“I think we’re finally here,” Rae says in his British accent.

Sure enough the train chugs and then lurches to a stop. Matt recalls the past fifteen hours spent traveling.

* * *

The ride starts off pleasantly enough. Matt boards one of the popular sleeper trains in Bangkok, sharing a berth with two British travelers, Rae and Sarah. Over the course of the first half of the fifteen-hour trip, Rae shares stories from their own island-hopping. His passion is reading. Oddly enough, he’s traveling with physical books (after two consecutive kindles died on him) and has to trade/barter for new ones at every stop. The boys bond over discussing science fiction and the future of human consciousness.

During the ride, Rae and Sarah are gracious company and they ooh-and-aah Matt’s origami. He’s busted out a koi fish this time owing to the fact that the group has nothing but time to kill until they hit the northern province of Chiang Mai. During the conversation, Sarah is a bit more reserved, but Rae picks up the slack.

He’s asking about how the American got into the hobby, what else he can make, and is genuinely interested in the topic. “I had no idea there was this much to origami! I just had no idea!”

Somewhere still a few hours outside of Chiang Mai a woman named Ellie joins them, visiting from another berth. Matt and his buddy Leon had met her in the Bangkok train station about an hour before boarding (this is a new Ellie, not the sweet German girl they met the night before). Leon had departed for Chiang Mai on an earlier train, leaving Matt alone to board his train with this new woman. This Ellie is from Florida. This Ellie is a few years out of law school. This Ellie is only traveling for two weeks. This is the beginning of her trip.

When Ellie visits the trio’s berth, the conversation is like drinking vinegar: full of grimacing from the sour taste left in your mouth. Ellie doesn’t like computers or technology. Ellie wants to talk about education reform. And worst of all, Ellie has horrible taste in movies.

“What do you mean you liked Lucy?” Matt asks. “That was literally one of the worst movies I have ever seen.”

“What? No! It was a simple, turn-your-brain-off action movie while you get to watch the hottie ScarJo kick people’s asses.” Ellie half-swoons. Is it important to note that she’s gay? Whatever, she is and super into Scarlett Johansson. At least they can agree on that one.

“How? How could you just turn your brain off and ignore the zillion and one things that just didn’t make sense? The story that just didn’t even make sense? The science that didn’t even make sense? ‘Humans use ten percent of their brain’? The plot that makes no sense as she kills random people, but leaves the bad guys alive? How can you enjoy that kind of slapped-together movie?”

Ellie raises her eyebrows and crosses her arms. “I just don’t think you appreciated the movie for what it was.”

“Um, I don’t think I quite understand what you’re talking about.” Rae cuts in. “There’s a new movie out? Called Lucy? What’s it about?”

“What’s it about?” Matt’s voice is getting louder and words start to avalanche out of him. “So Scarlett Johansson is Lucy, some random party girl in Hong Kong–”

“Taipei.” Ellie corrects.

“Taipei, sorry. And some bad guys use her as a drug mule for some new drug by sewing a bag of it into her abdomen. After it’s in there though, she gets beaten up by some random jailers for no explanation as to why she’s not at the airport that they said they were taking her to, for the purpose of that whole drug mule thing, and the drugs leak from the bag and into her body.

“And now this drug overdose is like some super-drug and she’s OD’ing and flying around the room and does she die? Of course not. She starts getting super powers because she’s ‘unlocking her brain.’ Of which humanity is of course only using 10%. Of course. Throughout the movie you get these big, bold numbers that show 20%, 30%, 40%, et cetera of what percentage of her brain she’s using. And these higher percentages, they give her powers like telekinesis which she uses to drive through Paris and force-push all the cars out of the way, causing massive accidents and just fucking killing tons of people! Why doesn’t she just make her car fly over everything and not kill all these innocent bystanders? Nobody knows, nobody cares! Because it’s a movie. Because then she injects herself with more drug, which was totally necessary, because at her current one-bag dosage her body is beginning to literally disintegrate. Yea, like totally melting and flaking apart into dust. They don’t really explain that either, it just kind of happens. Either way, good thing she harvests the drug bags from the other drug mules’ abdomens! They all died too, by the way.

