Welcome to the Jungle (part 1)
It’s beautiful in the early morning. Why do I hate it so much?
I am sitting in a lounge chair overlooking a deserted beach and listening to tropical birds chirping. I'm drinking good coffee, made in a French press with water boiled on a wood stove. The overhang where I'm sitting has hanging vines that hummingbirds periodically fly around. When I woke up, I was greeted by enthusiastic puppies and the young couple that lives on site.
I can hear waves crashing on the beach below.
But unexpectedly, there is no internet, no phone, no electricity most of the day, and no Theresa or Sophia. There are, also unexpectedly, lots and lots of ants and various stinging bugs. We had to pack in all of our food, which is in a cooler filled with ice meant to last until we leave. It is very, very hot.
It's the unexpected part that is actually the hardest.
Getting out of Manila felt a little bit like the movie “Escape from New York.” We had to be up at 5am, meet up with our landlord, who was late, two Uber Drivers (actually Grab - the local equivalent) canceled on us, the one who showed up went to a different place than we had marked, and I almost got into a fistfight with the gate-guard to get my ID back (seriously). The airport was a mess, we stood in the wrong line for a half hour, and by the time we got on the plane, we were all fried. To give you a sense of our mental state, Paul actually turned down a Krispy Kreme doughnut. When we landed it was pouring down rain.
We found our van, and our host met us at a local hotel, where we switched vans to go to the local mall to shop for the food we would need for the week. He had suggested we eat lunch at the mall, which meant the kids were anticipating the fast food selections of the Manila malls. We ended up at Jollibee, which is like if you combined KFC, Hardees, and Skyline, but then added (to the kids) weird sauces and bones into everything. Grocery shopping highlighted some odd cultural differences in terms of what was and wasn’t available and it took us a VERY long time as we tried to adjust our meal planning on the fly, then work our way through the under-staffed lines. We ended up with a lot of pasta and eggs.
It ended up being an hour and a half drive to a very rural part of the island, pretty far outside even the small nearby villages.
Given time to think and plan, I could have arranged life a little differently and happily dropped off the grid in a pseudo- paradise (well, paradise except for the bugs and lack of electricity). We would have meal planned more carefully, mentally prepared for this to be "camping +" not "Airbnb minus," Paul and Ava are toughing it out, but are clearly not happy, which makes me feel guilty and out of control.
There are some huge birds singing somewhere nearby.
At the beginning of this trip, I worried that my connections to work would prevent me from really settling into the process of this sabbatical - and being forcibly removed from work making me re-examine that again. This should be more of a vacation from the sabbatical, as odd as that sounds. We should be relaxing and enjoying this space. But at this moment, we are not.
Theresa and Sophia still trapped in techno-future state Singapore. We can trade messages through our host, a lovely Belgian man, who goes back and forth to the bigger city every few days. Anything complicated we write on paper and he takes a picture, which he sends through the AirBnB app.
A puppy has come over, licked my hand and fallen asleep nearby.
Trapped in Singapore does not look so bad…
We went down to the beach yesterday afternoon, where Malgar, our host who lives on property, climbed a coconut tree and cut is some fresh coconut. While both impressed with the feat (and the giant machete), neither Paul nor Ava were impressed with the coconut juice or meat. But they did like the ducks at the farm up the road, and the puppies that Luv-Luv, Malgar’s wife, brought out to show them.
After days of the psychic mud that was Manila (another post about that), we were all looking forward to some time at a beach. We were not prepared for:
· Electricity only at night
· Minimal appliances for cooking
· Bugs (we wear bug-repellent every time we walk outside)
· Doing all our own cooking (on a woodfire stove)
· Bugs (there are ants literally everywhere)
· Near constant rain and heat
· No friends, grandparents, or mom
· No internet
· No movies
· Bugs (some of them the size of small birds)
Other than that, it's a literal paradise.
The thing is, I know exactly how this sounds. “Poor guy trapped on an island with no internet” is not a situation to elicit sympathy.
Literally no one nearby
We have all of the ingredients for awesome: beach, animals, good food, lazy days, cards. I just have to figure out how to get myself and the kids into the right headspace to appreciate it.
The kids have woken up as I’m writing this and stumbled outside. Paul calmly informed me that the vinegar solution the host provided for us to stop post bug-bite itching worked as he showed me a good sized bug bite on his neck.
Paul is counting down the days until we fly to Australia. The answer is six.
Not that I’m counting.
