Home for Christmas: Port Barton, Kalinga, Puerto Princesa, and Sagada

This entry was written by Jon Morales. I met him when I photographed the Volcanoes (our national 
rugby team) in 2011. He's lived in the Philippines for 3 years. Before moving here, he lived in 
New York, Beijing, London, California, and a bunch of other places. I asked him to write this because I like reading what he writes, and I wanted it on Yellow Adventures :) 

We should start with the scars, since that’s how Hannah and I started.  I picked up my first one when I was four, from a nine iron to the middle of my forehead a la Harry Potter (I lived).  The first time I saw her, my front tooth had been recently involuntarily unaligned and then voluntarily, more or less, realigned with all my other teeth, more or less.  Oddly, this was briefly national news.  Hannah photographed it and there was my ragged face in one of the two biggest newspapers in the country.  Dishevelled, 7 stitches in my lip, and a possibly dying-at-the-root front tooth (it lived) splashed on a national broadsheet.  I loved it.  Broken smile and all, it was the best picture of myself I had ever seen.  When I got another gash in my brow winning the championship of the Manila 10s, I knew I wanted another portrait.  That bloody gash, sutured quick and dirty in a nearby clinic with 9 stitches so I could rush back for the trophy presentation, would heal and become a new scar and I thought here is my medal, it’s on my face.  It’s also how I came to meet Hannah.

This is how we began:

Toulouse Coron Barcelona Guindalupihan Italy Caramoan Cotabato Geneva Paris Zamboanga

Atlanta Cebu Bohol Bangkok Coron El Nido Saigon Iloilo Davao Caramoan

We started with travel: hers and mine, but never our travel.  As I got to know Hannah I suspected she had that same essential footloose homelessness, the kind that looks like a choice but feels like an imperative.  The kind that, looking down a dark alley way or a baked in the sun dirt road, tells us “go take a look.”   We chased each other in and out of Manila for six months, coming together and flying apart.  Even when we went to the same places we didn’t go at the same times. 

When the time came to give her a birthday gift, something material didn’t fit for an adventurer, just another Thing to weigh her down when she was so often on the move, or to sit uselessly at home.  A backpack and her cameras are her only necessities.  A trip to an out-of-the-way , under-the-radar destination felt  just right. 

We rode a single motorcycle into town, 2 people, 7 days, 1 backpack, and only the vaguest of plans. We like to leave space for serendipity.  Too much research and too much planning closes off chances to explore and to stumble across detours.  Schedules take on lives of their own.

Port Barton is at the end of a 22-km stretch of mountainous dirt road that branches off the national highway in Palawan.  The town crowds up against the sea ringed on three sides by mountains and on the fourth by the water, one road in, one road out.  During the low-season the place has a frontier outlaw feel to it: isolated, sporadic power, and slow-moving.   Or a haven for aging pirates.  When we first arrived, the seaside bars were populated by Jimmy Buffet’s over-forty victims of fate, aging white men with expansive tattoos sitting alone gazing over the sea into the middle distance.   They give the sense they've been sitting there a long time.  When the ocean is still, it looks like the edge of the world.

We did the usual things one does on a beach trip but also not so usual things.  Port Barton is gorgeous, and its obscurity and isolation has kept it from the homogeneity of fully tourist-oriented places.   We explored the sand bars rising out of the waters of the bay, kayaked to little a settlement called Pamuayan, a clean and orderly village at the foot of a waterfall, and slept under the stars on the sand. 

On Christmas Eve we met a group of people from all over the world, students studying abroad in Korea, playing drinking games at the room next to ours.  Students from the United States, Germany, Finland, Sweden, and a few other countries had all ended up there by the random roads their lives had taken and spent the night drinking with us.  A moonlit skinny dip, and Port Barton was done. As our families were sitting down to their Christmas gatherings at home, Hannah and I were on the back of a motorcycle flying down the road together riding the four hours back to Puerto Princesa.  On the way we came upon a magical house that had been abandoned before being completed.   The countryside was already starting to reclaim it.  The house, covered in vines and flowers felt like a reward for taking the risk of riding down that road and leaving ourselves open to the possibilities the world offers. 

We kept on the move and headed up to the mountains to greet the New Year’s with three other couples in a mountain lodge near Sagada.  It was an eclectic group.  We’d all taken very different roads to that point and ended up together, a family, the kind you choose.  Many of us came ‘temporarily’ and never left.  Some grew up here.  One had sold his PSP in Vietnam while backpacking across Asia to get here, and then sold his outbound ticket home thinking he’d earn enough to get home.  That was 4 years ago.  He’s still here.  Next year he’s getting married in Tagaytay.   It’s comforting to think this ragtag bunch of nomads, all from different careers, different backgrounds, could find a makeshift family amongst each other.

 

It was, literally, a Happy New Year’s, despite all of us being far from our families, some on the other side of the world.  As a group we hiked the narrow mountain trail up to Buscalan to meet Fang-Od and to get tattoos from her.  It felt like a pilgrimage, like more than a group of friends celebrating the New Year. We celebrated our pasts, the winds that blew us around the world, and the happy accidents that threw us together.  And we were there to etch it into our skins, the memory of these times, so we wouldn’t forget the days when we were still first rate.

Travelling with someone forces you to be honest, it rips away pretension.  Being around someone every moment of the day for sometime either builds bonds or breaks them.  You can’t feel ambivalent about someone after that.  When you first fall in love with someone it’s mostly speculation.   You suspect they are a certain way and you are swept away.  And then you begin to find out if they are who you thought they were.   And if you are who you thought you were.   I think meeting someone and falling in love is about finding the right fit.  Finding someone to run with you, fall down with you, make new scars with you.

Most people try to avoid scars.  But every scar’s a story (“they’ve lived”).  Life marks you.  Most of the marks and scars it leaves you can’t choose, visible or invisible.  They’re like the knick-knacks other people pick up and decorate their homes with, conversation pieces.  But we don’t have homes to decorate.  No walls to cover, or shelves to fill, just skins filled with mementos.  They’re much easier to pack. 

Palahniuk says there’s no scars for happiness.  It’s not true.  We have the scars to prove it.