You can call me John, or Patrick. Either of them. Full-time civil engineer, part-time traveler. I was born and raised in the Philippines. It is an archipelago found somewhere in Southeast Asia, a region where travel is said to be affordable. But being composed of islands, neither travel within the country nor abroad is cheap, since the only way to go farther is by means of an airplane. That’s why most of the people here believe that this hobby is only for the rich people. But I don’t, and it is not.
Actually I was never interested to travel until lately. As a kid though, I wanted to be an astronaut so I can fly to the moon and the stars. That’s where I wanted to be. Everything on Earth didn’t amaze me that much; Eiffel Tower was just a landmark, China was just a country, the Colosseum was just another ruin from the history that Italians wanted to preserve. Everywhere is just, nah.
But as I grow older, because of the advancement of technology and the rise of travel blogs, I became exposed to different stories of people told through photos. I read a lot of tales of excitement and wanders alongside the colorful images taken in different corners of the earth. I saw a lot of pictures that seem out of this world, which I didn’t imagine that they actually exist, yet only found somewhere in another continent. That was the time when I realized that the world is beautiful.
Europe was my love at first sight then. I always wanted to see the famous cities of Rome, Paris, Amsterdam, Moscow, London, and all of them. I dreamed of traveling around these places that sometimes I found myself using a Google Maps street view just to see how it looks like to be there in a first person perspective. In that moment I also discovered that I can book plane tickets by myself, which brought me to my first trip abroad – in Singapore.
Currently, I’ve been to most of the neighbouring countries in East and Southeast Asia, and I’m still working out to set foot on each and every country that exist in the world and see their wonders in reality, because I believe that “It is better to see something once than to hear about it a thousand times.”
Adventures of JPE 