Too Fast & Furious in Koh Phangan
Beach Brawls, Corrupt Cops, and Avoidant Behaviour in the Land of Kathoey
Gripping the handlebars, I pushed my 60cc scooter across the road. Reeling from the odd turn of events, I staggered through the T-shaped intersection that joined the main road to the one leading back to my ocean-side guesthouse. Between the whiz of motorcycles, tuk-tuks, and pickup trucks full of Thai nationals and twenty-something backpack-bearing travelers, I timed my crossing—nothing to hesitate about, especially after experiencing the mayhem that is the streets of Saigon. I propped my moped on its kickstands in front of a roadside shanty bar with a thatched roof. Several pale-skinned foreigners sitting at the street-side high-top drinking Beer Chang looked at me slack-jawed, just having witnessed the melee from the comfort of their barstools.
I never imagined a street fight was in our schedule when we started the day—or any day during our time in Thailand and Southeast Asia. However, it wasn't the first time I encountered foreign fists: several years earlier, while visiting a nightclub in Hanoi, Vietnam, I received a direct and unexpected punch to the jaw immediately upon opening a door on my way to the water closet. Thankfully, my brother, a seasoned traveler, was there to intervene and restrain me, catching me with the fellow by the collar and a fully cocked fist. He grabbed me by the shoulder, pulling me away from the short, drunken Vietnamese man and back through the doorway where the drunkard had launched his surprise attack. We immediately left the bar, but not before my brother described to me the location of the off-duty Vietnamese police—waiting at the end of the hall to arrest me for assaulting the poor lush in a clever but not-so-subtle extortion ploy.
But my brother wasn't here this time, and I didn't sense anything was cooking up. Even with my additional years of experience, I noticed no signs of fleecing or shadiness. This situation was completely different—we were dealing with a madman.
Abroad But Tethered
We arrived in the area days earlier in search of the fabled full moon party, and perhaps ourselves, on the other side of the world. As the inheritors of a planet with an uncertain future, we subtly understood that the world our boomer parents were reluctantly handing over was not as they promised. Having finished university the previous May and saving every penny to travel South East Asia ‘on a shoestring’—just as my trusty Lonely Planet guide outlined—we wanted to add meaningful experiences to our lives before stepping headlong into the modern working society which would surely draw us into oblivion. It was an attempt to defer adulthood through travel abroad, delaying the inevitable magnetic pull of ‘real life,’ with all its anchors, responsibilities, and seriousness. It wasn’t a gap year—although, looking back, I wish I had gone for much longer—but a gap nonetheless, a purposeful void in the progression of our future structured and planned lives.
We all had our things to do after our sojourn abroad, and our immediate travel engagement failed to deter the presence of future plans from lingering in the background and dictating the duration of travel. Jamie, one half of a pair of close friends and a small subsection of a larger group of pals, acquaintances, and recently met travelers with whom I had spent the better part of eight weeks traveling South East Asia, had a pending film school interview tugging at him to return. Jeff, the second of the pair, had plans to enroll in an HR course at a local college. I had less established prospects—work odd jobs for whoever would pay me before starting full-time in a Red Seal carpentry program the coming fall; it was late February of 2007.
Beach Bound and Busted
We landed at Koh Phangan pier, where desperate guesthouse wranglers waited to mob arriving backpackers and goad them into tuk-tuks to take them to an affiliated accommodation, but not before conveniently stopping at their cousin's store in hopes they'll buy something. There were many choices in places to stay, and what appeared to be a simple decision had an unfortunate outcome for one of our group members: a Brazillian backpacker, barely 19 years old, whom Jamie and Jeff met while visiting Vietnam, and had agreed could join them in neighbouring Thailand. (Such was the backpacker's way: you met like-minded individuals on your travels, and if everyone got along, you would spend time together until something changed, for better or worse.) This kid, trying to be like Leonardo Decaprio after watching The Beach one too many times, thought Thailand was the same place it was in the ‘90s. I suppose he had it coming, as he routinely ignored our advice that Thailand was not the place to smoke weed in public nonchalantly. The government had cracked down on it in recent years, and you could easily find yourself as an unlucky guest at the Bangkok Hilton for possession.
So, when the guesthouse wrangler tried to convince us to stay at his place because “we could smoke weed on the beach,” he failed to entice me. I didn't care for it. I knew Thailand wasn't the destination for such things. There was a time and a place, and Thailand wasn’t it. Plus, I had just spent most of the previous month smoking more weed than I care to admit but free from the possibility of being locked up for it.
Johnny Law-less
Back then, when you wanted to dance openly with Mary-Jane, you went to Cambodia. While Jamie and Jeff had toured Nam, Al and I extended our stay in Cam, spending over a week of debauchery in Sihanoukville, now known as Preah Sihanouk. At that time, it was a sleepy beach town with a handful of guesthouses and a boutique hotel on the Gulf of Thailand. There was also a small town with shops, bars, and restaurants. You could say it was quaint, in a drink-and-smoke-your-face-off-for-days-on-end-with-a-handful-of-multinational-backpackers kind of way. It was also pretty lawless. The town swarmed with working women and watchful pimps come sundown. There was a restaurant where live poisonous snakes were terrariumed inside glass-topped tables so you could watch them writhe at crotch level while you ate. You could do anything your little misdemeanor heart desired. Purchase Percocet from the local pharmacy without a prescription? Check. Roll and smoke joints on the beach, at your guesthouse, and in the bars? Check. Buy weed from the cop? Check.
