The interesting thing about planning a long trip is that the plan never quite survives contact with the research. You start with a rough shape, the countries you want to visit, the general direction of travel, and then you begin actually looking into each place and the shape shifts. Something that seemed logical on the map turns out to be logistically impossible, or expensive in a way you hadn’t accounted for, or there’s somewhere else you hadn’t considered that keeps appearing in everything you read and eventually you have to admit that not going there would be a mistake.
The Philippines wasn’t in the original plan. Japan was the first stop, and after Japan I’d assumed I’d head to China and then work my way south. But the more I read about the Philippines, the more it seemed like an oversight bordering on negligence to skip it. The country is, depending on which account you read, somewhere between seven thousand and seven thousand six hundred islands, the number varying because the definition of island turns out to be more contested than you’d think. Many of those islands are small enough that high tide renders the argument academic. But the larger ones, Luzon in the north and Mindanao in the south and the Visayas scattered between them, are places of real scale and variety, with histories shaped by three centuries of Spanish colonialism, fifty years of American administration, and a series of political upheavals that the country is still, in various ways, working through.
Japan was the first stop, and after Japan I'd assumed I'd head to China and then work my way south.
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