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Ser 4
Wanderlust
Last year, twenty-somethings Lois Yasay and
Chichi Bacolod — co-founders of the travel blog
www.wearesolesisters.com
— decided to quit their
day jobs to make serious traveling their business.
Here
,
s what happened. Story by Lois Yasay
MOST PEOPLE MAKE
a hobby out of
traveling; last year, my friend Chichi
and I decided to make it our lives. I was
working as a financial services trainer
for a foreign bank when I stopped
seeing travel as a once-a-month, do-
it-on-the-weekend sort of thing. I had
traveled to Thailand for the Songkran
Festival in 2010, the first country in
South-East Asia I had ever visited, and
for the first time it became apparent to
me how different the Philippines was
from its neighbors. In fact, because
of our Spanish heritage and Catholic
values, we’re the odd one out. So I
became curious about our neighbors
and was eager to see how they lived.
Then I met Chichi, my colleague
at the bank, in whom I immediately
saw the same longing and passion for
travel. We drew up a “30 Before 30”
list of things we wanted to do before
we turned the big 3-0, such as #13,
swim with the gentle whale sharks
(butandings)
in Sorsogon and, #29,
appear in a travel show. We called
ourselves Sole Sisters, and put our list
up online as a travelogue called
www.
wearesolesisters.com.
We soon got
great responses from people who also
wanted the same things: freedom,
travel and adventure.
In order to accomplish most of the
items on our to-do list, we had to take
a major life-changing step: we quit our
jobs so we could travel for as long as
our escape fund would allow. It took
us a whole year to plan our route and
save up for what we would need for six
months of traveling on the cheap —
PHP100,000 each.
My father was worried about my
safety and concerned about everything
in my life that would be put on hold
(read: my career, future marriage then
maybe motherhood). But I’m less
fearful of something happening to me
than of nothing ever happening. I’m
more afraid of a life where nothing
extraordinary ever happens.
So in early 2011, we stuffed clothes
and toiletries into a 45L NorthFace
backpack — light fabric clothes, bikinis,
flip-flops,
sarongs
, scarves, snoods,
and a tiny pink hairdryer (Chichi’s call,
because you never know when you
have to show up with great hair).
And we’re off! That’s me,
Lois (left) and Chichi.
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