“She kills them?” Rae asks.

“No, the Asian mob kills them, conveniently. It’s weird, don’t worry about it. Then she meets up with Morgan Freeman who’s not only The Smartest Scientist Ever, but who also has theorized these super powers exist at higher levels of brain usage based on… what? They never tell you. Then there’s these bullshit cutaways to him giving this lecture on nonsense and they have all these students and this old guy with a beard nodding along like ‘yes, Professor Freeman, this is fascinating and not just complete gibberish with a powerpoint and a podium.’

“So she meets up with him and he injects her with three times as much crazy-drug as before because ScarJo needs, and I quote, ‘needs to crack open the nucleus of all of her cells.’ ‘Crack open the nucleus’? ‘All of her cells’?! Science! It’s pretty much just random words anyway, right? And throughout the entire movie, not only do we get these cutaway shots to a lecture room, but also these clips of animals and nature, like Planet Earth, like a documentary, which is cool, but done way too much. It sort of rips you out of the shitty narrative, you know?

“I liked those cutaways!” Ellie protests.

“Of course you did!” Matt doesn’t skip a beat. “As she reaches 99% and is literally mutating into a weird tentacle computer thing, I swear to God I’m serious, the Asian–” Matt raises his hand to still Ellie, “the Taipei mob boss that she left alive after stabbing his hands to his chair even though she’s been straight-murdering other people like cabbies and doctors and innocents for no reason, this mob boss is launching a full-scale assault on the building she’s in. With bazookas and assault rifles and like thirty guys. Whatever, crazy fight scene between Asians and French police. Fine. During this tentacle-computer 99% phase, we get these shots of ScarJo whizzing through space and time,” Matt wobbles his hands around in front of him in a vaguely-mystical manner, “watching people in Times Square, fast forwarding them, rewinding them, but even though the people blur past, the shadows stay exactly the same. Time is supposed to be flying around, the sun whirls around, but the shadows all stay the same? Am I nitpicking or did they just do a shitty job with that one?

“Nitpicking.” Ellie mouths to a grinning Rae.

Matt ignores her worthless opinion. “Eventually at the very end of the movie it’s ScarJo and a primate, a proto-human, doing that finger-to-finger thing from the Sistine Chapel ceiling because fuck subtlety. And just as Mr Boss Asian is done staring at her with his gun pointed and not shooting her, just staring for like ten, fifteen seconds, she reaches 100% and disappears. He’s all ‘WHERE IS SHE?!’ in Chinese and then gets shot by the French chief of police ScarJo’s just been dragging along with her through her crazy escapades for shits and giggles. Literally, all he does is gape as she just rapes physics. Throwing around cars, stopping bullets, making people float away, whatever. Back to the ending and Inspector Clouseau asks where she is to Morgan Freeman and his team of bewildered scientists. They’re just cowering in the corner like ‘we don’t understand what’s happening, none of this is science!’ Then the police chief gets a text message that just says ‘I AM EVERYWHERE.’

Matt pauses to take a breath. “Cut to the final shot and it’s a galaxy and a ScarJo voice over saying ‘We’ve all been given this life, this time. And now you know what to do with it.’ Roll credits. What the hell? What am I supposed to use my time for? To demand a refund from this horrible movie that just ripped another ninety minutes of my life away? What the fuck did I just watch?!”

Sarah gapes and Ellie shakes her head.

Rae, who has been enraptured this entire time, throws up his hands at the sudden ending. “Spoilers, man!”

“Oh right, sorry. But seriously I’m not ruining anything, don’t see that movie.”

“You just didn’t get it.” says Ellie, restoring the dialogue. “It’s just supposed to be a mindless action movie.”

Rae smiles. “I wasn’t before, but maybe now I will see that movie…”

“Fine, fine, forget Lucy.” Matt changes gears. “What about Iron Man? Did you like Iron Man at least?”

