Monkeying Around in Borneo
But First: Packing the Emotional Baggage
So I get back from my epic journey around the world, and for a few days, I’m Neo in the Matrix. I walk down 4th Avenue in Kitsalano, unnerved by the baby stores that have sprouted like the hairs in an old woman’s mole, and I literally see through the woven fabric of society. Numbers and dots and letters appear to fall from the sky, exposing the true essence of modern life, describing all that I learnt on my wild, whacky adventures into the worldeness. The problem is, I’ve never been very good with numbers and dots, and the letters look suspiciously like #$!@&, which I understand as cuss words. In any event, the Matrix fades after three days, before I can figure out what the hell it actually meant. 4th Avenue begins to resemble 4th Avenue, and yuppie Lululemonites solidify into focus. Everything is more or less where I left it, a thousand years ago.
Not discouraged, I thrill in the fact that I no longer require a cell phone. Having left it behind for a year, I am liberated, sans ringtone, no vibration in my pocket to call me slave. I’m beaming. It seems perfectly clear to me that the glass is half full, and always has been. Further, after picking up my car from storage (five years, no accidents, leave it in storage for a year, and some slug reverses into my door), I am so at ease that I see little point to drive faster than 40km an hour. Around me, cars are screeching and horns are horning, and I’m a mobile island of fucking tranquility! Absorbing all the lessons of my incredible year, here is the new me, an Enlightened Esrock, the downright Groovin’ Gonzo.
Three months later, I’m suffering with the disease of the phantom ring - the one you hear when your cell phone is not actually ringing. I left my Nokia at home one day, and felt utterly lost. I long for the calls of friends telling me they’re going to call me later. Accelerating for no reason in particular - C’mon buddy! Learn to drive! What is this, a golf course?! - I feel the need to spend money I don’t have on stuff I don’t need. The glass is empty, because I drank the last half. I’m tearing my hair out in traffic jams, waiting in bank lines, navigating voicemail systems designed in the third level of Hell. I’ve been towed and ticketed, worked on jobs as stimulating as flaking plywood, and begun to obsess about meaningless local issues that provide talk radio fodder. In other words, I’m back to being the same idiot I was before I ventured to five continents in twelve months, albeit, a better travelled idiot. My past adventures feel fuzzy, like a dream you remember when you wake up, but have forgotten by the time you’ve had your morning leak. I’m startled to realize that my few items of traveller hippie gear look ridiculous in public - my prize purple hipsters from Goa transform into evening pajamas. I hear foreign accents in the street and feel the urge to talk to them (they’re mostly Australians on work permits). I even did a story about backpackers in Vancouver, which might have been a thinly veiled disguise to sneak my way back into the hostels. Is this what they mean by “post-travel depression?” The sensation of having seen and done so much, only to realize that your old life waits like a thick-necked coach in the gym, waiting to beat you back into shape? My epic journey began to feel like a book I read last year and vaguely recall, a movie I saw three years ago that left an impression but I can’t remember why, a song I once sang loudly in my car, how did it go? By whathisface?
I must have changed, even if the world I returned to didn’t. “The first three months home were great,” Phillipe told me, as we drove into the fertile interior of New Caledonia last January. Picture his French accent, as he floors his jeep down the empty highway, much like he once floored himself through South America. “I caught up with all my friends, went out a lot, slept, ate, fished. And then, I had to get a job. I had to do something. And I found a good job, but I don’t want to work. I want to travel. I want to go back to Colombia. Oh man, the woman in Colombia…” and into some sexual exploit or another. He is, after all, French. By the time I left his little island in the South Pacific, Phillipe’s good job had become unbearable. Adjusting to a life at home was not easy. My other long-term travel buddies are going through a similar crisis. Post travel depression indeed.
I felt the coach putting on the squeeze. When I was in high school, there was this creepy physical education teacher named Mr. Bolton, who wore a full afro, thick mustache, and running shorts that snuck up just a little too high. There was a rumour that he enjoyed relations one of the girls in my year, who happened to the same girl who was my first kiss when I was 13, and who later went on to die of a heroin overdose. Tragedy, all round. Point being, coaches have always freaked me out, and if the proper instruction dictated that it was time for me to settle down, find a job, a home and a wife, latent teenage rebellion was bound to kick in sooner or later. Plans were quickly underway.
All this is a long-winded way of explaining the fact that I am typing this in Kuala Lumpur International Airport, somewhat drunk from the free Bloody Mary’s I felt it was my duty to consume on the flight from Taipei. I’ve been travelling for almost 36 hours, and still have another four hour flight before I arrive in Kota Kinabalu, on the coast of Malaysian Borneo. There is life in this Modern Gonzo yet, and with a summer that promises Borneo, China, Russia, Mongolia, London, Montreal and the West Coast Trail, it appears I’ll be able to delay reality just a little while longer. Without an insurance cheque, I’m hustling to pull the river card, grifting my graft, and, also, providing an unusual conduit between those that would have others travel, and those that want to.
Apparently the Vancouver Sun received numerous complaints from people appalled that I would use my insurance money to travel. It takes a special kind of person to write to a newspaper because a guy they don’t know is living his life the way he (and so many others) wants to. I’d love to know what I should have spent my money on instead. Donations to the church? A new cage for an abused hippo? Purple hair dye? Pro-life posters? Bling for my bitches? Maybe they’ll write and tell me when my new articles appear in the Sun. In any event, hold onto your ALT-TAB button, because here we go again.
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