Wander Girl

by Tweet Sering

  She was still guilty for belittling my pregnancy scare (not that I made her forget it) and had since been trying to make it up to me.

  “All my foreign backpacker passengers say it’s beautiful,” she continued. “Kasipog ngani, eh—I’m from here and I’ve never been there.”

  Sagada in Mountain Province did sound like an interesting place to visit. Except...

  “We can’t go there by ourselves,” I told Lulu. “We have to drag at least one guy along.”

  That guy turned out to be Vince, my copywriter friend, who had nursed the biggest crush on Lulu since I introduced them in college. He was the only one of my high school friends who attended the same university as me.

  Vince was the sensitive, writerly type who discovered Pablo Neruda before Hollywood did and who introduced me to the underground, socially-relevant music of Billy Bragg. Afflicted by severe katorpehan, he would drink himself to oblivion when Lulu would join me for my high school group gimmicks. Everything that he wished he had the guts to say to her appeared in his short stories revolving around the same theme of missed opportunities: you were sure to find either a character named Lulu or a Surigaonon girl named Lala, Lily or Lou.

  Lulu knew about this, of course—as did everyone else—but even as she found Vince cute, which he was in a very sincere, dark-eyed Dermot Mulroney way, she just shrugged her shoulders. “Nan? Ako pa kintahay an mangulitawo dija?”

  But Vince being Vince, he never got up the nerve to ask her out. Not that he had all the time in the world to do that— Lulu was hardly without a boyfriend. And in between relationships, there were a number of boys trying their luck, most of whom she would entertain except for frat men. “Egotistic, insecure barbarians” she called them.

  I suppose Vince had grown tired of his “missed opportunity” life theme and having been in the working world for four years now had given him some degree of confidence, because the moment I brought up the Sagada problem during a drinkfest at Gweilos, he choked on his beer as though he couldn’t get his words out fast enough and raised his hand.

  “Pare, easy,” Omar had joked, and the whole table laughed. “Mahina kalaban.”

  The others couldn’t skip work. But Vince, driven by a force stronger than the ire of his boss, gave a determined: “I’ll join you guys. Bahala na si Batman.”

  The first thing that struck me, as we alighted the minibus and stepped onto the unpaved gravel road in front of the St. Mary’s Episcopal Church, was how unremarkable-looking Sagada was. This is it? I asked myself, more than a little disappointed. We had taken a bus from Dangwa in Manila to Banawe, a trip that took eight hours; then a jeep from Banawe to Bontoc for five hours; then an aircon-less minibus from there to Sagada for two hours over dusty, bumpy, and narrow ledges that fit only one vehicle—for this?

  The general color of the place was earthy, muted, nothing too harsh on the eye or too stark. Everything—church, trees, houses, small restaurants, minibuses—seemed to blend into one another. If Sagada were a guest at a party, it would be a wallflower—it would hardly merit a second look.

  There were no telephone poles, and the tallest structure was the gray-and-green stone Episcopal church. Sloping away from the side of the church was the baseball field, where young students were in the middle of a game.

  The second thing I noticed was the atmospheric sound: a strange combination of chirping birds, children’s thin, high-pitched voices, adult conversations, and the hum of a motor that seemed to be coming from some far-off field. It was as though the sounds dissipated into the vastness surrounding us as soon as it was released, and was quickly absorbed by the soft earth. There was no concrete or clusters of buildings to echo or contain it. It was like nothing I had ever heard before.

  Immediately after alighting from the bus, Vince offered to carry our bags. It didn’t seem right to take advantage of his vulnerable state, so I said thank you, but I was cool. Lulu, I was sure, wanted to hand him hers (a Louis Vuitton weekend-at-the-Hamptons number whose straps weren’t long enough to sling on her shoulders) but seeing my gesture, decided to lug it herself.

  It didn’t occur to us to plan our lodging arrangements beforehand (or to ask the minibus driver), so we followed the Caucasian couple, who were our only other bus mates, as they strode purposefully down the path, past the baseball field.

