A friend and I have met up from our respective countries of residence in South-East Asia for a two-week holiday. We are taking a two-day slow boat east along the Mekong River, from Northern Thailand to Laos.
As we board and meander down the aisle of the boat, we pass a gaggle of twenty-somethings congregated on the upper level of the vessel, already halfway through the first of their longneck beers, lighting up rolled cigarettes and choosing songs to blast through their portable speaker. My friend and I don’t need to share words, or even looks, to know we are walking right by them, but as we pass them to look for seats furthest away from their raucous fun, I have an urge to tell them all as I pass, “I used to be like you, just for the record. I’m not ignoring the spare seats next to you because I’m boring. It’s actually because I’ve just done it all before and now, I’m just kind of tired and don’t want to get drunk at 11am, okay?”
I, a person in my mid-twenties, became irrationally ashamed at my answer to the question all the late-teens and early-twenties folk we met along the way would ask us: “So, how long are you travelling for?”
“Well, we’re not really travelling, as such…” I would begin, head down, cheeks burning. “We’re just on like, a holiday… because we have jobs to get back to soon, and stuff.”
Of course, none of the young, intrepid, nomads had jobs to get back to. They’d put all their belongings in boxes in their hometowns and booked a one-way ticket to their coming-of-age, finding-themselves, on-a-shoestring-budget round-world trip.
I felt an overwhelming urge to prove myself, to tell them I’d done that, like, three times, and I think full-time work is stupid, too! I’m just doing it for a little while! I philosophically disagree with the concept of accruing annual leave! I’m just begging my friend to go back to our accommodation at 9pm because I’ve been working so hard and I am to-my-bones tired all the time!
Of course, the mistake we had made with our trip is that we were acting like backpackers – minus the all-night ragers – on our holiday. We’d zoomed around Northern Thailand and Laos, walking from boat docks and bus stations in the heat with our packs on our backs, taking boats that were too long and flights that were too frequent when all I really wanted to do was lie on a beach, book in hand, and get 10 hours’ sleep a night – just like the holidaymakers I had always tut-tutted at while I was hitchhiking through Eastern Europe, crashing in dingy share-houses in London and sleeping in hammocks in the middle-of-nowhere, Portugal, to, you know, experience the culture.
I now, unfortunately, understand how people become a version of themselves that can become inappropriately irate at an accommodation’s curtains’ lack of efficacy for maintaining privacy and filtering out light, when they are in desperate need of two weeks’ worth of deep and uninterrupted sleep.
In the year since beginning full-time work in my chosen career, I have watched, bemused and saddened, as some of the inconsequence and freedoms of being young have begun to slip away, and in their place appeared things like beginning to prioritise my circadian rhythm, my peers talking about cracking the property market, making sure I understand salary sacrificing, and the words, “Will this give me a headache?” leaving my mouth when someone hands me a drink I don’t recognise.
In our last few days, spent in a pseudo-hippie town of Northern Thailand, a man we meet in a café strikes up a conversation with us. He’s been backpacking the South East Asia circuit for a few months, and talks at us for about 30 minutes about how, in his forties, he has just learned that feeling your emotions instead of pushing them away is the key to life. While it’s never too late to learn something like that, he earnestly insisted he only came to this conclusion by meeting people overseas.
“You just can’t talk to people in your real life like you can when you’re travelling,” he says. “You can’t be vulnerable with people anywhere else like you can be with them in this town.”
I was glad for this man, because he reminded me of my 18-year-old self, someone who also earnestly thought my hometown was the barrier to me being myself. Not considering the fact that when people are at home, they are usually distracted and busied with the day-to-day events of their life, and authentic connection to themselves and others needs to be more intentional, rather than an inevitable by-product of an empty calendar, tropical weather and the only immediate goal of their days being to have fun.
As it hit 9pm that night and we jumped on our bikes to head to our accommodation just out of town and out of earshot of any heavy bass or late-night karaoke, I was glad to be older, and just that bit more grown up.
Growing up means you out-grow some things to make way for others. I’m glad to have outgrown cigarettes, dorm beds and pseudo-spiritual conversations at 4am to make way for health, my career and authentic connection. Next time, I will simply assess the photos on the accommodation-booking website for curtain quality much more closely.
Cover and inset 3 by Ketut Subiyanto; inset 6 by Jordan Opel; rest by the author.