To other people, who have seen me since I've gotten back, the 6 months that I've been gone have been quick, some people didn't even realize I'd been gone. But to me those that time has felt like 6 years, or 6 life times, because who I was before seems so different from who I am now I can hardly relate to that person anymore.
When we arrived in Beijing I had 4000 dollars, then received about 1000 dollars midway through from tax returns, plus about 400 dollars from donations to the blog (mostly from family members) and 100 dollars I got for playing a British general in a Chinese movie. So about 5,600 dollars to last me the entire length of the trip.
In Beijing we worked on a Nordic film festival with a crew of Chinese artists. The first night there I had a panic attack and was seriously considering turning around and heading right back home, I had money, enough to get an apartment, I could probably get my job back at REI, and start a life in my safe old comfortable city. I was sure was I wasting time, and that I didn't have much to waste.
After two weeks we took the fast train to Nanjing, where we stayed for one night in a nice hotel. I was so nervous, I still didn't know if I could handle the trip then and the experience of wandering around the city not knowing where we would be sleeping was far from the fun adventure I would see it as now. The next morning we took the slow train to Shanghai and I stayed in a hostel for the first time. There was no one sharing our 6 person dorm, which was lucky, and gave me a chance to transition into the idea of not having private space. I was still super scared someone would steel my stuff if I left it there, but followed Tryg's lead and left everything but my phone, passport, and ipod on my bed when we went out. I didn't explore the city much. I was still afraid to go out of my comfort zone so mostly hung around the hostel, writing, and hanging out with the people who walked by. I met some amazing people, and had some great experiences in spite of my anxiety, but me and tryg were living in separate yet adjacent worlds. My pattern at that point was to retreat to a safe place when things got rough, and so I retreated, only going out from time to time to get some food, which was as big an adventure as I could handle at that time, while tryg spent his days walking the streets taking portraits of people's faces.
From shanghai we took a two night train to ChongQing. In that city that was being built before our eyes into a post apocalyptic scene, radiating with a rough beauty like a demonic church me and Tryg faced our first true culture shock. We where 3 weeks in and everything that was tough about China was being concentrated in this massive town. Our first brush with food sickness, our first extended period of self pity. This is when Tryg started to realize what China was about, I began to remember what China could be, and for the first time I felt me and Tryg were on the same page, both crushed under the weight of day to day life in China
After 2 weeks in that place, which proved to be 11 days too many, we continued on to Chungdu and I instantly felt at home. The feel of the air, the color of the taxis, it all flooded back to me and I felt wonderful being in that place that I had once lived for 6 months as a 20 year old. In the hostel we met amazing people, a French guy riding his bike across Asia, Finnish girls who had traveled from their home by train through Russia to China and were continuing on to Tibet then India. We we happy there, content, comfortable. I was just starting to feel myself grow, just starting to be willing to go out on my own, not cling to what was comfortable and easy quite as much as I used to, though I was still nothing of what I was becoming. 2 weeks in Chengdu, then on to PanZhiHua for an afternoon.
The sleeper bus from PanZhiHua to Dali was the most beautiful ride we'd had so far. Through mountains, valleys and small pine tree forests. Red rock canyons and glowing green farmland. The beds were cramped, and my stomach was just starting to hurt, so I was happy to arrive in Dali, where we would stay for over a month. We slept one night in the best hostel we would experience the entire trip. If you ever travel in China stay at “The Jade Emu.”
I then spent the next 5 nights in the hospital, coming literally within minutes of having surgery in a rural Chinese hospital for appendicitis before a doctor at the last moment saved me with an examination that put me in a room with an IV for the rest of my stay rather than a under the knife.
This was my lowest moment so far, and there were times while spending my nights alone in that hellish hospital that I was sure I would be leaving China the second I checked out. I was facing things I felt I couldn't handle. I was facing things I didn't want to handle. But this was the beginning of my true transformation. Once I got out I fell in love with Dali. Every day I climbed a mountain, or walked through the farmland with Tryg. I become connected with so many awesome people, the people of the Jade Emu who were all artists, or travelers from all over the world. I hadn't been so happy in years as I was on a daily basis surrounded by friends and culture and life. Dali was my place, it was amazing and I could have stayed there for years if I'd had the chance.
