Captain’s Log, Day 5:
The barbarians of the island are leaving us tonight. Temporarily, but at least we’ll have a respite. They’re ferrying their numbers to the far beaches for drinking, orgies, and human sacrifice in celebration of the full moon. As long as they leave and avoid my beach, my side of the island, I can accept their perversity.
Is this ‘my’ beach? The memory of that first day seems so far away now. The sun and stars melt time into a blur, and only my notes can tell days apart. It’s all lounging and conversations punctuated by excursions for food. And WiFi.
Many of my companions and those I meet in the locale have been completely seduced by the siren song of simple island life, but not I. I was born in a city and matured alongside the internet. As glamorous as the ‘simple island life’ and travel can seem, I find myself wishing for the familiar comforts of home: a work space for origami and crafting, Chinese food delivery, 24/7 electricity…
That will come in time. I’m not yet wholly ready to come home. So tonight I make the most of my time here, blending in as I can.
Tomorrow I leave the island.
It’s just before noon and the sand underfoot isn’t hot yet. Warm, but not hot. Matt’s sandals swing from the carabiner clipped to his short’s belt loops. The sun that once seemed so harsh dissolves into his darkening skin. How tan can he even get? Genetically-speaking, that is. He’s somewhere in the vicinity of ‘Arab’ at the moment and well on his way to the leathery, dun tone of the other Western transplants.
He almost looks like a local and still can’t find a source of consistent WiFi! He wants to back-up his daily selfies, he’s seen too many travelers lose their phone and all of the non-synced photos and notes. Seriously, just like five minutes to check his email and send some messages to some people back home… Is he addicted to internet access or is this just a new paradigm of what it means for a contemporary lifestyle? For instance, are people ‘addicted’ to toilet paper? Certainly people on Koh Rong get by without it…
The search continues after his first failed attempt just now. He had tried to ferret out today’s WiFi password from the bar a few doors down (they change it daily to avoid freeloaders like him). His quick haggle was cut short when his ‘adversary’, the middle-aged Turkish man sitting at the otherwise deserted bar in the front, turned out to be the owner. As a result, Matt conceded to buying a single beer to qualify as a patron and gain access to the sweet, sweet global network. Plus, it’s never too early for beer out here.
The connection hadn’t, however, worked. He’d been duped! The owner, in a move of unbridled generosity, refrained from charging him the one dollar for the beer. Matt left the bar in a combination of fulfillment and emptiness.
Mostly, an emptiness of his stomach. The sloshing of the free beer inside highlights his hunger. This next hostel is a bit more bustling; some backpackers hunch over their plates of English Breakfast and sip preferred hangover cures. Without debate or fanfare, Matt gets an order for himself and a WiFi password for his phone.
No sooner has the platter of eggs, beans, sausage, toast, and (for whatever reason) a roasted tomato clattered gently onto the wooden counter top, than three larger guys stomp to the bar, their backpacks on and all strapped up.
“Three shotguns!” orders the largest one. He thumps the bar with a grin.
The cans of Angkor beer arrive, one of Cambodia’s three competing ‘budget’ beer labels. Small holes in the bottom of the cans are punched, the tabs popped, the beverages drained, and the crushed, empty vessels hurled to the ground with a tin clang. The men grunt, flex, and make their way to the chalkboard scoreboard on the nearby wall.
“Bubba’s Shotgun Tallies.” the wall reads. “REPRESENT!”
They add their numbers to the British totals, which are in the thousands. Thousands of shotguns have been had here? Not just thousands from the UK, but thousands from Australian travelers, and even Ireland is in the running to take the lead.
Beside each country, with almost a hundred different nations being represented, is the corresponding flag. Matt watches the men leave for their boat before munching thoughtfully and studying the board. America is doing okay, but it’s going to take more than a handful of morning shotgun beers to catch up. And Russia is holding its own, and–.
“Hey, you got the Taiwan flag wrong,” Matt informs the bartender scooping to pick up the dripping cans. “It’s flipped with Japan.”
“‘Kay,” she says, standing up.
“Can…I fix it?”
“Sure, whatever.”
Matt had done a significant presentation on Taiwan back in high school and while the two countries’ standings were barely over two dozen apiece, it should be fixed. How could you just not care that something like that was wrong? Islanders. Pah!
He hops off the bar stool and looks for the chalk.
That evening, the waves sweep in from the blackness and crash without so much as a single bar’s thump-thump-thump of bass to overtake it. Everyone who wanted to party has hopped on the ferries almost an hour ago.
