The Adventures of Expatboy

No, this is not about the TV series (which I like, by the way). This post is in response to Oliver ’s recent adventure, getting lost while hiking.

Back in the Philippines, when I was a wee lad, I used to spend summers in Cagayan de Oro, south of Manila. When I was around 12 to 13 years old, tito Vic took me out to hunt for fowl in one of the mangrove forests that were nearby. As I had never gone hunting before, and being the inattentive boy I was then, I allowed myself to be led to the middle of the swamp, to wait for fowl to shoot, assuming that my uncle would come back for me and lead me back to the pickup truck we left in a fishing village nearby.

So I lay in wait for something to shoot for an hour. Then two. After the third hour I was getting kind of bored, and was waiting for tito Vic to come back for me. After the fourth hour I was getting nervous, and after the fifth I was in a full-fledged panic. They weren’t coming back for me, I thought. They assumed that I could find my way back to the fishing village. So, what to do? What to do?

First I tried calling out. Silence. Louder. No dice. I would have to find my way back, I realized. But if you have ever seen a mangrove forest, you would easily see that you couldn’t rely on distinguishing landmarks, because a mangrove forest is basically a thick foliage of bamboo-like plants growing is soft mud, and because of that, there were no trails! You had to go by memory or sense of direction.

Since I did not have any memory, and did not have the presence of mind to remember which direction I came from, I was in deep sh!t. I started walking in a random direction, but shortly after the soft mud turned even softer, and soon after my slippers (yes I did not even have the presence of mind to wear shoes) got sucked into the quagmire. And shortly after that, I was literally knee deep in mud. But softer mud meant that I was near the water. And if I was near the water, that would be the edge of the mangrove. From there I could hopefully find my way to civilization. So I kept on wading deeper and deeper into the mud.

And yes, eventually the ocean started peeping through the thick foliage of bamboo. I headed straight for it. Reaching the edge, I started wading through the mud and sand towards my right, as that was the general direction where I came. Finally, I hit sandy beach, and a fishing village. I waded out of the salt water exhausted and muddy up to my shirt. Somehow this was the same village that I started off from and I quickly saw the Toyota Tamaraw truck that we drove in. I plopped myself into the truck bed, exhausted and relieved. An hour later, my uncle came back. He seemed nonchalant if I remember correctly. Man, he did assume I would find my way back.

I never went hunting again with tito Vic.

As I write this, and being older, I realized that I had made a pretty mad gamble, walking towards the ocean, and hoping to hit a fishing village. I could have reached the edge of the water and walked towards the opposite direction, and it could be tens or hundreds of miles to the next village going in that direction, if any at all. I could have very well died that day, drowned in the next high tide, or accidentally impaled myself on a bamboo pole, or slowly died of starvation. It’s not like in the US where you have the forestry service or the coast guard or any organized service that would have looked for me had I been lost. It was not even like a mountain trail where mountaineers would go looking for you if you did not arrive at a particular time.

And now 20 years later, living on borrowed time, I’m writing a blog entry. I should make better use of my time.