“Hey! It’s Nikolai, right?”

The scruffy young man turns from the reception counter at The Eco Hostel. Possessing a slight frame weighed down by a scuffed up backpack, he could almost be said to be going for Ghandi-esque. This comparison is further supported by his complexion: he’s well-tanned from head to toe, an observation that can be taken literally, owing to the fact that he’s barefoot. By choice. The sun pouring in through the full length window, however, ruins his Indian savior look since it filters through and highlights his curly beard and equally wild hair (barely tamed by a small tie in the back). With this fuzzy halo he’ll have to settle for the Jesus look instead.

His face is relaxed, unperturbed by waiting for the receptionist to see if they have any free beds available. His green eyes, a staple of his Austrian heritage, slip from the young woman to find a similarly-bearded backpacker standing on the stairwell, and a smile emerges from behind a parting of the impressive curtain of hair. “Yes!” He searches his memory. “…Matt?”

“Yeah! How’ve you been? I haven’t seen you since Hanoi.” Matt takes the last few steps to the ground floor. “You ever sell that bike?”

* * *

A little more than a week earlier, Nikolai steps into another hostel, Hanoi Backpackers Original. He surveys the room: clean, well-lit, a patchwork of posters for tours and excursions on the walls, with sturdy wooden tables and equally well-built chairs creating an erratic walkway through the room. Maybe if he had more time in the city he’d stay here, but he can’t. He’s leaving this evening to go south. His eyes key in on the few clusters of other travelers lounging and chatting in this common room.

It’s one of those groups that the smiling young man softly pads up to now. “Hello,” he says, the almost-German accent making him sound like a bird fluttering from one word to the next. “Are any of you looking to buy a motorbike?”

Matt looks up from his laptop. He’s frowning, typing as fast as he can. It seems it’s all he can do to jump from one outing to the next and hope he has enough time to record them in notes and maybe spin them into a full-fledged post somewhere down the line. Already he’s fallen three weeks behind, who knows how much more he’ll backslide as he continues his journey! It could be weeks, months before he gets around to writing about that crazy-woman they saw shouting and drinking in the park today!

“No, sorry, none of us are looking for one,” the red-headed Wallis tells him. She looks over at Stefanie, the Hispanic teacher from Texas, to confirm. At Stefanie’s nod she lifts an eyebrow at Matt.

“Yeah, I don’t need one either; I’m taking the train south tonight.” He looks at the salesman, now looking around the room for a new potential buyer. “But sick beard, man, how long’s that been growing?”

“Ah, thanks,” he turns back to pay the compliment a broad smile. “It grows from… seven months, I think?” He strokes his beard. “And you?”

“Me? Just a little under three months now.” Matt gently pinches and twirls his mustaches.

The two men stand there, absentmindedly grooming themselves for a moment.

Matt is the first to break the reverie. “Ah well, my name’s Matt.”

“Nikolai.”

They stop stroking their facial hair long enough to shake hands.

“Maybe you can sell it to a shop around here?” Wallis suggests.

“Yes, maybe, but they pay so little.” Nikolai looks pained. “I will look for others. Thank you!” His whole person smiles and he walks away.

Half an hour later he’s in the bike shop down the street, having been unable to find a backpacker buyer.

“I pay ninety,” the shop owner says, a dirty rag smearing the grime off one hand and onto the other. For bikes, especially when dealing with backpackers, the bargaining is always done in dollars.

“Ninety?” Nikolai has been trying to haggle for the last five minutes already.. “But you know I paid one-twenty when I bought it, and thirty for more parts.” The haggling, the conflict, it doesn’t come easily to the laid-back traveler. “Come on, maybe just a hundred?”

“Ninety.”

The young man looks at his two companions, Australians he’s heading south with very soon, too soon. They nod to him, indicating their support for  whatever Nikolai decides to do.

“One hundred is fair for sure.”

