Where I grew up, there were very few natural disaster kind of scenarios apart from bushfires and they were in a league of their own. So when I traveled it was a brutal awakening when I was trapped in a typhoon. AND terrifying.
On THE Tropical Island in The Philippines
I had been there maybe a week. Staying in an elevated shack on a beach, the first one was a kind of baptism, weirdly it does get easier, but that first blew my mind. It was a wellness place where I was staying, the bathroom was outside and downstairs and the ONLY thing between me and the raging winds was a thick clear plastic kind of blind thing rolled down over the openings masquerading as windows.
It was relatively small, but it did take my breath away as things swirled around inside before I had help unravelling the blinds. B who would eventually partner with me for seven years, came to me in the dark, rolled the blinds down for me (I didn’t know they existed) and explained what was going on. Then disappeared into the night of no sleep.
The Second Typhoon Was Even Worse
By the time the second one hit, I had been at the island for over a month, I was very weak because I had been fasting all that time, and was exploring a connection with B. She would spend every night in my hut and being supported made it such a different experience.
I was terrified, she wasn’t. The blinds were down and the wind was so strong, the waves were washing up underneath the hut and almost to the bathroom behind. I was shaking. B in her wisdom took me in her arms, pulled the sheet up over our heads and everything went away until the next morning.
The high winds went on for days though, and what looked like tons of garbage was washed up on the beach the next morning, and we spent days cleaning it up with staff.
The Typhoon That Blew Itself Out
While B and I were building our farmhouse, we stayed on a cliff overlooking a beach in a flimsy bamboo hut. The first typhoon was a couple of days after we moved there. The door blew open in the middle of the night (it had no lock). I was awake all that night watching the grass roof waving at me in the wind, expecting it to blow away any minute.
But the worst, or best was the day we expected a super typhoon. They told us it was going to be the worst one ever. We had added plastic blinds and a fishing net slung over the roof to keep it in place, so we were prepared as much as we could. B went to the our house to supervise the workers and I stayed and waited, there wasn’t anywhere safe to go.
It was the strangest day. Terrified yet calm, watching the horizon from the ample deck while keeping an eye on weather reports. The sky was blue, the day sunny, and it was eerily calm. No clouds at all. But I didn’t let my guard down, the reports insisted it was coming so I didn’t want to be surprised.
Early afternoon a rather impressive plume of thick cloud gathered itself sneakily behind me, but it soon dissipated, as disappointed in itself as I was in it, as it disappeared rather quickly like a puff of smoke.
Nothing else happened. Whilst I was relieved, it was also a strange day expecting a disaster that didn’t happen, that I was unprepared for anyway.
A Typhoon in Manila at The Top Of a Condo
I was staying on the 38th floor of a condo in Manila, near the water when one day I woke to the building swaying. And moving enough that it had woken me at five in the morning. I had a panoramic view over Manila through floor to ceiling windows, and the chaos of the typhoon was stark once the sun had peered over the horizon.
So many things went through my head. What if the building was to collapse, was it going to get worse, do I have food in the house, all while sitting on the side of the bed listening to the howl of the wind and swaying unconsciously with the movement of the building.
When it abated around noon, I stupidly went to the mall not far away for supplies, by the time I had finished shopping the winds were over 100km again and a bitch to walk in. But I realised that instead of being terrorised by the typhoon, because I had lived through a number of them, now it was a matter of inconvenience.
PeaCe ouT