The Better Question

Before I left Dumaguete, I shared my travel plan with an Austrian guy at the hostel. I explained that I would go overland to the north of Panay Island. His reply: "Uhhh you are taking ze bus to Boracay? Ahh no, no, I zink it tiz better to take ze plane from Cebu." He didn't say anything else but I knew he was questioning, "Why would zis woman want to travel the Philippinez by bus?"

As I began my trek north, I revisited that question-crammed in a short, yellow vehicle with Filipinos watching my every move. I made the awful mistake of drinking water and coffee back at the hostel. After three hours of thinking, "I have to pee. I have to pee," we stopped and for a reasonable price of two pesos, I was finally relieved.

Feeling better, I shoved in my ear buds and let me eyes pillage the landscape.

I looked. I watched. I saw; houses made of bamboo-sometimes stilted, sometimes in a tree-and usually surrounded by laundry hanging on ANYTHING. There were small shacks advertising Tanduay. We passed men diligently working on the roads, playing basketball on makeshift courts or just sitting in a waiting house off to the side. Women and children bathing in the river, oblivious to any onlookers.

If I took the plane, I wouldn't have seen the little boy spit on our bus when we passed by, or the signs about rabies that littered the road. Occasionally there were huge green fields spanning across the horizon with grazing water buffalo...but usually palm trees were the only life absorbing the earth.

Every corner, a photo op...every bump, a crisis averted...every turn, a lesson learned.

So a better question from the Austrian man would have been, "Why WOULDN'T this woman want to travel the Philippines by bus?"