Matt watches the ocean as his group lounges nearby. Nobody will play chess with him anymore, preferring cards. He’s sitting this game out and has struck up a conversation with a hostel employee’s son. “My name is Matt. What is your name?” He speaks clearly and without contractions or slang to be better understood.
“Mot,” the boy says.
“Yes, my name is Matt,” he points to himself and then the boy, “but what is your name?” The people of Thailand, Vietnam, and Cambodia have all been having trouble pronouncing his name.
The boy tosses his head, pointing at himself. “Mot.”
“Your name is Mot?”
The boy nods.
“That’s crazy! We have the same name, pretty much!”
The boy isn’t as excited. After sharing his age (eleven), it’s apparent that Mot’s getting bored.
“Here, I can show you some cool pictures of things I make.” Matt whips out his phone to keep the boy’s interest. “I made some of these when I was eleven.”
At the sight of the phone, Mot is enraptured. “Game?” he asks.
“No game, pictures.” Matt hands him the phone set to the photo album. “Origami.”
The boy accepts it and starts flipping through. Matt turns and chats with his fellow loungers, Cristian and Ran. He checks out their hands, the state of their game, all in turning away for like ten seconds. When he turns back the boy is far more engaged in the phone than he should be. It’s because the screen’s no longer showing photos from the photo gallery. It’s downloading a racing game from the Google Play store.
“Gimme that back!” Matt snatches his phone from Mot. “No,” he disciplines. “Not cool.”
Mot pouts and makes puppy eyes until it’s obvious Matt won’t concede, and then shrugs and gets up to go watch TV.
“Fucking kids,” Matt mumbles and walks outside to talk with Oli.
Oli’s sitting on a stone lip at the edge of the walkway. His feet dangle just above a small stream of water from the middle of the island that runs out to sea with the low tide.
Oli looks like most British backpackers, pale-ish and lanky, with his long hair all pulled up in a ocean spray weathered bun. But his eyes are different. They’re half-lidded as though he’s about to take a nap. They bespeak a calmness without laziness, a way of going with the flow, that Matt hasn’t seen since his time with Nikolai. Oli’s interested in hitchhiking, it’s been the theme of his life for quite some time already. If you ask, he’ll tell you that Jack Kerouac is one of his idols, along with folk/rock music icons, of course.
Now he sits, strumming the guitar in his arms that is perhaps his most prized possession. He’d had to ask to borrow Matt’s laptop earlier, since he has no other means of surfing the web effectively.
“You good to pick up where we left off?” Matt asks, easing himself onto the pebble-studded concrete lip.
“Mmhmm,” Oli murmurs, looking down at his instrument.
“Cool,” Matt scans through his notes. “So I’ve got your stories with Jesse, the crazy man. You’re in Varna, Bulgaria, not sure if you were twenty-two or three, Jesse–he’s like a thirty-something guy from Edmonton, Canada–he wakes you up after a six day binge of birthdays and drinking. Three birthdays in four days. He wants to know if you’re going with him at the two Swedes to Belgrade. You’re in, and soon you’re all drinking radlers on the train. You said radlers are a mix of beer and lemonade?”
“Mmhmm,” comes another murmur.
“Perfect. So, train compartment. Everyone else leaves while you guys get pretty rowdy until it’s you guys and some Bulgarian girls you met on the platform. Bulgarian girls are hot. People are sticking their heads out the windows, drinking out of your shoe for some reason, chasing vodka with water mixed with vodka. Jesse demands one of the Swedes spits vodka in his eye, and the kid does it.” Matt’s voice mimics the way it was all told to him, reviewing the bullet points of the story. “He’s rolling on the ground screaming and laughing, shouting ‘Do you understand how much I love my fucking life? I can do anything I want!’ And he tells you he can piss in his own mouth–”
“You missed what he said,” Oli interrupts. “He’s on the ground and he says ‘I can do anything I want! I don’t care if you pour sugar in my asshole or fuck my mom, I don’t care!’ Exactly those words: ‘sugar in my asshole or fuck my mom.’ ”
Matt chuckles. “Alright, got it. More craziness, yada-yada…” Matt flips past narratives of getting drunk and passing out in the middle of the street. “And finally the Swedes have enough of him and peace out when he wakes everyone up one morning and pushes the beds apart and vomits up at least a bottle of red wine. He pushes them back together, just laughing hysterically while you guys get your shit together and leave.”
