The Lonely Planet Travel Anthology Page 2
‘Is anyone going to own up to this?’ the teacher prompted.
No doubt our eyes became impossibly wide and glassy as we shape-shifted into the most puppyish version of ourselves – a superpower that only teens have – until the teachers hesitated, unsure of how to proceed. They gathered heads and whispered among themselves, likely discussing whether it was more important to punish teenagers for hooking up on a school camp or to celebrate the fact they did so safely.
The issue was dropped.
I still hoped there’d somehow be chocolate.
Uluru first came into sight in the Pitjantjatjara tribal lands, looking like a pimple that had budged from the horizon. As we neared, we dug deep into our juvenile vocabularies to describe what we were seeing, exchanging such riveting dialogue as:
‘Oh, wow, it really is big.’
‘Yes, it’s massive.’
‘Way more massive than I thought.’
‘Oh my god, you guys, it’s soooo big!’
We quickly ran out of adjectives and grew listless. We’d travelled such a long way to get here and our excitement turned to impatience, impatience to indifference, so that when we finally got off the bus at the rock we were complaining of hunger and tiredness, and the relentless nuisance of flies.
The Australian flag will tell you that the British own the country, while history and due respect indicate that it belongs to the indigenous people. Actually, it’s flies that own the continent. They’re ruthless dictators who help themselves to the corners of your eyes, drinking from tear ducts and gathering in great armies to loop-the-loop around your face in infuriating black clouds that can’t be shooed away by even the most enthusiastic jazz hands. There is no swear word in the English language that can adequately express the frustration felt as a result of non-stop fly harassment. Perhaps the Aboriginals have one, I don’t know. Either way, the flies could’ve been the reason we all began unravelling, or maybe it was the heat and the storms, the broken sleeps, or the fact that we were a fizzing, noxious hormone cocktail – on wheels.
We pitched our tents for the night in the campground closest to the rock. A torrential rain began without warning, and leaked into the tent canvas to form a waterfall over my bed. Marike dashed into the tent to move her stuff out of the way, and, anxious, I yelled, ‘Move my blankets! Move my blankets!’
She glared at me with her green wolf eyes and said, ‘Grow up, bitch!’ I wasn’t immune from Marike’s bite after all, wasn’t protected alongside this big, bad, beautiful wolf.
Outside the tent, I cried until I coughed and choked. Behind me, a rock nine kilometres in circumference shone brilliant copper against the silver of passing rainclouds, but who cares about staggeringly beautiful geological anomalies when life is rushing forward at breakneck speed and you’re being left behind.
My favourite teacher, Miss Michaels, asked me if I wanted to go for a walk with her to talk it over, and we left the campsite to follow train tracks into the colourless and disturbing emptiness of the desert, as lonely as Mars. The tracks were covered in dry bones in both directions – femurs and ribs, jaws and teeth, and I wondered how so many bones had ended up in one place. The only logical reason for this, I decided, is that once upon a time, an unfortunate animal was sitting on the tracks when a train came along and squashed it. The meat of that dead thing attracted a hungry dingo, who then got killed by a train, who then attracted another dingo, who then got killed by a train… until it became a museum of fatal mishaps. This seemed slapstick hilarious, like a Warner Bros cartoon, but I was too involved with choking on tears to switch out to a giggle.
Miss Michaels listened while I ranted and wept. Her motherly attention opened my floodgates, and from my skinny body poured the great burden of being a 15-year-old girl, only without either the perspective or eloquence that comes with time and maturity. ‘Like, she’s being mean to me for no reason, and, like, she can be such a bitch sometimes and…’ Flies gathered on my teary face for a drink. I shooed them with two hands. Fuck you, flies. Fuck you, Marike.
Miss Michaels pulled a white carton of cigarettes out of her handbag. ‘Want one?’ she said.
My jaw dropped like a train-struck dingo. I didn’t know how to respond. I wasn’t a smoker – she’d mistaken me for one of the cool kids, but I considered taking it up on the spot so as not to leave her hanging.