“Ninety is only price.” The man doesn’t stop wiping his hands.

“Hmmm,” he considers. “Ninety and six beers, for me and my friends. Cold.”

The shop owner pauses. “Three beer.”

Nickolai sticks out his hand and they shake with a greasy slap.

* * *

“And it is okay if I do not get all my money back,” Nikolai is saying as he and Matt walk down the street in search of travel agencies to book a Mekong River Delta tour. “I rode the train with friends I meet in Hanoi and we went to Hue to see the caves.” He spreads his hands out as if receiving manna from heaven. “The caves, so amazing, eh!” He doesn’t say the ‘eh’ as a question mark, as Canadians often do, but more like an exclamation point.

“That does sound amazing,” Matt says. He’s not much of a cave enthusiast. “I still can’t believe you’re walking the city barefoot. The city.”

The streets of Ho Chi Minh City are as dirty as those of any tropical city in Southeast Asia. Perhaps even more so. Dark puddles in scattered potholes between a mish-mash of decaying construction materials pose biohazards for the wariest traveler and the smog belching from unrestricted motorbikes, cars, and burgeoning industry doesn’t just foul the air, but leaves a film on everything in range. A gentle, dark dusting covers the city as though it’s perpetually in the first hour of a nearby volcanic eruption. Soggy bags and plastic packaging clog gutters. Leaves and crushed styrofoam collect in corners.

Nikolai doesn’t even look down at his dirty, calloused feet. This type of comment is one he gets all the time. “Yes, I know. I do not wear shoes anywhere.”

As he says this, a man off the street leaps over and starts pointing and barking Vietnamese at the Austrian. He points at the bare feet and then his rack of flip flops and sandals just off the sidewalk. Nikolai smiles, but doesn’t even slow down. He gets this in Southeast Asia all the time as well.

“Aren’t you afraid of diseases and cuts and stuff?”

“Nah.”

Matt eyes the injured toe on his own foot. It’s hermetically sealed in a series of band-aids over antibiotic ointment, all that stands between him and the torrent of scum just inches away.

“Since I travel without shoes I am not sick a single day.” Nikolai holds up one finger, the gesturing doubling to dare a challenge to the claim. “At first, it hurts a little and I cannot walk very far. But after one month, I am okay. Better.”

“Okay but why? You gotta tell me why.”

Nickolai shrugs. “Because I want to.”

“Come on, there has to be a reason.”

“Nah, it is a boring story.”

“Try me.”

“Huh?” Nikolai stops in the middle of the crumbling, gravel-studded cement road and looks at the slang-using American.

“It means just tell me the story and I promise I’ll stop you when it gets boring.”

* * *

Though Nikolai has just finished his apprenticeship to become a machinist, he’s put that career on hold indefinitely. He’s been reading a lot about hitchhiking over the past few years and simply loves that outlook. What’s not to love about it? Traveling to new places, meeting new people, relying on the inherent goodness of humanity to fuel it all, and it’s cheap, eh! This is important to people such as he who don’t have a savings of any kind to fall back on.

At the moment the cleanshaven youth trudges down the hard asphalt of the highway down from The Alps and the start of his journey. It’s been less than a week since his father had driven him two days west of their family’s east Austrian home with some food and camping supplies, whatever he could fit in his backpack, really. He’d since crossed the border into Italy and hitchhiked his way through the mountains. It’s pleasantly surprising how much more likely someone is to take you to the next rest stop if you chat them up a bit at this rest stop before asking. Holding out a sign and a thumb is a last resort type of thing.

The road he walks next to is starting to level off, with the mountains behind him. He slips off one boot, then the other, feeling the chilly dirt that lines the trans-mountain road. The weather has that last chill of early spring to it. The young man breathes the crisp, clean air, savoring the moment. It will be over eight months before he wears shoes of any kind on his feet.

He picks his way around some of the pointier steps and thanks the universe for putting him on this path almost four years ago.

