A postcard to the convoy of bikes
Snapchat memories can be killer. I don’t even use Snapchat anymore, I think at the grand age of twenty three and having progressed to Whatsapp groups, it makes me feel like a preteen. However, I do log on every day to see my memories, and sometimes they really sting, particularly when I’m sitting in my office while my phone reminds me of the active volcano that I hiked in Indonesia on this day a year ago. I proceed to remind myself that money doesn’t grow on trees and that where I’m sitting right now will get me to another seat very soon. Hopefully a hotter one, with a coconut in hand and a sunset in front of me — but I’m not too picky.
It’s only since I’ve come home that I started to actually process the adventure I had last year while backpacking Southeast Asia. When you’re in the middle of it and each experience is flying at you a hundred miles an hour, it’s hard to grab each one and hold it for safekeeping. I tell people the same stories every time I’m asked about my travels — or even when I’m not — it’s my favorite topic of conversation. The day I spent at the elephant sanctuary, finally getting to see the animal I have tattooed on my body up close. We fed them and learned about how they were rescued before hiking down to a waterfall nearby to cool off in the midday heat. I often talk about our first night out on the Phi Phi Islands, and realising our hostel bar was the nightclub, which swiftly ended in me attempting a fire jump rope and Nic taking a late night dip in the ocean. Some of my favourite moments came from a group that became known as ‘two peas and a leech’ — otherwise known as me, Nic and Ben. We spent days together driving around, causing trouble and laughing so much that our stomachs would hurt. One day in particular, was the day we decided to go for a lantern boat ride down the river in Hoi An, Vietnam. Except in true ‘seize the moment’ fashion, we did it in the midst of a flash flood that submerged the entire island, meaning we rowed down the literal streets, under an umbrella. I could write more than a travel journal on the days I had during that trip. In fact, they’d fill a novel and it’d be a page turner and a half.
I didn’t have a reason for leaving on a one way ticket. I bought it knowing that something in me wanted to go and decide when I was there when I was ready to go home. But I’d be lying if I said there wasn’t some part of me that wanted to classically ‘find myself’. Now to be fair, I didn’t know what I was looking for, there wasn’t much missing to begin with. I found nice cocktails for €2, a cheap tattoo at a villa party and a new love for hiking (in small doses, only sometimes, on a cool day).
That said, I could tell you the moment I found myself. I was in Laos — a country I never even intended on visiting in the first place, Nic talked me into it. We had met a group of people that seemed to grow from 5, to 6 to 8 to 12 and before we knew it there was a family heading on the slow boat down the Mekong River. Laos is famous for it’s blue lagoons, and there was this one day that all of us headed out together to visit as many of them as we could. On our way back from hiking one of the viewpoints and stopping at one last lagoon for a swim, the sun was just setting and we lined up our bikes, one by one, to head home. I was near the front of the convoy, and I can never forget looking back at every person in the line of bikes, and realising that life isn’t gonna give me too many of these days again. I was 22, on a bike, in the middle of a remote country in Asia driving with my best friends. I had only known them a few weeks, but that’s what they were. It kinda clicked with me then the answer to the whole ‘finding myself’ thing.
It’s a fantastic thing, to fly to the other side of the world, only to find yourself. But the surprise was not the version of myself that I worked so hard to find, but to learn that she was made up of glimmers of every person she met along the way.
I’ll be searching for those glimmers in every future plane ticket, every hostel bar, every vespa, and each and every sunset while I try to tick off more pins on my map. I’ll be looking for eyes as warm as Mad’s while caught in conversation with someone who can’t make clever jokes like Reece could. In between those conversations I’ll be listening for Lewis’ laugh knowing full well that across every country in Southeast Asia I could never find somebody that made me laugh quite as loud. On top of that, trying to find someone with a better eye for adventure than George or Remmi would be hard pushed. I’ll look for an Amy and Russ in every tipsy walk home, an Ellis and Ash in every bike adventure; I’ll be sitting by the campfire under the backpackers version of the Northern lights (just , like, really bright stars) and I’ll never find a smile like Ella’s when I look to the other side of my blanket on the grass. I’ve been to twenty three countries in my twenty three years, and the more I go on the more I’ll stop trying to find a friend like Ben — because I don’t think I could match the handshakes, or the hugs elsewhere.
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The waves were huge on the beaches of Bali, and I’ll never forget the day that one of them almost took me out in Uluwatu. I laugh about it now but I think I was picking sand out of my hair for weeks, and mortified at the thought of flashing the entire beach. There was one day, however, it was pretty calm. In fact it was our last day in Bali, and after plucking up the courage to drive our own bikes we headed down for one last swim in Canggu. We stood there in the water with the sun on our tan-line-stained irish skin when Nic turned to me and said ‘Rosh..we’re in Bali’; and the laugh we let out was that of a final scene in an Oscar winner. I had a hundred of those moments with her but I think that was the first time I realised that I’ll never find another Nic. I think I could backpack a hundred times over and never quite find the friend I found in her, or recreate the adventure that we made from a Facebook page, two coffees and a dose of insanity. It’s a rare thing — to find someone who’ll put up with me for that long. It’s an even rarer thing, to find a sister from a stranger.
There’s a part of me who , like everyone else, used to find it cringe worthy when people would leave their country and all of a sudden proclaim to have ‘found themselves’ — I’d genuinely wonder what they were finding. Patience? Alcohol? Back problems? (those bags get heavy). Now I’m home and after doing the healing ceremonies in Bali, swimming with the turtles in Thailand and biking the mountains of Vietnam, it turns out that stuff does matter, but it’s not the thing that changes you.
You come home made up of parts of people that sit all over the globe, and you will never quite understand just how inimitable that feeling is until you leave, or gain, a part of yourself in a few corners of the world. Or in my case, that day, on a convoy of bikes in Laos.
*sighs*
*opens laptop*
*googles Skyscanner*