“Yeah. We ended up going different ways when he didn’t join our train.” Oli looks out onto the water. “We were boarding, but he just tells us ‘I don’t care what you guys are doing, but my withdrawals are setting in and I’m gonna go get some vodka.’ I dunno if he was joking, but I think he was probably an alcoholic. Very much like the character Dean Moriarty, from On The Road. He was a huge punk rocker, Jesse was, had a purple mohawk until he asked me to shave it off in the hostel one night.”
Matt takes down the thought. “Any other good hitchhiking stories?”
“Well, it’s not a good one, but I think you’ll like it.”
* * *
Oli slides into the backseat of the car and rests his guitar next to him. He bought the thing the other day, a cool Fender CD-60. He’d wanted the cheapest one for fifty leva (~27 USD), but it was black topped and he needed one with a wooden face so people could write on it.†
It’s April 2013 and he’s riding with a late-thirties local couple in the area around Sofia, Bulgaria. Oli speaks very little Bulgarian, but luckily they speak a broken, passable version of English. With the help of a graciously donated cardboard sign in the local language, they know he’s looking to go to Skopje, the capital of Macedonia.
The couple is a brother-sister pair. The man is driving. He’s a bit older, a bit more serious and scary looking, but then again, most of the guys out here past a certain age look that way. The woman is skinny, even by a hitchhiker’s perspective. She offers Oli a cigarette.
“You have money?” the man asks.
“No, sorry, I’m hitching. No money,” he adds for emphasis when the man grunts. The woman keeps smiling at him, though.
The ride goes on for a few more hours. They stop for lunch, the pair splits their packaged tomato and feta cheese sandwiches. Despite the man’s gruffness, they had a chance to drive off with Oli’s stuff when he went to the bathroom, but they didn’t. Hitchhiking: people are better than you think!
So when they get to the border between Bulgaria and Greece, Oli politely points out he’s looking to go to Macedonia (which is kind of in the other direction). They tell him they’re going to Albania, and will drop him somewhere close to Macedonia, they just need to get some money. Could he take out some money at the ATM here at the border?
He agrees, but naturally he’s suspicious. He’s rushed through the ATM process with the man and the border guard looking over his shoulder. They hit buttons for him, since everything is in three unintelligible flavors of Eastern European, and four hundred levas shuffle out of the machine.
“Four hundred levas!? Fuck me, mate, that’s like two hundred euros!” It’s a huge portion of his budget for the trip. “Why’d we take that out?!” Oli snatches the money and pulls it close to his chest.
But the man is playing it cool. He gestures about the car needing gas. The woman is there and smiling and helping him through converting the money to euros, the currency they’ll need in Greece. They’re obvious in not trying to take the money from him. Oli pays for all the gas to fill up the car. Tensions ease.
The border crossing disappears behind them and the sun dips over the horizon. They’re talking to him, but quickly and not in heavily accented English. All he can make out is the man saying “No mafia, no mafia!”.
Oli says nothing.
He stops the car and goes to the trunk in the back, pulling out a Quran. “No mafia, no mafia!” the man repeats, emphatically.
Oli keeps his mouth shut.
They start back up and the couple starts talking about staying in a hotel since the pitch blackness outside is making navigation difficult. They ask to borrow Oli’s phone for GPS guidance and he complies, not wanting to get lost out here in the middle of a foreign country.
The phone is plugged in and guiding them, but as the hours tick past, the man is getting angrier as he argues with his sister. The streets they’re taking are smaller, poorer lit, and more isolated. Eventually the car stops.
“Give me two-hundred elrow,” the man demands.
“Elrow? Euro? I already gave you money!”
“Two hundred elrow!”
“Fine! Fine, you fucking arsehole! If you drop me off at the petrol station, I’ll give you the money. Just don’t leave me in the middle of nowhere.”
They drive for a few more minutes before pulling over again.
“I go no more. All your money.” The man is adamant and his sister, who had been all smiles earlier that day, isn’t smiling.
They have a car, they speak the language, and Oli has no idea where he is. Hell, they even have his phone! The woman up front is holding it, using it to navigate. Even if he gives them the money, he can’t trust them to not steal his phone, too. Okay, think, what does Oli have? He has a book he’s been reading. And a small flask of whisky. Useless. Who is he, Jason Bourne?
“Can I have the lighter for a minute? Here’s the money, but can I have the lighter? I want to smoke a cig, this is making me crazy.” He shows them the money.