* * *

“Wait, I thought you said the first day of not wearing shoes was coming down out of The Alps?” Matt interrupts.

Nikolai laughs. “Yes, yes, I start not wearing shoes eight months ago, but I get the idea from Capo Testa years ago.” He nods sagely.

“Years ago? Like, twenty-ten? Twenty-eleven?”

“Mmmm, twenty-ten.”

Matt looks at him, expecting more. When nothing comes he pushes. “Okay, so what it again? Cabo… Tosta?”

* * *

“Capo Testa!” a richly tanned, somewhat portly middle-aged man is repeating between exuberant Italian.

“We cannot understand you. Please, can you speak anything else?” Nikolai begs.

More Italian. “Capo Testa!” Wild gesturing.

“This is hopeless,” Wolfgang says. Wolfgang is Nikolai’s closest friend from home, so close they could be considered brothers, twins even. They don’t quite look the part, though, because while the pair shares the same bushy eyebrows and pale complexion, Wolfgang is a bit shorter and stockier, not quite the same skinny build as his friend. And his hair is a dark blonde that fades into a darker stubble, expectedly sparse as the two are barely out of high school.

They’re visiting Sardinia for a fun vacation between semesters and they’d just gotten off the boat when this local man came bounding up to greet them. He’s been waving frantically and speaking loudly in a language they don’t understand, puffing up his chest, then tugging on his long, bushy mustache and beard. All of his hair is the white of fresh-fallen snow.

The man stops to wipe his brow before looking first Wolfgang then Nikolai in the eyes. No more fancy Italian, just two words. “Capo Testa,” he says one last time before leaving as energetically as he’d come.

* * *

“And Capo Testa, it was beautiful, eh!” Nikolai breathes, lost in the memory. “It is an island, on the north of Sardinia. After the man leaves us, we ask around and we find it. Clear water, amazing beaches… All day we swim and dive and have fun and hang out in the evening.”

“And… the shoes thing?” Matt’s been trying to keep the smiling European on track this whole time.

“Oh, yes. The island, it is full of people who live there, hippies, nobody wears shoes. We were there almost one month before we have to go home. No shoes the entire time. I get the idea for not wearing shoes now from that summer.”

Matt opens his mouth to ask a follow-up question, but before he can speak, the shop owner drops two steaming bowls in front of them. While Nikolai has been meting out bits and pieces of his story, he and the amateur journalist have given up on river tours and found a noodle place deep in the maze of narrow alleys and hanging clothes lines.

Matt spoons some red pepper flakes, a ubiquitous condiment on tables up and down the country, into his phở. He’s growing accustomed to spicier food these days. “So what happened after you got down into Italy?”

Nikolai blows over his bowl, one of those porcelain jai-alai spoons in his hand. “I backpacked, like I am now, but Italy is much more expensive. I camped a lot. I eat fruit from markets a lot. And then I go to a monastery in east Italy with a girl I meet on the Camino de Santiago and worked there for a while. It is boring.” He brings some noodles up to his mouth. His wrist and forearm, though covered in leather bracelets, reveals a simple om tattoo about two inches wide.

“Boring?” You gotta be kidding! “The Camino thing, that’s the road in Spain, right? When did that happen?” The almost-correct tenses of the Austrian’s English confuse the timeline in Matt’s mind.

“Yes, The Camino was before,” Nikolai pauses. “The summer before The Alps, we walk The Camino. She was fun…” He looks through the poorly masoned wall in front of him, seeing only memories.

“You said something about a monastery?”

“Hmm? Yes, I was a gardener. Easy work, like two hours a day, just cut bushes, sweep the floor. The rest we are smoking weed and fucking.” He turns back to his soup.

“Is that allowed?” Matt sputters. “Like, any of that?”

“No, of course no, but we are in a monastery, what else to do?” Nikolai grins.

“And you were barefoot the whole time?”

