Sandy Does Southeast Asia

This is what a Travel Day is like…

Wake up early. You have to wake up early if you hope to get to the place you’re going at an hour when it’s still possible to get a room for the night. So I wake up around 6:30am, finish packing, leave my key, and go downstairs for breakfast.

Waiting for the city bus to the bus terminal. Not as quick as the day before but maybe that’s because it’s Saturday; regardless, I get to the station by 8:30am to buy a ticket for the 9:30am bus to Udon Thani, where I hope to catch a connecting bus that day to Nong Khai, instead of having to spend the night. Wait around, wait around, people stare at me, wait around, get on a bus.

The six hour trip to Udon Thani turned into seven and a half hours but felt like seventeen thousand and a half hours. I didn’t want to drink much water because who knows when the bathroom breaks will come? Which means that on top of being stuck on a bus, I’m dehydrated. And on top of being dehydrated, I’m already exhausted because I got really depressed the night before thinking about my failed relationship and couldn’t sleep. So now I’m exhausted and dehydrated and still depressed. The countryside is monotonous and empty. I am bored of looking at it. I am pushing myself for some unknown reason to reach Nong Khai. Why am I doing this? Be one place, be another place – it’s all the same. There is no one to talk to anywhere. I am alone in one place, I am alone in the next place. There’s nowhere to get to where the things that landed me here magically would not have happened. These are the sorts of thoughts that keep causing me to burst into tears on a bus full of strangers in the middle of Southeast Asia.

When I get off the bus in Udon Thani, I am pointed to the bus to Nong Khai. I am told it leaves in 10 minutes. Perhaps I can get there just as it’s getting dark. 10 minutes turns into 45 minutes and finally we get on the bus. It’s still okay – I can probably be there by 5:30. The bus pulls out of the station, to my immense relief. Finally! We drive for about two minutes, just out of the station, then stop and the driver gets off. For an hour. Passengers trickle on. Night falls. I feel that jittery aggravation you would get if you had to wait in a very, very long line at the bank and just when you get to the front, the cashier’s window closes and you then have to go to the end of another very, very long line.

When can we go already?? Eventually I remember that I am in Asia. We will go when we go and no amount of aggravation will make any difference. So I settle down to enjoy the on-board TV blaring a Thai variety show (did I mention I developed a splitting, nauseating headache about five hours before?).

By the time I arrive at the Nong Khai bus station, I have completely given up. I don’t even put up a fuss at being overcharged by the tuk-tuk driver. I tell him to take me to the first guesthouse listed in my guidebook. It’s likely sounding because it seems big & I hope that means they’ll have a room available because I desperately need to not go tramping around all night looking for a place to sleep.

As I walk up to the guesthouse – stumbling under the weight of my backpack, hungry, thirsty, feverish and nearly blind from the pounding in my head – I hear something very beautiful. I hear an American behind the reception desk. I never thought I would, in all my life, be so happy to hear an American accent. The American is named Simeon and he takes my backpack and rents me a room and then sits with me while I eat because I told him that I haven’t spoken to anyone in two and a half weeks and it’s starting to drive me insane. I eat a big dinner and drink a lot of water and speak English for ages, all while sitting in a cool dreamy garden courtyard overlooking the Mekong, with John Lennon and Neil Young playing in the background.

This is the Mut Mee Guest House and you will hear more about it soon. But for now, let me just say that I was mistaken about what I was thinking while on the bus – one place is not like another place. Some places are far preferable to others. Some places are worth going through trials to get to because they are less lonely and more beautiful and they can make you forget, even for an hour or so at a time, that everything in your life has gone wrong.

Tags: Nong Khai, Thailand

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 15th, 2006 at 12:49 am and is filed under Nong Khai, Thailand. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.