  They continued on where the road turned left, with the three of us hot at their heels, until they stopped, consulted a thick book, looked at the wooden sign nailed to a tree (the Greenhouse Inn), then clambered up the stone steps that climbed off the unpaved path. At the top was a quaint, wooden two-story house with an old iron gate whose white paint had peeled off. Seeing the gate unlocked, the five of us let ourselves in.

  A petite woman of about 65, with wild hair that was mostly gray, and soft, round watery eyes opened the door with an expression that suggested she had been expecting us. Like many Sagada inns, hers was a converted home, which accounted for the warm and homey feel of the place. We stood in the middle of the small living room, which I noticed looked lived-in, yet clean.

  “Sharing?” the lady asked the Caucasian couple, who smiled and nodded. “Sharing?” she asked the three of us.

  We looked at one another. Another thing we hadn’t planned—our sleeping arrangements. Vince had been my friend for a long time and I didn’t mind having him in our room, but I wasn’t sure how Lulu felt about that.

  “I can stay in a separate room,” Vince offered unconvincingly, looking from me to Lulu and back again. “I don’t mind.”

  “It’s OK,” Lulu said nonchalantly. “You can stay with us; it’s cheaper if we split the bill three ways.”

  The bedrooms were on the second floor—all three of them. We were led to a bedroom with a window that looked out onto the field and the church beyond it. Lulu and I dropped our bags just barely in the door and jumped on one of two beds (the one by the window), giggling as we tried to push each other off it.

  “Kids, kids,” the newly confident Vince said. He sat on the bed opposite ours. “So what do you guys wanna do first?”

  Lulu and I looked at each other. “Eat!”

  We backtracked to the restaurant we had passed on our short walk to the inn. Shamrock Cafe Restaurant—yup, that’s what it was called. On the way, we passed two Caucasian guys who were walking towards the opposite direction.

  “French,” Lulu declared when they were out of earshot. “Both cutie.”

  Vince whistled, pretending not to have heard her comment.

  That afternoon, while enjoying what we were told was a Sagada specialty—fresh fruits in yogurt—and watching the light change over the lazy town, I felt a familiar headiness that I associated with being in a new place.

  Wow, I thought, I’m finally traveling again.

  His name was Matthieu Louis, French, 23 years old, IT specialist. He and his friend Philippe, 23, football coach at an international school in Bangkok, were staying at the Greenhouse Inn, too.

  I had always fantasized about being swept off my feet by a Frenchman just once in my life. That accent, that romantic intensity—what self-respecting Asian girl hadn’t? And this Frenchman, this Matthieu Louis, literally had me at “Bonjour.”

  One of the quirks of our inn was the absence of a water heater. Now, in Manila, that information would have been of little consequence, but in Sagada where the water seemed to flow in straight from Siberia, it wasn’t an issue you took lightly. This meant that, as a guest aching for a warm shower (or at least one that didn’t make hell freeze over), I had to fill the kettle left out in the kitchen for the inn’s guests with water and wait for it to boil. When the kettle whistled, I had to take it to the only bathroom, mix the boiling water with the ice-cold water from the faucet, hand the kettle to the next one in line, then hurry back to the bathroom for a shower before the water cooled.

  On the second morning in Sagada, I was at the kitchen table, scribbling on my journal while waiting for half my shower water to boil. Lulu and Vince were sti
ll snoring when I left with my shower kit. Last night’s energetic, noisy round of cards (where someone actually rapped on our door before we heard footfalls padding back to the room down the hall and a door creaking closed) must have tired them out.

  “Bonjour,” a masculine voice said behind me. I jumped, instinctively covering the open page of my journal with my arms.

  I turned to see an ash-blond boy in a shirt and boxers, a striped towel slung over one shoulder. His tall, broad-shouldered frame covered the doorway to the kitchen. His hair was disheveled, his left cheek bore red pillow marks and his light blue eyes were blinking with barely-sustained wakefulness. He looked completely adorable.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, surprised. He turned uncertainly, as though he didn’t know whether to stay or leave. “I will not look, I promise.”

  Embarrassed, I sat upright and closed my journal.

  “I was just waiting for my water,” I said, like he needed an explanation. Then, because he still seemed to hesitate, “You can come in, if you want.”