But after 6 weeks the 90 day limit on our 12 month visas ran out. We could have just hopped across the boarder and hopped back, but for the first time I was starting to be in the mood to pursue adventure, to seek out the unknown. Confidence in myself was building and I was ready to do something. We went to Laos, a country I honestly couldn't not have located on a map till we got there. We hitch hiked for the first time in my life (though I'm not sure if it counts as hitch hiking if you end up having to pay the driver who gave you a lift in the back of his pickup truck). Laos was the poorest country I'd ever seen in my life, people lived in nothing but woven straw huts standing on stilts. They seemed to have no commerce except something to do with the dried grass they harvested, possibly to make brooms, or perhaps to act as roofing material. The roads were nothing but red dust in many places. But the people's smiles were some of the most genuine I have ever seen. It was the shock of a life time when we arrived in Luang Prabang and found a teaming flood of white faces who had all come from who knows where. Spiky haired men in muscle bound tank tops drinking beers as they walked down the streets in their mid day sun glasses with blond girls in short skirts and tank tops taking pictures of young monks. This was major culture shock to us and we didn't know what to think about it, except that we didn't like it.
We tried to by a boat to float down the river we'd been driving along in our bus, but upon playing a game of boccie ball with a nearby village chief who told us the river was too low to navigate this time of year we abandoned our plans. We took the most beautiful bus ride I have ever experienced in my life from Luang Prabang to Vientiane and decided to continue on to Thailand. After a day of chaos trying to get our visas, and a rather pleasant train ride from, we came to Bangkok, where we stayed for only one night. In the morning we hopped on a bus to an island in the south, relatively unknown and out of the way.
The first two weeks on the island were wonderful, but when they were done, and our friends had left, we still had a month left, and had adopted an attitude of extreme stinginess. By now we had decided that we would go to Australia. We had met a number of people along our trip who had talked about the jobs in Australian mines, where one could make a starting wage of 90,000 dollars a year even if you had no skills going in. The jobs were incredibly easy to get, and we were tempted enough to submit applications for working/travel visas. We put the 270 dollars each which served as a commitment, and waited for a response. In the mean time I was eating only 1 meal a day, filling my stomach the rest of the time with muesli. The whether became prohibitive to action, 95 and humid in the day, with sun that would burn you in minutes. The mosquitoes at night ravaged my body so that at one point I got an infection on my leg that became systemic. I had to take my emergency supply of antibiotics. Each day became a meditation on nothing, I spent hours staring at the cashew trees that grew in front of our bungalow. I listened to pod-casts and took up the hobbies of passive sweating and beard growing. I endured unbearable boredom, anger, sadness, and all the things that come up when you sit and do nothing.
The night before we flew to Hong Kong we slept in the airport, and that was the moment I realized everything had changed. Nothing was uncomfortable even though I knew I would get almost no sleep that night. I was not worried that we had no place to stay when our plane landed, I wasn't worried about what we would do. I started going through the lists of all the things that used to terrify me and found none of them were an issue anymore. I could sleep anywhere, talk to anyone, poop in the worst conditions. A stomach ache didn't make me want to hide in my room anymore. As I lay there I realized finally why I had needed to go on this trip, because I had so much that needed to change, so much about me that was preventing me from simply enjoying my life.
There was still no word about the visas from australia by the time we landed in Hong Kong, and we were were getting a bit worried. We met Lupin at the airport and took her to our tiny little hotel that we'd found earlier in the day. Hong Kong was truly incredible, to a degree I cannot at all express in writing. The amount of energy on the street, the age of the signs that hover over the double decker buses, the density of the people and the density of the culture. Every square inch of the city seems to harbor some ancient story. Every breath of air was filled with voices of every nation on earth. I had never seen anything so diverse, so incredible in all my life. Money was everywhere, in the solid gold statues of cartoon characters for sale in the windows to the million dollar cars being driven on the streets. People judged us for our cheap cell phones. Despite this, all three of us agreed we could live there if given the chance, the energy was just too intoxicating not to love it.