‘Um… thank you,’ I said, ‘but… I don’t… actually… smoke.’
She shrugged and lit the cigarette for herself, her cheeks caving into her jaw as she sucked hard on the filter. I noticed her face was pockmarked and weathered, ravaged by both puberty and time, her hair frizzy and dry. She was so old. 30? 35? Fuck you, Miss Michaels.
We continued to walk along the tracks, crunching dry dust, bones and tussock grass beneath our feet, our earlier ease now strained. Maybe I should’ve taken the cigarette. I bet Marike would’ve taken the cigarette. Carolina would’ve taken two cigarettes – one for her lips, one to stick behind her ear – and then she would’ve taught Miss Michaels how to make a bong from a dead dingo’s skull.
On the tracks I spotted a dingo’s jawbone with two clean rows of intact teeth and not a flay of skin or tuft of fur remaining. I picked it up to take home as a souvenir. The trip would be coming to an end soon. This was looking like it was going to be the worst time of my life.
While the morning was still fresh from the previous night’s freeze, we set out to climb King’s Canyon, a rocky interruption to the desert plain. I broke away from the group on ‘Heartbreak Hill’ and dashed ahead, traversing cliffs and waterholes, gorges and sandstone domes. ‘It’s not a race!’ cried a teacher from behind me, but I kept racing, because I craved air.
To my advantage, I had the body and athleticism of a boy. I rounded corner after corner, my feet stepping over rocks and ruts in a dance, until I could no longer hear a chorus of gossiping teens behind me. I was alone. Though it would take me eighteen more years to stop being terrified of it, what I didn’t know then was that aloneness would become a sanctuary to me – be it on a plane to somewhere new, a hotel room for one, or under the ocean’s waves drawing oxygen from a tank. What other people call loneliness would become my Church, its silence my God.
From a rocky outcrop with a panoramic view, I looked out over the middle of my country. The landscape stretched out flat in every direction, placing me at the centre of a distance so unfamiliar that I had no language in my fifteen-year-old mind to articulate it. When I’d return from the journey, my dad would say, ‘So tell me about your trip,’ and I would summarise all this stunning, perplexing largeness into a monotone ‘It was okay.’ (That I’d grow up to become a writer would surprise us both.)
So distant was the horizon that I felt I should’ve been able to see the whole world from that vantage point – only this, unbelievably, was but a small portion of it. These wide sweeping spaces were not just names to be memorized for geography tests, not just a collection of tonal areas on the gridded spinning globe my dad kept in his office – they were actual places made up of dizzying spaces. This could only mean that the blue regions on the maps marked in cursive lettering with Pacific and Atlantic were also harrowing volumes of space, not to mention the endless stretch of universe overhead. I was but a dot on this giant blue ball, a grain of desert sand, and just as irrelevant too. It was a thought so surreal that it was difficult to hold for longer than seconds. But in those sweet seconds, I could breathe.
The sun rose higher, saturating the grey morning light with a spe
ctrum of colours. Nothingness was not nothing at all; it was packed full of somethings. Who knew the colour brown could come in so many different shades? The carpet of spinifex turned a lustrous beige-green as the sun angled over it just so, the shadows taupe, the dirt a rich ochre against the blue of day. With my eyes fixed into the far distance, I watched the beauty of an ancient land being changed by the turning sun.
EIGHT HOURS IN BANGKOK
BY BLANE BACHELOR
‘Please don’t leave the airport.’
It was an order more than a request, my mom’s worry transmitting loud and clear over the thousands of miles of fiber optic from Florida to a pay phone in the Rome airport, where I sat fiddling with the cord. A beep cut through the line, warning that there was one minute left on my prepaid card.
‘Ok, Mom, I gotta go now – my time is up on the phone and my flight is leaving soon.’
But she was insistent. ‘Promise me you won’t leave the airport.’
