The driver hands out plastic bags before we leave. Not a warning. Just admin.
3 hours of mountain road, 4 if the rain has taken a piece of it. The seats do not recline. There is a curtain on the window that will not close the last 10 centimeters, so the sun comes and goes across your face every few seconds for the whole climb. The woman behind me was asleep against the glass before we were out of the town, which is a thing I have never once managed to do.
I have done that road about 8 times. I have not enjoyed a single minute of any of them.
I have been out here 10 years and I would not swap the life.
I like living in other countries. I like the first week in a town where I do not know anything yet. I like the shop where the woman starts putting my order in a bag when she sees me at the door. I like having a dentist in a city I was not born in. In the last town the barber decided my hair should be shorter than I asked for, 3 times, and by the third time I stopped asking and just sat down.
The traveling I hate. All of it. The 5am pickup that comes at 4:40 or 5:25 and never at 5. The bag. The border hall with 2 windows open and 6 closed and a queue that is not really a queue. The hour by the gate where you cannot start anything real because you are about to be moved.
The night before is worse than the day, and that part gets talked about even less.
The bag is open on the bed and everything I own is in 2 piles and neither pile is right. I stand there with a half empty bottle of shampoo, making a real decision about it, for much longer than the decision is worth. The alarm goes on for 4:40. Then I lie in the dark not sleeping, listening for a van that is not coming for another 5 hours, working out how tired I am going to be when I arrive.
I have done this for 10 years. That hour has not changed at all.
Living somewhere else and traveling are 2 different activities and they have almost nothing to do with each other. The word we all use sticks them together, and then everybody assumes you wanted both.
I was at a breakfast table in Siem Reap a few years ago. Plastic cloth, instant coffee, the toast that comes with the room. 5 of us, and the usual question went round, which is where next.
A man about my age said, not loudly, that he did not actually like the flying part.
Then he took it back. Inside about 4 seconds. He laughed, said something about not having slept, said the next place was going to be great and he had heard the food there was unbelievable. Everyone agreed and the table moved on.
I have thought about those 4 seconds more than most conversations I have had out here.
He had a bad knee and a laptop with a cracked corner and he was going to Kuala Lumpur the following week. I never asked him anything else about it.
Nobody says it because the moving is the only part of this that is visible from outside.
Living in one town for 14 months does not look like anything. There is no arrival in it. No stamp, no new light on a new street, no photograph that means anything to anyone who was not there. From your friends' side of the screen a year in one place looks a lot like staying home, and staying home is the thing everybody out here left in order to stop doing.
So the moving turns into the proof. And once it is the proof, you cannot say you hate it, because it sounds like you are saying the whole thing was a mistake.
That is why the man took it back in 4 seconds.
There is also the arithmetic, which took me years to do honestly.
The travel day is not one day. I lose the day before it, when I am packing and useless and answering emails in 2 lines. Then the day itself. Then 2 or 3 days on the other end where the work is slow because I do not know anything yet. I bought a charging cable near the bus station in one town and it died on the second morning, and the proper shop turned out to be 400 meters from the room I was sleeping in. In another place I walked 25 minutes to a market 3 days running before somebody told me it finishes at 11.
4 moves in a year is about 20 working days. A month, near enough, spent in transit or getting over it. For 6 years I did not count those days at all. I counted the flights, because flights have a price on them.
I move 2 or 3 times a year now. That is the only real change I made.
My bag is under the bed in this room. It has been there since February and there is dust along the top of it. I saw it this morning while I was looking for a shoe.
I have loved almost every place I have lived out here. I have not enjoyed one hour of getting to any of them. Both of those are true and I stopped trying to make them agree with each other a long time ago.
Andrew - No Refunds •••