfights. and in moments of self-reflective clarity we sometimes even talked about people who stay at hostels and what they talk about. and by the time a 29 year old girl from sweden came into the picture, i wasn't exactly in a big rush to leave dumaguete either. i guess you could call that broken expectation number 2. even though my original expectation wasn't really met, what replaced it was just as good, if not better. i mean, what's more important? the places you've seen or the people you met and shared those places with?
speaking of experiences...hostels are an interesting microcosm of society much in the same way an episode of the real world can be. at the same time, whats the most you can learn about someone when you're both just transient occupants, there one day gone the next? all people generally provide are snapshots of their lives, like presenting a social resume in which we can decide whether they would make a good facebook addition or just someone who might be a question mark in a photo down the line. in fact, most conversations at a hostel are similar to the conversations i had at orientation for epik. where are you from? where have you been? where are you going? what do you do? okay nice to meet you and on to the next one. its all experiential. what have we done, what have we seen? rarely do we talk about ideas. about what we've learned from these experiences. afterall, what's the point of gathering experiences when you take nothing away from them? they're about as good as a snapshot, but deterioate even quicker because they're based in memory, not celluloid (or whatever it is). how much nicer would discussion be if someone just said, "you know, what i got most from my trip in india is that regardless of economic circumstances and incredible adversity, it is possible to not only rise above what life casts you, but to embrace every hardship with grace and dignity." what sort of conversation would that evoke? what would your experiences contribute then? more than just a snapshot but maybe something significant.
so, to loop back around, seneca basically said human anger arises from an illogical stance that our expectations should be carried out to their most perfect potential, and that any unforseen problems along the way are peculiar and ill-gotten, when in fact the only absolute thing about life are these unforseen problems. in order to not be angry, or rather to be happy, we need to give up these unrealistic expectations and simply accept that things are not always, and in fact often, not going to go as planned. and this trip was a shining example of just that. it may not have been exactly what i was thinking it would be, but in the end it turned out being exactly how it should have been - aside from the rainy days. those still kind of sucked.
anyways, here are some photos. i'll add others as i receive them from my travel compatriots. oh! and the title of this post borrows some visayan slang: jerjer means to have sex and loklok means to masturbate. this is the full extent of my visayan language education. enjoy!
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