Wanderlust (19 page)

Once I had decided, you couldn't argue with me any more than you can argue against love. Stu, who not only loved me but believed in love, who believed in star-crossedness and soul mate-ism, made a valiant effort to understand. He raised more objections to a trip I took to visit my parents in February than he did to my Australia plans. But no one collapsed into cognitive dissonance just yet. We both maintained the worldview that said I would return. Stu was the one who drove me to the airport, and he began to cry as soon as he walked away. I thought to myself that I should be crying, but I couldn't summon the tears.

chapter fifteen

M
uch as I wanted to get to
the sex and lager, I couldn't go there just yet. I had to dare myself again before I went to the beach. So instead of flying straight to Australia, I planned to first spend two weeks alone in Malaysia.

I avoided arrangements as deliberately as some people make them. I wanted the experience of landing in a new place with no plans, and considered hotel reservations a luxury for the weak. Conveniently, my attitude and my budget meshed. On top of the price of my plane ticket to Australia with a stop in Singapore, I had saved up a few thousand dollars. It felt like a fortune, but I knew I had to conserve.

For the first hours I slept, but by the time we were over the South China Sea, I was wide awake. I chatted to my seatmate, who was traveling with her young daughter and had a hotel reservation. Now I asked myself: Would it have killed me just to know where I was staying my first night? In midair I began poring over my guidebook, reading about youth hostels and studying a map, trying to commit it to memory.

When I arrived it was the middle of the night in that deep and alien way that is only possible when you've just landed in a foreign city on the far side of the world. The airport was bright and cool and efficient, and I followed signs to a bus stop. The heat walloped me
as soon as I stepped outside, a heat that would have seemed unlikely even in the middle of the day. It was like carrying an extra bag, made of velvet and full of lead. The bus was cool, and I sat alert, looking out the window, mentally reviewing the street names and maps I'd tried to retain.

A Belgian approached. He was young and bald and wore a floral short-sleeved shirt; he worked as a tout for a youth hostel. The airport bus into the city, where he was sure to find a backpacker or two, was his regular run. Things would not be so hard after all. I was almost disappointed, and a dying ember of rebellion urged me to resist him, but I was in no position to turn down an extended hand. I followed him off the bus in a low, flat neighborhood of boxy identical buildings, and up a narrow flight of stairs to the check-in desk of a hostel. They had two kinds of dormitories, with air-conditioning and without, and I permitted myself to have the former, which cost one Singaporean dollar a night more. Every decision was like this: I was not allowed to take the easier, usually pricier, route. I needed to save money, sure, but cheapness was also a barometer of something else. It measured my ability to get by, satisfying that need to prove myself to myself, as well as to the judges and skeptics—other travelers, Graham, Stu, my parents; anyone who thought I wasn't tough enough—whom I imagined watching over my shoulder.

The Belgian disappeared and the clerk, a small young Singaporean Chinese, showed me to the dorm room. It was pitch-black at first, and I wasn't allowed to turn on the lights. As my eyes adjusted I saw that the room was enormous and windowless, lined with metalframe bunk beds on every wall and more aisles of bunk beds across the middle. There were maybe forty beds in all. Most were full, populated with boys and girls from across the Commonwealth and Europe. The temperature was frigid, and the hostel's sheets were
plain white, so that I seemed to have stepped into an institution of some kind, filled with incubating human life forms. I chose a lower bunk against a wall, tucked my pack under the bed and my money belt under my pillow, and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.

I awoke to an English accent. A girl one bunk over was talking about a job interview. When I opened my eyes, I could see that she had on a white shirt and was pulling a suit from her backpack. She had a real purse and a plastic folder that contained a sheaf of papers. I wondered if her interviewer would have any idea that her staging area today had been this people warehouse, which looked every bit as neutral by day as it had in the middle of the night. I hoped not to have a job interview for a long time, but I liked the idea of a cool safety zone from where to launch oneself into the world. The room was emptying out, kids of nineteen or twenty-three heading off to their next destination. We were half-cooked, struggling to be born.

In the face of the English girl's clear direction, I remembered that I had none, and that I had none because I wanted none. This no longer worried me like it had on the plane. I didn't want to stay in Singapore, which was modern and expensive, and so out of sheer need to have some kind of a goal, I decided I would go north up the east coast of Malaysia. There was an island up that way, Tioman, that was supposed to have pretty scuba diving; maybe I would go there. I checked out and left my backpack at the front desk, and went out into the heat.

I bought a bus ticket to somewhere called Mersing. With hours to kill, I stepped into a shopping mall with a specific purchase in mind: I'd come away with no watch, and it had occurred to me that this was an oversight. On the road I would have planes, trains, and buses to catch, as well as time zones to negotiate. In the mall, which was multilevel and hexagonal, I found a watch that had an analog
face, a bezel for counting minutes, and a lemon yellow plastic strap. The package said it was waterproof to thirty meters. It wasn't a splurge, I told myself, but a necessary and sensible purchase. The store clerk set it to 11:15.

While standing in the customs line at the border, I noticed a German couple behind me who kept laughing, and before I could wonder what they were saying they switched to English and invited me into their exuberant little world. Where was I going? Where was I coming from? The boy, Stefan, had been working in a tiny fishing village on the east coast, and had just been down to Singapore to pick up Nela, his girlfriend, who, like him, was tall and sandy-haired.