We were talking about the upcoming leg of my current journey, quite literally, around the world. After stopping for week-long visits with friends in London and then Italy, I – a newly turned 22-year-old with a newly acquired passport – was headed for a couple of weeks Down Under, where my dad was working temporarily in Canberra, Australia. One of the conditions of my relatively cheap round-the-world ticket was nightmarish connections and layovers, including the one my mom was pleading with me about now: eight solid hours in Bangkok.
I sighed and slung my carry-on corduroy bag over my shoulder. ‘Ok, Mom, I promise I won’t leave the airport.’
She thanked me, said she loved me, and we hung up. I felt only a slight pang of guilt as I scanned the boards for my departure gate to Bangkok. This was a prime opportunity to snag another stamp for the almost bare pages of my passport, my first time ever to set foot on the Asian continent, and a chance to explore – albeit briefly – one of the most exotic-sounding cities I’d ever heard of.
Of course I was leaving the airport.
By that point, I had been traveling for about two weeks. The original plan had been to head straight to Australia. But then I remembered I had a high-school friend in London and a high-school sweetheart in Italy. Both extended warm invites. I got an extended leave from the newspaper where I was working, got my passport, and started planning my itinerary: London, Italy, then Australia. By the time I would head back to Tampa via Los Angeles some five weeks later, I’d have flown around the globe.
This was my first time in London since my family had lived there when I was a wee little thing, and the city was as wondrous as an adult as I remembered from my childhood days. I’d never been to Italy, though, and my former flame and I made the most of our time there. My trip coincided with his return to the States, and we spent his last couple of days on a farm stay near Sienna working hard in the field by day, and gorging on amazing pasta dinners at night. I turned 22 in that tiny town – how worldly I imagined myself, shedding the clichéd debauchery of my 21st year in one of Europe’s most romantic countries.
We hit Florence after that, and then Rome. But by then the glorious Mediterranean sunshine had turned to endless rain, bringing a depressing gray pallor to the grand city. I was depressed, too: a little homesick, still smarting from a devastating heartbreak prior to my trip, and sad that my high-school love, moodier than I’d ever remembered him, seemed to have zero interest in rekindling the flame. We went our separate ways in the Rome airport, him heading back home, me continuing my journey. I had at least 24 hours of traveling ahead.
I couldn’t wait to see Australia, but exploring Canberra – a city an Aussie friend had warned me wasn’t exactly brimming with excitement – with my dear old dad wasn’t exactly going to scratch the adventurous itch I’d been feeling throughout my trip. But Bangkok! I couldn’t get the song out of my head: ‘One night in Bangkok makes a hard man humble….’ Surely, a few hours there could make me, an eager but inexperienced traveler, more wise in the ways of the world.
Our flight touched town early, around 9am on a Sunday morning. I flagged down a flight attendant and asked for her advice: Did an eight-hour layover allow enough time to do some exploring in the city? Yes, she told me, but only because there was much less traffic on a Sunday. As the plane emptied out, several other flight attendants hovered around me like a cloud of butterflies, their long purple dresses fluttering. They wrote the name of a market on a slip of paper and, as politely as they could, issued words of advice: ‘Only go this market – nowhere else!’ ‘Bangkok traffic very very bad sometimes – come back airport early!’ ‘Don’t lose passport!’ ‘Be careful what eat!’ ‘Don’t miss flight!’ Yikes. This all sounded alarmingly similar to what my mom had said. But I thanked them all and smiled graciously, pushing those thoughts aside as I gathered my stuff and left the plane. How hard could this really be?
I made my way through the airport, the unfamiliar rhythms of Thai chattering all around me. I found a currency booth and exchanged $US75 – until that moment, I had no idea that baht was the national currency of the country. There was no line in customs, but the thrill over acquiring my third passport stamp was offset by the stern look on the official’s face as he handed it back to me. How suspicious would it look when I returned just a few hours later? I started to sweat in my wool jacket, doubts about the sanity of my plan creeping in again.
