Chapter 1: Touch Down

CHAPTER I: Touch Down

Where does the quest begin? The quest for what exactly? It begins with roadside ATMs gulping down my last remaining (unexpired) EFTPOS cards without so much as a thank you. Then six hours on the back of a stranger’s Yamaha Virago, a Balinese man who became a friend in no real time at all, as we searched for places I could extract cash with Paywave (with a brief intermission visiting his wife and son at their family home, the son was my age, the wife was not, as he changed for work as, well, a Grab Rider (Indonesian scooter Uber). He walked with a limp as he entered his house, he walked with the same limp when he returned with black coffee, a limp from a tourist collecting him at an intersection two years before) until we exhausted all options and I booked a flight home with the last of my money, and gave him all the cash I had left in my wallet, although I wish I could have given him more.

We said our goodbyes in the evening. A premature end to a years escapade in the East. From Bombay to Mumbai and back again. From antipodes to Orient. We promised to see one another again. It was 6pm. He had spotted me sitting on the side of the road in despair at 6am that morning.

Two days later I landed in a new city, new home, and a minus-five wind chill with nothing but boardshorts and button-ups in my backpack. And a few kilos of Cambodian marching powder, a kilos ziplock bag of Loation buckshot tobacco, the rare molar of Zhianjiajie apline monkey, a Sri Lankan peacock’s feather, special grade North Vietnamese poppy seeds, two knives and thre packets of Thai super-viagra—the stuff that downed Shane Warne.

’So this is it’, I thought, stepping out of the terminal and into the cold, ‘I wonder what the temperature of the water is.’