Busuanga Renting an Airbnb Tree House to Live Like Robinson Crusoe

Within just a few short years, the expansion of the Internet and mobile has completely changed the way people live and travel. With only one phone at hand, we can go almost anywhere in the world. We can use translation software to communicate, Uber to travel in most big cities, and use Google Maps to freely navigate any foreign land. We can even use shared economy apps to ride a bike someone else just rode home, live in a local family’s home and listen to them tell stories all through the night, use someone else’s idle GoPro to go diving in Mexico…

What I hadn’t realized was, aside from appearing in the cities in their familiar forms, sharing models have also reached many unknown corners of the world, even in the depths of rainforests untouched by modernity. This time, it has afforded me my dream life. In 2014, I traveled to Busuanga, north of Palawan in the Philippines, where I met two trees. Their owner shared them with me, and using Airbnb, I booked two nights in the treehouse, located in the river’s estuary, two hours by car from the nearest town, without a sign of other human beings. The man second from the left was the owner of the treehouse who, years before, took his dog Buhay with him and bought this piece of land. Over the course of several years, he built the treehouse by hand, and lived in it all the while, enjoying his dream life. He told me that “the treehouse was his biggest dream in life, because now he could live closer to nature.” Work upon sunrise, rest at sunset. My girl and I would punctually come to the window of the treehouse, facing west to wait for sunset, and then gazing at the multitude of stars above our heads.

I once told a German boy who had gone out to sea and got back, “You see that star next to the Moon? That’s Saturn.” And then I bragged about my time chasing stars in Hoh Xil. After feeding him fish for an entire day, I tamed my dog “Buhay”. After that, I would sit with Buhay every afternoon at the wharf, waiting for my girl to finish doing laundry in the most primitive way, then singing a song or two about freedom. Taking my girl and “Buhay”, and carrying two pails of bathing water, I would return to the treehouse. With a sharing platform like this, I can go and experience all kinds of miraculous lifestyles that I expected before, to experience the dreams of others. And all I had was a smartphone, and a heart full of curiosity and yearning.