Bitten by the travel bug

We travel, initially, to lose ourselves, and we also to find ourselves. We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers tell us. Sometimes, we have to see things for ourselves. We travel to bring what little we can, in our ignorance and knowledge, to those parts of the globe whose riches are differently dispersed. We journey to become young again, to slow time down and get taken in, and fall in love with life once more.

In our modern times, when airfare and boat fares are at awesome lows (those promo fares are blessings to budget travelers) and transportation is readily available to globetrotters, who wouldn’t be thrilled at the thought of jetsetting? The first great joy of traveling is simply the luxury of leaving all my beliefs and certainties at home, and seeing everything I thought I knew in a different light, from a different angle. Some things we take for granted back at home can be both a novelty and a revelation on foreign land. For example, Jollibee branches in California reveal large Filipino communities in the sunny state. It’s your personal observations – which beyond the pages of your travel book – that evoke the feeling of being thrown into someplace very new. And it’s wonderful.

I’m no shutterbug; I don’t travel for the pictures or souvenirs but instead, for the freedom. I think pictures can never really capture the thrill of just being there. So I take a moment’s pause, and just breathe in the beauty. The exhilarating freedom of traveling comes from the fact that it whirls you around and turns you upside down, and sets everything you took for granted on its head. Travel can also be education. If a diploma can famously be a passport (to a journey through realism), a passport can be a diploma (for a crash course in cultural relativism), and a first lesson we learn on the road, whether we like it or not, is how provincial are the things we imagine to be universal. Like, we take for granted our country’s lush white-sand beaches, when in fact such beauty and weather can hardly be found anywhere else in the world.

We travel to open up our mind, just to shake up our complacencies by seeing all the moral and political urgencies, the life-and-death dilemmas, that we seldom have to face at home. And we travel to fill in the gaps left by tomorrow's headlines: When you drive down the streets of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, for example, where there is almost no paving and women relieve themselves next to mountains of trash, your notions of travel book pictures and landscapes grow usefully revised. Travel is perhaps the best way we have of capturing the humanity of places, and saving them from abstraction, ideology or misrepresentation.

For many others, people travel for a faith-based experience and the best experience is felt first-hand. Every year, a pilgrimage to the Basilica of Sto. Niño is a must if you are a devoted Catholic and especially if this was your first time to the Sinulog. The elders say that you should make three wishes with a prayer every time you make your first visit to a church and your wishes will come true.

Every year, scores of Sto. Niño devotees from all over the country travel to our city to pay homage to the Child Jesus and take part in the grandeur set for a highlight weekend every January. The waiting line to touch the original Sto. Niño image snakes all the way to forever. The crowds are thick and hardly penetrable, the discomfort is awful and the theft rate could be high. Yes, the risks are strong but faith is apparently stronger. They don’t need to be bitten by the travel bug, because faith is a mysterious thing. The power of faith is the worship it inspires, bringing people across land and waters. For such faithful devotees, and perhaps many other tourists, travel is only incidental and the real reward is the destination.

*  *  *

Email: [email protected]