The New Year has found me in the southern Philippines where I have been telling everyone the women are fast, or should I just say friendly and the internet is slow. I am renting a house in Thailand for three and a half months so I can write and edit images and I decided to have a break in the Philippines en route and I persuaded my friend Jack to join me for a few weeks.
He is recovering from that ever-increasing feature of western society — a late in life divorce from his partner of 37 years and at times is finding it difficult to adjust to life on his own when he does not have a job or keep him occupied and distract him from being reflective.
We went to a Leonard Cohen concert in New York a month ago and I told him he should be looking at the next 10 years as an exciting new opportunity as he has no partner, no job, no children, no responsibilities, no home and no financial pressures and I suspected there are plenty of others who would be very envious of him and like to opt out of whatever they are doing and start over. I thought that quite literally he has the world as his oyster and now can now go anywhere and do anything without having to answer to anyone.
If I was you I would go off and travel and if you are lonely why not travel through South East Asia — lots to see, low cost of living, great beaches to relax and no shortage of friendly women. Frankly your life needs a new direction and you have the means to make it happen, it just needs a bit of willpower. We had initially met on a remote Fijian Island in when Jack and his wife to be were travelling the world but Jack totally poo pooed my suggestion and said he had not travelled for years and would not know how to even begin to prepare let alone get his affairs in order to depart in early January until his brother, friends and therapist all told him they thought my proposal was a great idea and that is how I found myself at Cebu Airport in the Southern Philippines a few days ago waiting for Jack to fly in after three flights and a hour journey from Washington Dulles.
My arrival from the UK 3 days earlier had been a much more manageable two flights and 16 hours from London. Our taxi driver Jimmy assured us he had not had an accident in 27 years which was surprising given he liked to explore both sides of the road as we headed north up the east coast of Cebu, before crossing the spine of the island past one truck in the ditch the drunk truck driver had died on impact but the ditch had stopped the runaway truck from ploughing into the roadside dwellings and arrived at Hagnaya from where we took a rather shabby and basic car ferry to Bantayan.
