35: A Love Letter to New Friends and the Universe
Ok. I’ve never wanted a drone more than in the Philippines. Someone on the boat had one and these few photos from him are INCREDIBLE. The beaches, the water, the islands, all of it was spectacular. I’m pretty sure that’s me in the water, I was art directing sexy photo shoots for people!
When I started out on this trip I listed out all of the fears I had. They spanned a spectrum of sane to crazy, but all of them were based in the unknowns of what this journey would throw at me. Now that I’m 11+ months into it, there are not a ton of new experiences or new curve balls I’m faced with. Whatever normal is after 11 months of traveling, this is it, this is my new normal.
When I reflect back on my list of fears a year ago I thought one of them was that I’d never make friends. When I’m totally honest with myself I know that’s not possible. I’d even go as far to say that for me, it’s impossible. It’s just not in my personality or my spirit or my DNA not to meet people and make friends. However, if I had the foresight to rephrase this fear I would have changed it from a generic “What if I don’t make any friends?” to “What if I don’t have genuine, vulnerable and lasting connections with other people?” that would have been a better and more accurate fear. Being friendly with people, grabbing a meal together or chatting in a hostel lobby is easy. Creating meaningful connections where you share a piece of yourself - your life, your experiences, your hopes, your vulnerable self, that’s what I care about and had really, really hoped to experience.
I’ve met a handful of wonderful people on the road but a lot of them have been these brief and wonderful connections. The moments I got to spend with people in genuine connection was so brief it feels like it never happened. What I wanted, (or hoped for) and seemingly was at a loss for, was a group of humans that connected for longer than one day or one meal.
I don’t know why it never happened before this but it didn’t. I never met a group of awesome people I wanted to travel with, or they wanted to travel with me! Until now, I had only traveled with one other amazing human I met in India at OSHO. That’s only 1 person in 10 months. That seemed extraordinarily bizarre considering how many other travelers have these wild and wonderful tales of new friends and exciting adventures together.
Maybe it’s my age? Maybe it’s their age? Maybe I wasn’t open to it? Maybe I’m not cool enough? Maybe I had too high expectations of what those people would be and when no one could live up to those expectations I moved on. (There’s likely some truth in that.) I don’t know that there is only 1 reason, but whatever it was, it never happened and I really, really thought it would. In the meantime it’s not like I didn’t meet new people or make new friends so I wasn’t living in deprivation, I just sort of figured that having a more meaningful connection wasn’t a possibility for me and I was ok with that reality. Then just as my time on the road was coming to a close, I met the most wonderful 9 humans from all over the world and it was perfect timing because these were the people I was meant to meet.
My favorite humans!
Stunning and amazing and the best. Sunset on our 2nd night with rum jungle juice.
In my last blog post I wrote about the reality of going home and how I knew it was time. Until this specific experience in the Philippines I thought it was time. In fact, I was so sure of it I had written a blog post all about it. I was convinced that the box was full - full of experiences, full of joy, full of boredom, full enough to fit almost perfectly into 1 year. I didn’t think there was much more to be seen or done. But the Philippines challenged all of that for me. It really all started because above all else, I did not want to be alone on my birthday (April 9th).
When I was traveling in Guatemala a woman had mentioned that if I was going to the Philippines that I should look up a boat trip called Tao Philippines. I was a little nervous about her recommendation. I wasn’t looking for a party boat full of drunk a**holes. But she was in her late 40’s and I trusted her suggestion. I wrote it down in my phone and over the coming months looked it up multiple times as I began to plan my travels through SE Asia. The boat trip looked cool but it felt a little expensive, especially for SE Asia ($550 USD for 5 days). It wasn’t a slam dunk for me, it was always just this thing in the back of my mind. If I had time or if I had extra money maybe I’d consider it but once my birthday rolled around I knew that I wanted to do something unique. It didn’t have to be epic per say, I just didn’t want to be alone. Signing up for the Tao was definitely going to be a splurge moment. Not to mention I still have quite a bit of PTSD from my first boat trip in Panama. Hello, can you blame me?! Look what happens when boat trips go terribly wrong? It’s my birthday, do I really want to chance it on all days?
