I had said goodbye to my students. Some seemed OK, most did not. I certainly wasn’t. Korea was not a place for showing strong emotion, so crying in the teacher’s area made my boss and colleagues uncomfortable, but I hadn’t been able to help it. Now was February and the the last time I would ever see Jeju. I didn’t know that yet, though. It would also be goodbye to my animal rescue, JARC. No more foster puppy kisses and the pitter of little paws around the house. I loved all of my life on Jeju. It was the happiest time of my life, and it was ending.
My birthday was Feb 8th. At first I had booked a trip to Bali but, when that flight got canceled and I found out that the border for the Philippines was going to open on the 10th, I decided to go there. My niece LanaBell was half Pilipino and I wanted her to see the two sides of who she was being connected. Going to the Philippines would give me a chance to share in her history.
I enjoyed my last days on the island living as I would any day of my island life. Good food, lovely bars, museums, outside exploration, animal love and even got to watch the henyo work outside my living room window. My partner in JARC, Maggie, and I went out to eat a couple times. She and her husband even took me to dinner for a little birthday celebration.
Printing and laminating picts of LanaBell to take with me, “we” headed off to the Philippians on the 10th and together explored Boracay Island, again doing much of the same things I had on Jeju. Before heading to Boracay from Manilla, the capital and rough urban city usually only used to fly in and out of, I had been livid that the tour company I was set to sign up with told me last minute that pricing quoted required two people. They had never told me that before coming and I was screwed. Going back to the backpacking way I was used to traveling, I began exploring on my own. Quickly finding my way to Boracay, in no time I was at great restaurants and bars, loving on the street animals and outside exploring. In true vacation mode, I also did a few fun tourist activities. Different kinds of boat rides, exploring different spots with a guide, getting henna and braids, ATVing, going on a helmet dive and making friends in the way one can only do when traveling solo.
The culture of the people was much more boisterous, loud and friendly than S Korea had been. One time, in an elevator with a loud and friendly woman showing me my room, I noticed a young man from S Korea who was looking down overwhelmed by the energy. I felt for him and it made me feel good to be experienced enough to understand the cultural difference I was seeing. It was also interesting to see the difference between two different places in Asia.
Getting to the country the day the Covid bad had been lifted, there were few tourists. That meant I was swarmed by merchants and others counting on tourism to make their money. They weren’t as aggressive and pushy as I was used to from Mexico, but it still was enough to amp up the high energy of the vacation island. What I had been looking for when first finding a destination was a place more peaceful like the beautiful island of Palawan where I could decompress. I was excited to get there. Especially for the beautiful resort I had booked and to scuba in shipwrecks. It still was therapeutic to not have to worry about money in Boracay, but it was more of a party island.
Turned out Palawan wasn’t to happen at all. A Red Cross employee pushed me to get my next Covid test a day early. They were required to be done within three days of moving onto another location. And airport employees gave me wrong info for connecting flights, causing me to miss them and have to pay for many additional. Missing the original connecting flight meant that I was going to have to stay an extra day in Manilla. That also meant I had to get another Covid test. Wandering around a mall exhausted and zoned out during the extra afternoon I was stuck there, it turned out my assumption that I was just exhausted from travel was wrong. I had covid.
Instead of being quarantined in a beautiful resort on a beautiful island, I got stuck in a dreary box of a hotel room overlooking a city that had much to be desired. Even in what was considered a nice room in a nice hotel, it was a dreary place to be stuck. On top of that, my banks (who had assured me I would be fine with accessing my money in that country) froze my accounts for potential suspicious activity because I was in the Philippines. That meant I couldn’t order food. I was on the phone with my bank for hours. time passing while getting that sorted along with using the first couple of days to decompress from all the stimulation, I made it half way through quarantine before starting to go a little cuckoo. Taking nutty picts with my niece’s face to pass the time, there wasn’t much else to do but wait it out. When finally released, a hotel employee on the phone with the government chased me down the street because I still tested positive. Scared for a minute that I would be locked up again, I constantly told him that I finished the quarantine and may still test positive for a while. It was normal. Thank god the person on the other end of the line finally confirmed it. And off I went.
Thinking I was to head off to another island, I was once again proven wrong when attempts I made were sabotaged by different resources still being shut down from Covid. I was tired and I gave in. I was to spend the rest of my time in Manilla. A city I never would have visited, let alone stayed in. Goodbye Palawan and other islands I had hoped to enjoy. As happens in travel, what I was to do, where I was to go and the experiences I was to have were to take a different path.
