One of my favorite after-school activities was finding “secret roads” on my way home from school. I did most of it when I was in elementary school with my sister. We always took the train from the school and walked our remaining way from the train station to our home. With the typical route, it should’ve taken around 15-20 minutes or about 13,000 child steps (I once actually counted lol).

We had some friends who were also siblings and used to walk home together. One day, we had the idea to find alternative routes home and it would be a competition between me and my sister vs them. We called it “finding secret roads”. Whoever managed to find the most secret roads was the winner.

The way from the train station to our homes were through residential areas, a mix of village and sub-urban housings. There were houses, corn or cassava fields, and bamboo forests — just to name a few scenes that we had to go through. There was no rules of the game. No one was keeping record of the newfound secret roads. Soon enough, it stopped being a competition and we were just having fun doing it. Sometimes, we shared the secret road that we found with each other.

How I did it with my sister was simply just choosing the paths we had never traveled, turning to alleys we never went through, crossing corn fields with unknown end, and just kept pushing until we showed up wherever familiar and made our way home. There were a lot of times when we weren’t sure if we were going to make it home but 100% of the time we figured out where we were and arrived home safely.

One day when I was already an adult, I stumbled upon the quote that says “Choose the Less Traveled Road” and I thought, “Oh, this is something philosophical? It was just a silly game we played back then haha…”

As I grew older, I realized that that particular silly game is how my whole life has been — a series of finding and figuring out secret roads.

I am now 11 months into my 39th year. Last year, after my 38th birthday, I decided that I was going to make my 39th year a special one. At that time, for the first time ever I came to realize that whenever we reach a certain age, that’s basically us celebrating the completion of that year of age. For example, when we celebrated our 1st birthday, that’s us celebrating having completed our 1st year. And so I decided to make the whole 39th year special, in ways I can, of course.

Just to refresh why I insisted on making the 39th year special, it has nothing to do with it being the last year before being 40. It’s simply because the gap between 9 and 3 is my birth date and if we sum up 9+3 that would be my birth month. Basically my own band of numerology haha..

To add some spices in my 39th year, I decided to do what I call 39 in 39 (read here if you haven’t) — where I will try to visit 39 cities/districts within 1 year, with December 5th, 2025 being the cut off date. I was trying to recreate my adult version of “secret roads” game, but with some cheats from Google Maps.

Considering my broke ass, I was ready to do it by collecting mileages with my car aka road-tripping all of those 39, through roads I had never taken. However, somehow I ended up finding “secret roads” through collecting quite a lot of air mileages.

As I write this, I’m only at number 22. Given only one month left, there’s no way I could make it to 39. But looking back at the list, DAMN.

Even in my wildest imagination, I couldn’t have imagined I would make my way to some of the places I had visited this year. First of all, money issue, obviously. Second of all, also money issue.

Right away one day after my 38th birthday, I went on a post-production trip to Tokyo and while in Japan, I managed to sneaked to Nagano where I’d never been before. My tropical soul was happy to be able to encounter snow again after the last time in 2013.

Then, early in 2025, my work took me to Harbin, China. I never thought I would ever visit China, let alone taking my easily-freezing ass to Harbin, one of the coldest cities in China, DURING WINTER. Out of that work trip, one thing I was most proud of was making it out alive. This particular trip to Harbin, China, was my first experience in sports broadcasting, a field where I barely had any knowledge. So there I was learning while surviving.

As I’m writing this, I just got back from 19-days trip to Bahrain for the Asian Youth Games. I was struggling with jet lag and usually writing helps me sleep so here I am. Bahrain has never once crossed my head and after a few work trips to Dubai in 2023, I was kind of judgmental of the gulf countries. Turned out Bahrain was an amazingly grounded country. They just seem to have a typical human warmth, which I didn’t feel in Dubai.

So how do I feel about not making it to 39 districts/cities? Honestly, fine haha.. When I started this idea, I was so sure I would have all the time in the world to make it to 39 places, and maybe even more. Apparently I don’t have as much. But at the same time, I’m not as broke-ass as I expected I would be, and it is something to be very thankful of.

Some of the special visits I made was to Tasikmalaya, where I met my friend, who’s also a former colleague, who’s also my most favorite work couple.

The other one was to Tegal, which was an unplanned one, to a city that turned out to be my best friend’s hometown — and I went there with her! This was somewhat funny because I asked her to go with me just one day before the trip, and when I told here where to, she just casually said “oh, that’s my hometown” which I never knew :’).

In the middle of this year, my father unexpectedly had his second stroke which got so bad that we believed we’re going to lose him, but Mr. Stubborn successfully made his way back to recovery.

Suffice to say, it’s been one hell of a year. I still have one month to complete my 39th year and I hope no “secret roads” will show up in the remaining month *fingers crossed*.