I’ve been away for a while

Some of you may know that for the past several years, I’ve been living quietly on an island in the Philippines with my wife and two children. By 2016, I had realised that I was in a rut personally and professionally and had decided a change of scenery was probably in order. Also, since I had been working remotely for a few years before that, I could no longer use a job as an excuse to avoid seeing more of the world. I had already been bitten by the travel bug. A 2007 trip to Israel to explore the Holy Land, the history of Byzantium and the Crusades, and ancient sites like Jerusalem, Akko, Haifa, Tel Megiddo, Jericho, Capernaum, Beersheba, El-Araj, Beit She’an, Tel Hazor, Qumran, and Masada had whetted my appetite to go off the beaten path and see parts of the world far away from the usual European tourist haunts.

I was only supposed to be here on the island of Negros for six months, but because of a series of circumstances beyond my control, my brief sojourn turned into what physicist Thomas Kuhn has called a “paradigm shift”. And though my shift wasn’t scientific in nature, it was a social and cultural rearrangement of assumptions I used to hold dear.

Usually the Philippines is pretty sleepy, but occasionally there's some real excitement

I blame National Geographic

It all started with a National Geographic magazine subscription that was a childhood gift from my grandparents when I was twelve years old.

Whenever an issue arrived in our rural Pennsylvania mailbox that featured the Philippines, I found myself taking a particular interest in the remote island archipelago. Articles with titles such as The Last Tribes of Mindanao, Sea Gypsies of the Philippines, and Tropical Rainforests: Nature’s Dwindling Treasures fascinated me, firing my young imagination with visions of densely-packed rainforests of palm and banana trees, exotic and endangered animal species, and primitive cultures replete with supposedly noble savages and tribal chieftans.

In fairness, Anthony Bourdain must take some of the blame as well.

But in 2007, the idea of travelling to the Philippines, let alone living here, was a ludicrous proposition and something I would never imagine doing at that time. I liked my life in the USA for the most part, and I didn’t see myself relocating to a southeast Asian country on the other side of the planet. I was still working as a land surveyor and commuting to work. Even so, I was reading a lot about the archaeology of Israel, a country rich with ancient history.

I decided to save up my precious comp time and blow it all in one go on a trip to the Holy Land. My employer clearly didn’t want to let me go for that long, but they couldn’t say ‘no’ because I had earned it.

It was time for a legit adventure

So after a sleepless flight from New York City that I spent reading guidebooks, I landed in Tel-Aviv wide-eyed and beset with a sense of wonder. Little did I know what was in store for me!

(To be continued…)