I walked through the sliding glass doors to the taxi line and a cloud of men in suits swarmed around me, buzzing offers: ‘Taxi for the lady?’ ‘Good rate!’ ‘We drive you!’ I must have looked like an incredibly easy target wearing a heavy coat in such oppressive humidity and mustard-yellow sneakers that had seemed so cool when I bought them in London but now felt like clown shoes, and struggling with a bulky corduroy bag full of souvenirs from England and Italy that I was already cursing myself for buying.
I picked out a man wearing a wrinkled sport coat and tie, the most respectable-looking one of the bunch, looked him right in the eye, and handed him the slip of paper with the market’s name on it. Round-trip to the market and back would cost 800 baht, he told me, about US$20. I told him I’d pay half up front and half when he picked me up. He agreed, and we shook hands. I couldn’t help but gloat a little over my cleverness. I may have looked like an ugly American, but I was no idiot.
My taxi driver was a balding, frail fellow with glasses who appeared about sixty. He sat on a massage-type seat cover made of small wooden spheres. A tangle of beads, jade, and a round metal symbol inscribed with Thai dangled from the rearview mirror, swaying back and forth as we hurtled down the highway. He spoke no English, and I, of course, no Thai, so we rode along in silence.
Once at the market, he maneuvered to a curb and we agreed on a pickup time – 1.30pm – through a series of hand signals and pointing at our watches. And then I had another thought: what if I could leave my huge heavy carry-on in his trunk? I gestured, he nodded, and it was settled. I stuffed my passport and money into a small purse and left everything else – my travel souvenirs, wool jacket, Discman and CDs – in the bag and shut the trunk, knowing that if I never saw them again, at least I wouldn’t have to schlep them around all day in the oppressive heat. The driver smiled and nodded before driving off. I watched the beads sway from the rearview mirror as the traffic engulfed him.
The market, too, was an overwhelming crush of humanity: throngs swarming about in all different directions, no rhyme or reason to the flow; vendors shouting to prospective buyers; rancid, meaty smells wafting through the humidity. The hodgepodge of stalls burst with a cornucopia of food and goods: children’s clothes, shoes, CDs, sweets. I couldn’t take my eyes off the whole poultry dangling from hooks – ducks, perhaps? – skinned and dripping with sizzling grease.
This was nothing like the Bangkok I had imagined, full of temples, monks in flowing robes, and friendly locals. I felt the weight of infinite eyes on me, the only solo female – and Westerner – in all directions, wandering about helplessly, pushed and pulled by relentless crowds who had
things to do, places to go, people to see. I wanted to take some photos, but I was afraid that pulling out my camera would only make me stand out even more, a gawking tourist amid these busy locals just trying to get their shopping done.
I suddenly lurched forward, nearly tripping over something on the ground. It was a man with no legs, rags falling off his frail torso, propped up on a blanket, moaning and waving a tin cup in the air. I was so stunned – I’d never before seen a human in such wretched conditions – and so embarrassed for almost having fallen on him that I didn’t even have the wherewithal to dig into my purse for some money. I glanced back as I walked away to see the crowd flowing around him once again, like he was a rock in a roaring river.
I continued through the market. I bought an entire carton of Marlboro Lights (overkill indeed for the occasional cigarette I thought made me look cool, but they were so cheap). Some weird gummy candy. A handful of postcards. Some underwear and a pale green T-shirt with a bunny on it to change into back at the airport, plus a toothbrush and toothpaste.
Eventually, the crowds and endless stalls started to wear on me. I found my way to the edge of the market to figure out my next move, and a youngish boy, a teenager perhaps, rolled up on a pedicab. ‘Tour?’ he asked. ‘Good price!’
Drenched in sweat and tired of walking, I agreed. I hopped onto the back seat – thankfully, it was protected from the sun by a red awning cover – and we were off. We rode for quite some time, the boy pointing out things here and there in his broken English. I couldn’t understand much, but I smiled and nodded anyway as we rolled through the shanty towns along a small creek. Their corrugated metal roofs shone brightly in the sun, colorful laundry strung outside. Chickens scratched about in the dirt patches next to the water. I’d never seen such poverty first-hand, and I couldn’t help but stare. Occasionally, a small child would stare back at me as we passed.