The woman eyes him suspiciously, but takes the money and turns to get the lighter from her pocket. In a flash, Oli reaches up and snatches his phone from her. She snarls and turns on him, digging her nails into his arm, leaving long scratches as he wrenches his arm back. The man is twisting in his seat to get a grip on the hitchhiker, but he’s too late.
Oli’s up and moving. He grabs his bags and guitar, flips open the door and takes off into the night. Behind him, the pair is shouting incomprehensibly for a minute, but they don’t chase him. They drive off, leaving him alone. He checks his watch. It’s 2am.
An hour back up the road, Oli finds the gas station he’d prayed he’d actually seen. The man there accepts Oli’s last five pounds for five euros, gives him a free cola, and some leftover food from a party the night before. Shit, it’s going to be sunrise soon.
A few hours of restless sleep later, the man takes Oli to the bus station on his dirt bike. The only place he can afford to go to is Tirana. Albania. The man drives away, leaving the near-penniless traveler to wonder if he’ll ever make it to Macedonia.
* * *
“And then?” Matt asks.
“I get to Tirana, about thirteen hours later. Two of waiting, eleven in the bus. My phone’s dead, no money–the ATMs keep showing me the same error message when I try to take out any–and I’m shit out of luck. I get a cab and ask for a hostel. The guy takes me into the darkest alley you’ve ever seen. I’m thinking I’m gonna get robbed again.” Oli pauses for dramatic effect.
“But when I get out, I see there’s a door. And inside there’s a reception counter, and a fridge of beer, graffiti on the walls, and pamphlets for the city. It’s a backpacker hostel, for sure. I didn’t even have to pay the cabbie, he said he gets paid commision for bringing people around. And the next day I figured out how to get money out; some ATMs just don’t like Mastercard.” He adjusts his hands on the guitar, almost forgotten during the storytelling. “All of this because I didn’t want to pay for a fifteen euro ride-share in Sofia. I wanted the hitchhiking experience.”
“Sounds like you got it. And that was the first time you hitchhiked?”
“One of, yeah. It wasn’t the first trip I really took though. That was when I was down in South England. I met a guy at a concert and after a week of hanging with each other, he wanted me to come with him to another one. It would’ve been awesome, though I should’ve been getting back home, so I flipped a coin on it. I actually wrote a song about–”
“Hold that thought,” Matt stops him. “It’s getting late and I haven’t eaten anything since breakfast. You want something?”
“Sure.”
Matt bounds down to the place next door. He’d never been there, but it looked happening enough. They sell sandwiches. The muscular and bearded man at the counter is named Jake. He has something of an islander hipster about him. Jake the Quasi-Hipster sets about making two turkey sandwiches.
“Not going out to the Full Moon Party tonight?” Matt asks the smiling stranger standing next to him while he waits.
“Nah,” the man replies simply.
“Yeah, it’s a Thai thing anyway, right? The hostels here are just copying it so the backpackers can go get retarded.”
“Hey, you let them do whatever they want!” the man says in mock reproach. “This is practically the only night a month that us locals get a night to ourselves.”
“You’re a local? What do you do?”
“I’m a diving instructor.”
“Makes sense. How’d you decide to come out here and live in the middle of nowhere?”
“It was this or go back home to keep up my consulting work. And I love to dive. So I flipped a coin. Heads I’d stay, tails I’d go home. I got heads and here I am.”
“And here you are,” Matt agrees.
“And here you are,” Jake jumps in with two parchment-wrapped parcels.
The diving instructor raises his beer in goodbye, and Matt leaves the locals to their night off.
He’s barely outside when he hears a guitar playing. It’s Oli. And next to him, Mot’s crouching, watching and listening. Oli starts to sing. It’s the song he’d mentioned.
I met a girl in Bristol town, seemed cool to me
She had dreads in her hair and tattoos, anyway
So I asked her a favor, flip a coin for me
I’ve got an important thing to do you see
She told me she once got a skip key for her birthday
And bought me a ticket onto the train
Seemed like a nice girl, I’ll never see her again
Seemed like a nice girl, I’ll never see her again
Cuz the coin, it came up tails,but I had to ignore
I guess it helped me realize what I wanted more
It’s a catchy song, and an appealing philosophy, but Matt doesn’t need to flip a coin to know what he wants. He’s outgrown island life; he’s ready to move on.
† As it should happen, nobody from Oli’s travels ended up writing on his guitar. The only signatures he ever got were from his idols, Frank Turner and Billy Bragg. The guitar itself, however, was run over and destroyed in Amsterdam, but that’s a whole other story.
Oli playing guitar while Mot listens intently.