Stefan described their destination. He was working for a Swedish boat captain, he said, doing archaeological work. It was very hush-hush. His best friend in the village was a Buddhist mechanic. Why didn't I come with them, and then I could go on to Tioman Island? Yes, yes, Nela said, maybe pleased to have another girl on board. I looked for the village in my guidebook; it didn't seem to exist. No buses went there, so we would have to share a taxi for the two-hour drive. I glanced at my bus, which had now crossed the border, and the line of passengers getting back on. I wondered if my disappearance would cause the bus attendant any consternation. Singapore was famous for banning chewing gum and caning juvenile delinquents, so it seemed possible that a staffer would chase down a missing girl. I felt surreptitious as I shouldered my pack and followed the Germans to the taxi stand. This was what I wanted: new people, whimsy, a strange place to go.

On the taxi ride Stefan and Nela told jokes in German, which
they tried to translate for the Malaysian driver and me. None of them made sense—there was one about a farmer with many daughters and a chicken—but their laughter was infectious. Stefan had been fuzzy on where I would sleep that night, so I wondered if there would be a hotel or a host or a spare room. That kind of uncertainty might normally have made me anxious, but now it just seemed like part of an adventure. I got an internal flutter from thinking about it, the kind you feel when you've just rounded the top of a roller coaster ride.

I drifted in and out of the moment. As the landscape became more rural, I looked out at the fields and took pleasure in the curling palm fronds and multiple shades of green. Then a gear would shift and I'd feel surrealistic for a minute, like I was watching a movie in which, oddly, I was the star. Then the Germans' laughter would bring me back and I'd feel present in the car.

I'd almost forgotten where we were going when the taxi rolled to a stop. The village had one main dirt road. On one side wooden warehouses separated the road from the waterfront, and on the other side there was a barbershop, a restaurant, and a scattering of houses set back carelessly from the road, some screened by low palms. I stood there with my pack, and Stefan invited me to come meet Ah Chung. I would stay with him. A small red shrine was nailed to the front of Ah Chung's home like a birdhouse; two incense sticks burned in front of a gold Buddha. Stefan and Nela disappeared and told me they would meet me at dinner. I wondered if I was part of a trade or agreement of some kind, if Stefan had promised to bring a girl back from Singapore. Maybe he'd joked about it one night, teasing Ah Chung about his bachelorhood. Then, when he met me, Stefan thought what a laugh it would be if he actually pulled it off.

Ah Chung spoke little English but was courteous, even courtly.
He repaired diesel boat engines for a living and had the hands to show for it, but I couldn't tell how old he was. The house was one story, and painted inside in a color that had once been robin's egg blue. Ceiling fans stirred the air. It was a little cooler than Singapore; we were closer to the breath of the sea and the trees. He showed me to a tidy room and handed me a folded towel, and I closed the door behind me. I hadn't been alone since Vancouver. What with the flight and the time difference and my jet-lag-addled mind, I wasn't sure how long ago that had been.

When I went to bed later that night, I wondered if I should think of some way—a chair?—to barricade the door. I was a girl and he was a man, so the usual question hung above us.
The hell with it,
I thought, rejecting the ambient disquiet that afflicts girls who leave the nest. As if to reward my optimism, Ah Chung would be respectful to a fault.

We had breakfast on the dock. It was a restaurant, insofar as someone was serving us food for which we would pay, but mainly it was a dock. We ate bone soup, and chucked the remnants between the floor slats, into the green water below. My sense of the surreal came and went again. One minute I was comfortably in place, and one minute I was watching myself. I imagined myself pulling on a new skin, stretching into it, wiggling my fingers toward the ends.

Seasickness, which affects even the hardiest mariners, comes from the contradiction between what the body feels and what the eyes and ears take in. A balance system in the inner ear keeps us steady on the ground, but when it tries to do the same thing on the deck of a boat, while we're looking at a pitching sea, the brain becomes disoriented and nausea is the result.

I think of culture shock as working in a similar way. The slow travel of yore gave wanderers time to adjust. In fast travel, we may jump across the world in eighteen hours, but the brain takes time to catch up. Jet lag is over in a few days, but culture shock lasts much longer and comes in waves. There's the initial shock of, say, suddenly finding yourself on a dock in a Malaysian backwater. Then there's the long, slow shock of staying in a new place, spending months or years discovering a new difference every day. In a new culture you stand on something more like water than land, and it goes on shifting under your feet. The cultures most similar to our own can provoke the greatest unease, because the differences are unexpected. When I would live in London years later, the initially familiar English would become stranger and stranger to me every day, until I would feel like they were communicating with one another via antennae, in a language I couldn't understand.

Stefan and Nela were going out on the boat with the Swede and invited me to come. Captain Lars, they said, would be grateful for the extra hands. I didn't know what we would be doing, but Stefan told me there would be diving and that was enough. I was away now, up for anything. Theoretically you can take on any old adventure at home, bungee jumping or spelunking or whatever. But you don't. The mind is primed by going away. Desire and appetite build and you feel like you can't miss a thing, because who knows when you're going to have just this chance again? Everything has to be tasted.