When Lupin got her visa we took the train to Dali, I was super excited to show Lupin around this place that had become so important to me and Tryg. We ate all the food, saw all the sights. I introduced Lupin to my favorite person from the whole trip, George, a guy who despite being only 24, and having Aspergers, has already lived a more amazing and adventurous life than I think I will ever experience. Lupin was as excited to see everything as I had hoped she would be and by the time she went home she had been bitten hard by the traveler bug and seemed more alive and excited than I'd ever known her.
While in Dali we discovered that, though the Australian visa office had never told us this, because we had been traveling in China they required us to get a chest x-ray to prove that we didn't have tuberculosis before they would grant us our visas. This we learned after a lot of difficult research and a full month after we'd applied for the visa in the first place. Unfortunately the closest place to get the chest x-ray would be in Hong Kong, so when Lupin left China we flew back to that magnificent city again, only to discover that it was easter and that all the doctors offices were closed. This was remarkable, as almost the exact same thing had happened to me 4 years earlier. When my Chinese visa had run out while I was traveling through the country in 2007 I flew to Hong Kong to get a new one only to find that this Asian City was celebrating the rebirth of Jesus, and I was forced to spend a week waiting for the visa offices to open.
The Hong Kong experience this time around was a mess, it took forever to get the x-rays, took forever to get them submitted, there were hiccups and challenges all along the way that made me think it wasn't going to work out. Finally Tryg got his visa, but I did not get mine, and as each day passed which me not receiving word from the visa office I started thinking it might just not come through. I told Tryg that if I didn't get my Visa by a certain day I would be flying home. My desire to go to australia was already tenuous, I was only going to make money, and now I was confident enough in myself to act in the way I felt was the best for me, rather than trying to please others.
At the last minute the visa came through and the next day we flew to Australia. We couch surfed with a guy who made beer, gardened and loved to cook, it was an amazing couple days, but while we were there it became painfully obvious that the mining jobs were not going to happen. Our visas would only work for an employer for 6 months before we would have to find some other job, and all the mining companies wanted people who could work for a year or longer. We looked into other jobs, but while we could find work, none of it was anything I wanted to do if it meant just getting by in Australia. We decided to try WWOOFing, but by that point I was already seeing the writing on the wall. As it was I'd already have to borrow money from Tryg to get home, and if I stayed to WWOOF I'd end up owing him over a thousand dollars. If I had to choose between working as a waiter in Australia, or working as a waiter in Portland, I'd rather work in Portland and start taking steps towards getting a job in the field I want to pursue, rather than just getting by. Finally I made the decision to leave. To Tryg it seemed sudden, and when I told him I was leaving and he said he'd stay in Australia, it marked the end of our adventure together.
On the plain ride home I cried, and laughed, and slept on the floor of the airport during a 12 hour layover in Beijing. I mourned the loss of my adventure even as I knew it was the right choice. I wanted to stay in Asia, but that wasn't an option anymore.
It took 34 hours to get to Seattle where I spent 2 nights adjusting to American life at the house of a friend I met in a fly fishing forum. I took a bus from there to the San Juan Islands, where I hung out with my 90 year old Grandad as he prepared to move down to Portland where he could be closer to my parents. While I was there I did an interview for a job that I would later get, working with teenagers in a residential therapy/alternative high school program for kids with all kinds of social and emotional problems.
It's maybe worth saying now, since from time to time I wrote things that made people uncomfortable, that when I wrote about my inner turmoil, my struggle in one situation or another it was not because I was seeking sympathy or support, but because it was an honest part of the story I was living and it is always worth it for me to tell a good story.
Now in Portland I am preparing to move to Utah for my new job and I have never felt so vindicated in the choices I've chosen to make. I am not the same anymore, and I have no interest in ever becoming that same scared kid I used to be. I have strength now, confidence. I could sleep under a bridge tomorrow and be comfortable, I could fly to the heart of Africa in a heart beat, I can do anything. I am so happy about everything this trip has meant to me, and even though it took me the first 4 months to get there, I now realize that this trip was absolutely necessary. I feel ready for what ever comes next, I feel ready for life.