“Barefoot the whole time.” Silence but for the noodles.

Matt needs to know details, he needs to understand the whole arc. “How long was that?”

“Ehhh, maybe two months and then I left.”

The sound of noodles are a poor substitute for the continuation of the story.

“And then where did you go?”

“Capo Testa again!”

* * *

Nikolai and Wolfgang sit on the rocks just above the beach. To their right is a pool of crystal clear water, ringed with lush vegetation. In front of them, the ocean ripples into the distance, fading from blue-green to orange in the sunset.

“We cannot stay here forever,” Nikolai says, eyes fixed on the horizon.

Wolfgang feels the month’s growth on his chin and cheeks. It’s been four years since he and his friend found this island at the excited man’s urgings. And only a few weeks since he flew out to meet up here again to become island locals for a time. If they left, when they left, he would miss the bonfires and the feel of warm sand between his toes. “Where would we go?”

“Someplace where they are okay with beards, eh!” Nikolai, already months ahead, has convinced Wolfgang to stop shaving completely (it wasn’t very hard). They’ve also forgone the beaded dreadlocks of their youth in lieu of long flowing hair that blends into one of the beards so common to the Capo Testa locals. Well, almost completely forgone; Nikolai has kept one or two up by his temple out of nostalgia.

“Somewhere we can see more of the world, maybe?” the shorter one says, stretching an arm over his shoulder. “I feel so lazy.”

“Lazy?” Nikolai scrambles to his feet. “You feel lazy? Then we must dive!” He runs the five yards to the edge of a small cliff overlooking the darkening pool below and keeps going, bringing his legs up and arms around them.

Wolfgang is up and running before he hears the splash.

* * *

The blonde Austrian listens to his friend laugh. It’s a familiar sound. They’re in Indonesia on one of the hundreds–thousands–of islands in search of adventure. Today they’re sitting in a late-middle-aged Canadian man’s apartment drinking his beer. They’d met Dave earlier that day and with smiles and nods and perfect English he’d invited them back to swap stories. And who was Wolfgang to say no to free beer? He pats his pocket, the wallet inside at its usual low weight. Indonesia is cheap, cheaper than home for sure, but without a steady income his funds are rapidly draining.

He sips from his beer to forget about money for now only to find his bottle empty. Leaving the pair of drunk men slapping their knees in delight, he gets up and moves to the kitchen. The previously fully-stocked fridge is bare save for two bottles. He gnaws on the ends of his almost two-month grown mustache, a few hairs now able to clear his upper lip and come within range of his teeth. How long had they been here in the house? He looks out the window, but he can see nothing in the dark outside.

“Nikolai?” he calls over his shoulder. “When is the boat today?”

“Ah?” the fellow European calls back

“Our boat to the next island. What time?”

“Ah… five? Five-thirty?”

“Scheisse! We miss our boat!”

Nikolai groans, but Dave chimes in with more laughter. He has his own private boat and would be happy to take them around if they promise to take his money and go out to get them all more to drink.

* * *

“And we ride around with Dave and his captain for a week. His captain,” Nikolai says over his once-again forgotten soup, laughing to himself, “his name is Wee and he is a small Filipino man.”

“A week?” Matt asks. “What’d you do for a week?”

“Whatever we want, it’s just us four! We dive and swim and fish. We stay on islands and drink every night for seven days? Eight days. And when we get off in the end, we don’t want to drink for a long time.”

“I can imagine.”

“But we do, we do drink! We meet some girls and it is one girl’s birthday, so we have to go party!” He rocks on his small plastic stool, “And the next night is Wolfgang’s birthday, so we have to drink again. Ten days we drink!” He rubs his head, right over the thin dreadlocks, as if recalling the hangover of ten days of drinking

“And then you came here, to Vietnam?”

“Oh no, Wolfgang and me, we go and we work on a farm in Malaysia for a month.”