  He approached the table, sat down, and extended his hand to me. “I’m Matthieu,” he said warmly.

  “Hilda,” I said, shaking his hand.

  “Ahh,” he exclaimed, jumping back a little in surprise. “Your hand—eet ees like ice! Ees eet very cold for you, this weather?”

  Ooh, the accent! It killed me. (Later on, I would add this to The List: No. 30—“Has an accent.”)

  “Yes, it is,” I said, retrieving my hand and wrapping it in my towel. “We’re not used to the cold.”

  “For me it is perfect weather,” he said with a crooked-toothed smile that upped his pogi points considerably. “Perfect for caving. My friend and I, we’re going to the Big Cave. I’m looking forward. And you? What do you do today?”

  And that’s how our Sagada group came to include two French guys on the last leg of their Southeast Asian tour.

  As with the Caucasian couple (who we learned were Kirsten and Mark from Sweden), Matthieu and Philippe seemed to know the places to visit in Sagada. They had a thick book they carried around with them, much like the one we saw Kirsten and Mark consulting on the way to the inn: The Lonely Planet Guide to Southeast Asia on a Shoestring.

  Their book intrigued me. It contained detailed information about where to go in the Philippines, how to get there (right down to the tricycle fare), where to sleep, eat, what places to visit. Obviously written for foreigners, it included observations about Filipinos—under the section “Women Travelers,” for instance, it had this to say: “many male Filipinos like to think of themselves as irresistible macho types,” (Ha! I knew it) “but can also turn out to be surprisingly considerate gentlemen,” (I’m sure!) and that they are “especially keen to show their best side to foreign women” (in a word—plastic!).

  I had traveled with my parents before; why didn’t I remember ever having such a book about the places we visited? We were always in a hurry to be somewhere. Travel to me was hearing, “Girls, let’s go! The bus is waiting!” or our guide telling us we had 20 minutes to walk around a temple or a park or a museum. Visiting another place then for me had felt like being herded along with an... entire flock of sheep—we ate, slept and walked around when we were told. We relinquished the responsibility (and the headache)of planning our trip to travel agents, simply taking their word for it. But by doing so, we also gave up our freedom to explore at will.

  We gave ourselves no choice but to follow a pre-planned itinerary that we neither had a hand in drawing up nor could deviate from in case something else struck our fancy. We left little room for surprises, or for adventure. We zipped through places, trying to cover as many as we could in as little time, skimming the surface and thus, absorbing only the clichés about the place—Paris was for lovers; the US was about Mickey Mouse; London was about a bridge on the verge of collapse. And we came from those trips not any wiser, not knowing any more about a place than the standard information about it that we had before we left home.

  Now I was feeling the freedom of travel for the first time, the heady knowledge of having choices.

  At first it seemed embarrassing for us to be following these two foreigners in what was supposedly our own territory. They knew so much about Sagada—where to find the hanging coffins, how long it took to trek to the Small Falls, how to get to Eduardo Masferre’s studio with photos depicting life in Mountain Province from the 1930s to the 1950s. Later on, my interest in the guidebook outweighed my embarrassment.

  After leaning over his arm too often for a look at the book’s contents, Matthieu finally noticed my special interest in it.

  “Hilda,” he said, handing me the book. “Where do you suggest we eat tonight?”

  “We can have dinner,” I told the group, as I scanned the “Places to Eat” section under Sagada, “at a cozy little Log Cabin’ because it serves the best food in town.”

  The book’s information proved true. Not only was the food the best,’ the serving was surprisingly large that two people could share one order. But since we didn’t know that beforehand, we all agreed to each get a different dish so we could all sample from one another’s plates. It was Vince who suggested this, and at that I noticed Matthieu and Philippe exchange looks.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” I quickly added.

  “Oh, no, no, no,” Matthieu said waving his palms at us. “We do not mind at all.”

  “Sorry to put you on the spot,” Lulu, the worldly flight attendant said, addressing both boys. “Over here meals are a very communal thing, we just help ourselves to one another’s plates.”

  “Yes, yes,” a visibly embarrassed Philippe said. “So sorry if you think we didn’t like sharing. We are not accustomed, yes? But we like it.” He smiled.

