In this plane begins a new adventure. Another attempt at expanding my knowledge of the world, a response to my unquenchable thirst for seeing and understanding the different ways that as human beings, we have come up with for living. Cultures, worldviews, perspectives and realities all inherently moulded by our genetics, our environments, and our decisions. My wanderlust is, in principle, a way of exposing myself to different combinations of all these factors and examining (or merely admiring) their outcomes. Travelling inevitably allows me to increase the differences in the nature of the stories I encounter. It increases the pool of backgrounds which in turn lets me see the different ways in which lives unravel across nationalities, political ideologies, cultures, histories, and personal quarrels. Filipinos, as I have learnt while chatting with the flight attendants, count in Spanish regardless of the province, and one of them is actually officially Spanish-speaking. In Davao City, the city that would host me for the next 8 weeks, curfew for minors is 10pm and smoking publicly is illegal. As the locals tell me, Mayor Duterte has made the city much safer and according to numbeo.com it’s ranked high on safety despite a very low purchasing power. As life would have it, I met him three weeks later. But, later.

For now, there I was in a 13-and-a-half hour flight between Vancouver and Manila feeding my passion for knowledge and experience, learning as I take off and soaking up the feeling of being alive.

Earthscapes. El Nido, Palawan. Philippines, 2015.

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