In this situation I couldn’t shake my overwhelming truth, I didn’t want to be alone on my birthday. In one of the early years of living in Portland I decided not to go home for Christmas and that was years before I was going to Esalen in December. For whatever reasons I can’t entirely remember to this day, I ended up not having any plans on Christmas day. No friends or family to be with, no stray single friends to commiserate with, I was all alone. Let me tell you what, being alone on Christmas is the absolute worst. I was terribly lonely, incredibly sad and it was all around awful. I vowed never to do that to myself again. I sort of imagined being alone on my birthday would feel a little bit like being alone on Christmas so booking an excursion was a top priority. Even though I knew all of these things about being alone, something still felt off. I signed up for the trip and had 7 days to pay to secure my spot and still I waited almost the full 7 days to book it.
I ended up booking a combo tour that included 5 days and 4 nights of Filipino boating fun. This specific combo included 2 nights on a private island and then 2 nights island hopping.
Before our adventure began, we were all required to come to the tour offices for a mandatory meeting and preparation session. This is also where we all met each other. I looked around, we were a small group of only 10. What a relief! I sort of had prepared for 20-30 strangers and people who I’d probably never really get to know or like. I sat down and loudly and very American-ly announced that it would be my birthday in 2 days and I’d gladly accept free drinks. Everyone laughed, or at least pretended to laugh. And then the rest of the meeting went by with little fanfare. We all said hello and goodbye and prepared for our adventure to begin the following day.
It’s always the things you expect the least that turn out the best, right? These 9 fantastically beautiful, generous, wonderful and kind humans were my little family for the next 5 days. This was it. This is what I was hoping and waiting for. It felt totally unexpected and random that there was only 10 of us, all other tours had more people in them and for whatever reason we lucked out with a small group. For the first 2 nights we were all marooned on a private island and with the joy of no where to go and nothing to do, we became friends.
As I had previously mentioned to the group, they knew it was my upcoming birthday and with all the gratitude and wonder in my heart, two of my new friends, Anders and Anna from Denmark brought a bottle of champagne with them to celebrate ME. What? It was one of the most touching gifts from these total strangers that I had only just met the day before. It was so, so, so unexpected. How lucky am I that I’m on this journey? How lucky am I to be on this boat with these beautiful humans? How did the universe manifest these people for me to have an incredible 37th birthday? Even the staff members on the island got in on the fun and baked a cake (albeit a sort of weird fake-cheese-from-a-can tasting cake, but whatever! How sweet is that?!).
We did a lot of eating together.
Birthday cake! It was weird. But so, so sweet!
After our first 2 nights on the island we joined another boat and a large group of 18 people and together we spent the remaining time island hopping through the Philippines. At first it felt like an intrusion into our little family we created. I didn’t want to share them. But we soon figured out that for many reasons, these humans were also incredible, kind and remarkable too. There we were, 28 random humans in the middle of the Philippines living life and so damn grateful. I don’t think anyone on that boat wasn’t in awe of the islands and the humans that were with us. It was such a beautiful 5 days.
It’s Anders again!
The most babalicious Brazilian babes of all time! Livia and Natalia.
My sweet Janine.
The most Bramiest of Bram photos. My favorite Dutchman.
Never not smiling. It’s Marre!
The sweetest babes of all time, Anna and Anders from Denmark.
Patrick the professional bartender.
Veit in all his napping glory.
And here’s where it got more interesting! If that wasn’t enough to spend 5 days with them on a boat, it didn’t end there. There was about 10 of us that traveled together further south in the Philippines. Many of us had no strict itinerary so it allowed us to plan outings and change travel plans to stay together and keep the fun going for a few more hours or days.
Sweet sunset embraces with Marre!
It was here that I met Marre from Sweden. My very unexpected and delightfully sweet friend. Marre was the first person I met in the group orientation meeting that first day. When I first met her I thought to myself, well I probably will never be friends with her! And boy was I wrong.
I’m finishing this blog post in May and after weeks of traveling together then meeting back up I just said my final goodbye to her. I’m forever grateful to have met her and to have traveled with her. Tonight as we said goodbye we made a promise to meet up again in at least the next 3 years and I fully intend to keep that promise. I always genuinely wanted to meet people on this trip that I’d never forget and will meet up with around the world and this trip in the Philippines gave me just that - the thing I thought I’d never have on this trip I got.
After having met these people and traveled with them it made some invisible checklist I had in my head feel complete. I knew I wanted this but I didn’t realize how sad I would have been had I never had it. If there was a some sort of prerequisite list I needed to have going into this trip after meeting and traveling with this group I checked off the one of everything list. It’s so sad to leave them but it fulfills something I had deeply desired - to create a genuine, vulnerable and lasting connection with people.
The entire posse, all 28 fantastic humans.
- M