  To make up for that slight hitch, during dinner, the two French boys reached across the table to fork a piece broccoli off my plate, scrape chicken and tomato sauce from Lulu’s, and twirl spaghetti with puttanesca sauce from Vince’s. In turn, they pushed their plates of spinach fettuccini and fresh salad towards the middle of the table, the better for everyone to dig in.

  Nowhere in Matthieu’s book was this Sagada specialty’ mentioned, but visitors seemed to know where to get good hash, known among the locals as “kulangot.” At night, when the shops had closed at 9 p.m., Vince and the boys set out to find us Sagada’s “finest,” while Lulu and I walked back to the inn to wait for them.

  Less than half an hour later, they came to our room and, as we sat on a rug on the floor, excitedly spread the bounty of hash.

  “Chocolate,” Matthieu announced happily, holding up his stick of rolled-up hash. Vince lit mine and Lulu’s, and we began puffing away. It was my first time to try it but I wasn’t about to admit that to the group.

  A few minutes into the session, with the French nodding their approval, everyone was a funny guy. But Lulu, it seemed, was most amused with me.

  “What’s so funny, bitch?” I laughingly asked her.

  “Bitch?” Lulu cracked, tumbling sideways from her Indian position. “Bitch? Vince, she said bitch!”

  Vince was himself rolling on the floor with mirth.

  “Fuck off, you guys!” But I couldn’t stop the giggles bubbling in me.

  “Fuck off!” Lulu croaked to Vince, weak with laughter.

  “Putangina niyong dalawa!” I was really, really enjoying this.

  Lulu was pounding the floor with her fist, cackling like a witch.

  They were laughing so hard, both Vince and Lulu were red in the face and no sound escaped their lips. I looked at Matthieu and Philippe, but they seemed to be quite entertained enough by the three of us. I shrugged at them.

  “Fuck you, guys,” I said with a smile.

  “Fuck you, too,” they said in unison.

  The following day, the lady of the house graciously kicked us out. And so we made our way to another lodging house that the French knew of—St. Joseph’s Rest House. We picked a cottage in the grounds of the rest house, separate from the main
building to avoid disrupting the peace of other travelers again.

  The cottage had a terrace across the room at the back, facing the Episcopal Church, and the five of us sat there on chairs and on the railing just enjoying the cool weather.

  “Where is this, ehh, apartment of yours?” Matthieu asked me. “Is it near Malate or Makati?”

  Oh, no! Why did I tell him all those things last night? That I was living on my own in a condo unit and that he and Philippe were welcome to stay once we returned to Manila. Fuckshit, hassle!

  I felt Lulu’s and Vince’s eyes on me. I cleared my throat. This shit is so deep!

  “Um, it’s actually in the Pasig-Mandaluyong area,” I lied, silently wishing Helen would be out on a flight and lend me her apartment for two weeks.

  “Thank you again for the offer,” he said warmly. “It’s very nice of you.”

  Sabi na, eh: Just say no to drugs.

  “Ate?’ I said. “Ate? Ate! Super duper favor.” Thank God for cellphones!

  I was pacing under the pine trees outside our cottage, while the rest of the group had gone to Shamrock for lunch. I told them I would catch up with them.

  “You’re throwing me out of my apartment?” an incredulous Helen asked on the other end of the line.

  “It’s just two weeks, Ate,” I pleaded. “Only until they leave for Bangkok.”

  “Where do you expect me to stay?”

  “I don’t know...” I said, desperation tightening my chest. “How about KP... I mean, what’s his face—Martin? Don’t you guys want to stay in a hotel?”

  Shame, shame on you, Hilda! Feeding your sister to the lion to save your own skin. Ngayon lang naman, eh, I battled my conscience.

  There was silence from her end, which I dearly hoped meant she was considering.

  I hugged myself, feeling the chill of the nippy air even as I was buried in layers—a tank top, a shirt and a sweater. Come on, Ate, I pleaded silently.

  “Hil, TWO WEEKS lang, ha?” Helen said finally, firmly.

  “Yahoooo!” I jumped up and down, visions of a honeymoon made in Mandaluyong-heaven dancing in my head.