“Uch, god no.”

“What?!”

“Yea, I just can’t get into any of those Marvel movies.”

Matt, who literally has on a Captain America bracelet, is speechless.

Needless to say, Ellie made the last few hours of the train ride a bit difficult.

* * *

Though now it’s over. They’ve pulled into the station and are giving hugs and handshakes goodbye. Ellie gives Matt her business card. He puts it into the back pocket. The one that’s designated for wrappers and other pieces of small trash.

He finds the hotel shuttle and climbs aboard, sitting next to a young woman named Caitlin. Caitlin, the same age as Matt, is backpacking through Asia for a few weeks and spending the last of her money after years of saving up. She fell in love with backpacking years ago on a trip to Barcelona. Is it important here to note she’s gay as well? Maybe not, but now you know. Although Caitlin, who prefers Cait, is loads better than Ellie.

Matt and Cait check-in only briefly and then head out to explore together. They wander the nearby residential portion of Chiang Mai. They take pictures at temples and sniff out an authentic Chiang Mai lunch of spicy soup with crunchy noodles (known as ‘khao soi’ in Thai).

At their lunch in the small, four-table big ‘restaurant’, Cait watches Matt taking a selfie. “What’re you doing?”

“Yeah,” Matt starts, not turning from staring at his phone and angling it slightly left, then slightly down, “I’m taking the same picture of myself every day and turning it into a timelapse video. It’s fun to sort of track my trip and it’ll also be a cool movie of watching my beard grow.”

He shows her today’s picture and all the photos he’s taken over the past month already.

“Ahaha!” Cait laughs and claps, “You have the same face in every single one!”

“Same same, but different.” Matt quotes.

‘Same same, but different’ is a phrase every traveler hears in Thailand. It’s used by vendors to wave off ‘minor’ differences in price. It’s used in restaurants to describe a Thai version of a Western dish, like omelets or pad thai. It’s also used by backpackers to describe their selfie-a-day project to connote the slight variation in a face day over day.

Cait laughs and rolls her eyes at Matt’s co-opting of the phrase, though it’s one she is bound to hear many more times on her trip. She has a breakneck agenda set up for the rest of her journey through Thailand: first over to Pai in the west, then Phuket south of Bangkok, a ferry to the island Koh Phi Phi (‘koh’ in Thai means ‘island’), another ferry over to Koh Samui and Koh Tao for some diving lessons, and finally back to Bangkok to head home to California.

“That’s quite a trip you’ve got planned.”

“Yea, and the hotel here offered to book it all for me, but I think the cost is a little high, you know? Three-thousand baht just for the flight down to Phucket.” Cait elaborates. “Even more for the whole thing, like fifteen-thousand…”

“What? 15,000 baht?!” Matt almost falls off of his little plastic stool. “That’s like, five-hundred dollars! That’s crazy! You gotta haggle them down. You have to.”

“Can you do that? Just haggle the price down?”

“Are you kidding me? I haggled my stay here at Backpackers Meeting Place down quite a bit. And they still kind of ripped me off, I think.” Matt gloats, before launching into the story of how he booked his trip.

* * *

The woman at the tourist office in downtown Bangkok punches some numbers into the calculator in front of her. “This much.”

The calculator reads 6,466. That’s about two-hundred dollars from baht.

“That’s way too high,” Matt says, not looking up from the table between them. He’s folding a dog out of a twenty-baht note which is slightly more challenging than a regular dollar. These damn semi-plastic bills.

The woman grumbles and brings the price down to 5,800 baht.

“Best price. Special discount, just for you!”

“Hmmm. Can you explain that price? How much for a night, how much for the trekking?”

“Four-hundred per night, five night,” the woman naked Lek explains in cut-off English, “and two-thousand for two-day, one-night trekking.” She pronounces and stresses the words strangely: ‘per nigh’, ‘tre-king’.

“So let’s think about it.” Matt says, pulling out a pen and paper.

“Ah! You think too much!”