“On a farm? Like picking fruit? I hear that’s hard work.” The American’s heard exactly that from the many backpackers who have come through Australia, working to finance their travels.

“A little hard, but we work for food and beds only, so we do the morning work. The people who work for money, oh man, that is hard work. The sun is so hot during the day!”

Matt has been considering working on a farm, to get some perspective on that lifestyle, but knows better than to wait for Nikolai to elaborate on his own. He would be left waiting forever. “What was it like to live on the farm? Was there anything to do besides work?”

“Hmmm, I don’t think so. We did not stay at the farm very much.”

Some gestures to keep going.

Nikolai shrugs, as though this were all trivial details. “In the beginning, a priest meets us and likes us. He is very high up in meditation and on the weekend he takes us to temples and cities all over Malaysia. On the week, we drink and enjoy us.”

Matt tries to imagine what a conversation between a meditation guru and some foreigners might look like and fails. He can, however, figure out why such a man might take a liking to the backpacker sitting across from him. Unburdened by details, living simply, and seeking only to experience and enjoy the world he lives in, Nikolai is unsurprised by both providence and adversity alike. Very much like Matt’s friend from Pittsburgh, Mike, who has a similar outlook.

“And your friend? Where’s Wolfgang?”

“He runs out of money, so he has to go home. But we promise us that we will not shave each other until we see each other!” Nikolai runs his hands through his prodigious facial hair.

Matt doesn’t spoil the mood by laughing at the image of the two standing over each other with clippers in their hands. “So after Malaysia, you came to Vietnam? To Hanoi, where I met you?”

“Yes, then come to Hanoi and I buy the bike and I drive in the north for six weeks before I meet you.”

“The north. You mean like Sapa.” Sapa is a place in the northeast, famed for its vibrant terraces of differently colored crops.

“A little Sapa, yes, but I also go to to east.”

“But nobody goes to the east, it’s all just mountains and small villages.”

“It is perfect, eh! The views are amazing in the mountains, and the air is so clean. And the local people, they are so nice.”

“So you speak Vietnamese?”

“No.” Just no. “Do you?”

“No, nobody here wants to teach me. They just look at me like I’m speaking gibberish and wave their hand by their cheek,” Matt demonstrates the movement, “and hope I go away.”

Nikolai nods. All backpackers in the country have seen that ‘I don’t know, go away’ motion.

“Without Vietnamese, how do you communicate? What do you do up there?”

“I use hands and smiles.” Nikolai gestures as he talks. “We drink,” an imaginary beer is held high, “we dance,” he sways, “and we laugh.” No demonstration required.

Six weeks, hopping from village to village, not speaking more than ‘hello’ and ‘thank you’ to a population that can’t possibly see more than a couple dozen Westerners a year.

Matt pulls out his wallet, fishing for the 40,000 dong to put near his empty bowl. “And now? Where do you go to next?”

“Cambodia for some weeks, I think.”  He pulls out his own wallet and money as well. “Then Nepal. It is my dream to climb The Himalayas!”

“Barefoot? Would you do it barefoot?”

“Maybe. We will see!”

As they bid farewell to the shop owner and brave the tangle of alleys and stalls and god-knows-what, Matt wonders at the impossibility of braving the tallest mountains in the world without boots–without shoes of any kind. It would defy the laws of the universe! On the other hand, the universe seems to provide for his new friend in the strangest of ways.

“You’re gonna have to give me some of those details again,” Matt says, pulling out his phone. “I didn’t think to take any notes the first time around.”

“Sure, sure,” Nikolai agrees, nodding softly along with each quiet step. “But it really is quite boring.”

A rather hasty shot of the city’s traffic at night. It really doesn’t do it justice (though if it’s any consolation, I was almost hit by a van just after this picture was taken)

I really didn’t take nearly enough photos of the city (or of Nikolai’s feet) so please enjoy this one of the ‘Notre Dame’ Cathedral right in the middle of the city