Goodbye, Bangkok
Sarah: Sometimes over the course of this trip people have asked us how much of it is planned in advance -- you know, whether we already purchased a round-the-world plane fare or have an itinerary all mapped out. And the answer to that question -- how much is planned ahead -- has been, very little.
We’ve had a vague mental itinerary, something like, Southeast Asia, then India and Nepal, then Eastern and Mediterranean Europe; and we were starting to get a little more specific recently, thinking, Northern Thailand, then Northern Laos, then Yunnan province and a bit of Southern China -- but in terms of flights and routes and concrete plans, we’ve been flying by the seat of our pants quite a lot.
I’ve mostly been glad about that. In the best cases, it lets us take people’s advice about where to go or what to do; it lets us stick around for longer in the places we’re intrigued by and hightail it out of the places that we’re not so into. It has allowed us to luck into being in the right place at the right time more often than really seems fair sometimes; we were at Bromo for the full moon, in Penang for Deepavali, in Phuket for the Vegetarian Festival and King Chulalongkorn Day, in Bangkok for Loi Krathong, in Phnom Penh for the Betty Ford and the GT Falcons show at the Rock Zone, and back in Bangkok for the King’s birthday festivities.
The flip side of playing everything by ear is that it can sometimes result in feeling aimless, like we’re not sure exactly why we’re going where we’re going next, or what particularly is the point. We didn’t start out the trip with a specific research question or plan of exactly we wanted to get out of it -- the thing about travelling the world is that the world is very big and very complex and very interesting, full of far more sights and sounds and foods and people than we could ever see and hear and taste and meet. Often that complexity is fascinating and exciting, but at times it can just become overwhelming, and those are the times when we start to question what we’re doing.
But for that reason too, making it up as you go along has its benefits.
As of yesterday, all of our vague plans have been pretty drastically altered. My dad’s mother, my grandma, had a stroke just after Thanksgiving. She is in a rehabilitative hospital, and my family is heading down to Tulsa to spend Christmas with her. Talking on the phone with my parents the other night, on a frustratingly delayed international connection on my cell phone, in our hot fan room in the New Siam guest house in Bangkok, all of the emotions started to come together -- the bouts of aimlessness I’d been feeling, the occasional boredom, even, and now this family crisis that tugged at my heart.
I tossed and turned all night, and then Patrick and I talked through options all the next day, gaming out airfares and budgets and itineraries, and then that night I called my mom and asked how she’d feel if I came home for Christmas.
I think we both started crying.
So now we have a few last days to say goodbye to Bangkok, a city where we’ve spent a combined total of almost three weeks over the past couple of months, and which we have really come to love. We’re sampling new hawker foods and eating some favorite standbys -- mango and sticky rice, guava shakes, coconut yogurt, whole fried fish, steamed dumplings.... We’re going for long walks and sitting in parks in the early evening watching high school kids learn swishy choreographed dance routines from fabulously hip teachers. We’re strolling through markets, keeping our eyes out for a few last souvenirs. We’re riding the skytrain and the river ferry. We’re taking more photographs.
In addition to Bangkok, we’re saying goodbye, for now, to Southeast Asia, a part of the world that has come to feel very familiar over the past four months and that I know I’ll want to return to in the future. After a couple weeks in the states with family, we’ll be heading down to Mexico and Central America to continue our world travels.
I feel good about this decision, and glad that it’s a choice we were able to make. As I said to my mom, what’s the point of flying by the seat of your pants if you don’t sometimes fly off in some completely unexpected direction? I feel very lucky to be able to spend this time with my family. And I feel energized, too, about the prospect of continuing our travels in a wholly different part of the world.
Meanwhile, I’ll drink another Chang or two, try a few more hawker treats, and bid a fond farewell to Bangkok on Friday morning.