“Really?” Once again, Matt doesn’t look up from the page. “I usually get the opposite. So five times four-hundred is two-thousand, plus the two-thousand is only four-thousand.”

Lek tries to argue the simple math her customer’s written on the paper, but eventually relents.

Matt pulls out all the money he has on his person: 3,800 baht, a previously-folded US dollar terrier (~31 baht), and the origami’d 20-baht note he’s just made.

Lek accepts and rakes in the pile of bills and hands over a ‘paid’-stamped receipt. It says ‘NON-REFUNDABLE’ in bold letters all around the slip of paper.

That evening, Matt has time to review his purchase. Online reviews aren’t kind. The hotel he’s booked seems to be a backpacker scam. At four-hundred baht a night, he’s paying almost double what a similar or better hostel would cost. He needs to get a refund, but he can’t just ask, otherwise they’d say no and he’d have no recourse to change his tactics. He needs to be sneaky.

He needs to scam the scammers.

The next day, Matt pauses outside the tourist agency. He imagines the people he loves dying before him. His mom, dad, sister, brother, girlfriend, friends, mentors, anyone he cares about, all dying. He feels the loss. His eyes brim with tears. His face sags.

He walks inside.

“Hi… sawaidee-krahp,” Matt blubbers, “is Lek around?”

“Lek no here today. Can I help you?” a Thai man with a long ponytail says.

Matt hunches his shoulders. “Yes, I ummm, I booked a trip yesterday and I can’t stay for all of it. Can I maybe get a refund for part of it?”

“Sure, sit down, sit down. You okay?”

The man ushers his guest into the chair beside him.

“Yea, I just,” Matt contains a sob and exhales slowly, “I just can’t stay in Chiang Mai as long, you know? I need to… I need to come back to Bangkok early. Oh god, I can’t believe this is happening. I know it says no refunds, but please?”

The man is nodding. He turns to bark out Thai to a woman to the side and she rushes over a bottle of water.

“Khop khun-khrap,” Matt mournfully thanks them.

Matt wants to keep the trek, which got rave reviews, and maybe two nights at BMP won’t be that bad? With barely any hassle at all, the man refunds the three nights Matt asked for. Cash.

Matt graces him with a shaky smile before turning to go. The ponytailed man stops him, gives some pointers on where he can go in the city, the relative fair prices for taxis, and once again asks him if he’s okay.

Matt winces from his deception, but there’s no honor among thieves. He shakes his head and walks out into the street.

* * *

Cait giggles when Matt finishes the narrative, flipping his feigned wince into a grin once more.

“I need to learn to haggle like that!”

“You sure do. Come on, let’s pay for this soup and head back to the hotel. I wanna see if it lives up to its hype or not.”

Once they’re back at the hotel, the two part ways. Cait gives Matt a hug before walking with renewed purpose to haggle and book the remainder of her trip. Maybe she would cry during the negotiations? One can hope.

That evening, Matt showers in the strange shower-toilet-sink single-room combination thing his room has going on. It’s weird, but it gets the job done. He’s ready for bed. His eyes droop and he lays down to fluff his pillow and–

“Holy fuck!” Matt starts and recoils from the pillow.

Underneath, the sheets swarm with ants and other creepy crawlers. His skin crawls at the thought of sharing a bed with them.

He checks at the front desk for a room swap, but nobody’s manning the post. Matt has no other choice. He has to brave the ‘natural beauty’ of the northern province. He climbs into bed, eyeing the pillow on one end.

Later that night, Matt shudders awake. He’s curled up in his sleeping bag liner at the foot of the mattress. The thin silk sack promises to keep insects at bay and the brand, Cocoon, lives true to its name. Matt is swaddled up, looking like a gigantic, bearded caterpillar.

His eyes swivel up and he swears he sees a tarantula on the wall. He pulls into the fetal position and squeezes his eyes shut. He yanks the drawstring tighter around his face and falls back into a fitful sleep.

The next morning there is no trace of the tarantula.

Welcome to Chiang Mai.

Here’s a past-dead Delorean I found rusting in a Chiang Mai autoshop