During our week in Sihanoukville, we purchased marijuana from a local fella we met on the beach the first day there. A few days passed, and we were out again, so we scheduled a meeting with our guy to replenish the stash. He asked us to meet him at a store up the road from our beachfront guesthouse. We arrived and started the predetermined transaction. As the dealer handed us the bag of greens, Al noticed a police moto parked out front of the store in a line of motorbikes. We stopped in our tracks, midreach for the goods, stomachs sinking. An immense “oh shit” moment descended upon me, with the thought “I wonder what Cambodian prison is like?” bouncing between my ears. We frantically looked around, glimpsing the eyes of our guy, who didn't seem the least bit phased. Al, the brave soul he was and who fit right in this place, asked a group of men sitting in chairs up against the store's wall whose bike it was. A middle-aged man wearing a tan short-sleeved button-up shirt, with green lapels and black paints, reclining on two legs of his chair, put up his hand as if taking attendance. “Are you okay with this?” Al asked, trying to stay calm. The man flashed an expression of indifference, shrugged his shoulders, and returned to his conversation with the other wallside men.
We breathed a quiet sigh of relief. The dealer passed off the contraband (although it clearly wasn't deemed such). We paid up to fulfill our side of the deal but only had a high denomination bill. Our guy didn't have change for it, so he passed the money to the first man in the row along the wall. We watched as the note made its way from hand to hand into that of the police officer, who pulled out a massive wad of cash and cut us change. He placed our bill into the fold before returning the softball-sized knot to his pocket. No one flinched except Al and I, who could barely keep our eyeballs in their sockets. We played it cool, though; we thanked our guy, the cop, and their fellow onlookers and headed back to the beach to enjoy our score, minds blown and laughing the whole way. (This may not seem like a big deal, but this was long before the age of legalized marijuana and retail weed in North America; you could get in a lot of trouble for possession of even minor amounts—and friends of mine experienced this part of the Canadian legal system during high school—not to mention as a traveler in a foreign land.)
Serious Siam
Worn out from the day of travel and confronted by the paradox of choice, we decided to stay at the wrangler’s place, as it seemed as good a place as any to rest for the night. We misjudged. Later that evening, the police arrested our unsuspecting Brazilian friend on the guesthouse’s beach for smoking a joint. The cops just happened to be patrolling the beach in the dark as our Brazillian friend took advantage of the wrangler's proposed smoking amenity. What a coincidence! They took his passport, threw him into jail, and told him he needed to pay 10,000 USD to see the light of day. The jail was where some of my fellow scooter riders were headed on the day of the melee: to visit the poor kid in jail, give him his backpack, and help him contact his family back in Brazil to bail him out. Ten grand was a lot of money for the shoestring travelers. I roamed for over two months on 3,500 Canadian Dollars, which included my flight. Ten grand was not the kind of money he or we had.
Despite his not heeding our advice, we were pissed. The guesthouse’s extortion setup was abhorrent. It's one thing to get ripped off by a tuk-tuk driver or tricked into paying an inflated price for some tourist tchotchke hawked from a street market, but this type of scam fucked with people's lives. We vehemently expressed our disapproval to the guesthouse owner, who claimed they had nothing to do with it. Before leaving the following morning, we let others know about the dangers of staying there.
Procuring Transport
We moved down the beach to find another guesthouse that suited our needs and settled in. We wanted to get around quickly, and having spent considerable time traveling in Laos on 60cc bikes, we were comfortable doing so again. We found someone willing to rent some near our new accommodation and eagerly jumped on them to explore the island. Dave, who had just arrived from England to join us in Thailand, had no prior experience on one and immediately over-revved the throttle, skidding the bike with him on it across the street and into the adjacent ditch.
We couldn’t help but laugh; we’d all done the same at some point while in Southeast Asia. All of us bailed at least once while driving the Loop in Lao. I went down hard with my bike when a water truck, dampening the road to keep the dust down, turned the 6” of red silt on the road into 3” of mud. The road had a slight bend to the left, and as I tried to make the turn, I fishtailed and lost control, falling into the sludge with my bike, backpack, and confidence. It was a tricky situation: you needed speed to balance the bike, but too much in the slick mud or dust (depending on how recently the water truck had been by), and you lost control. By the end of that motorbike trip in Lao, we all had the brand of the adventurous: a nasty little burn on our lower-right calf from the hot exhaust pipe.
Dave was okay, though, just mildly shaken up and thoroughly embarrassed. Surprisingly, the guy who rented the scooters to us didn't take them back but instead helped him retrieve them from the ditch, brushed the dirt from his shirt, and gave him a quick tutorial via charades. I don't recall what we did the rest of the day, but I remember navigating obstructions in the road by the thatched roof bar on the way back to our guesthouse. We stopped and parked our bikes to remove a large tree branch and rocks from the road. We thought it was weird but didn't dwell on it too long as it posed no safety concern—the road was pretty open, and you could see the debris from a considerable distance.
Mauy Thai with a Madman
The following morning, we were on the bikes again, rounding the corner towards the thatched roof bar, when we noticed more rubbish on the road. We zigzagged through the maze of debris, dodging the road rubble and barely throttling down. We stopped at the T-shaped intersection across from the bar, planning to turn left onto the busy road.
Jamie was slightly in front of me to my left as we waited to merge into the traffic flow. We both heard a loud ping emanate from my bike. “Did it stall?” Jamie asked, looking over his right shoulder at me. The bikes we rented in SEA weren't troubleless machines and would frequently stall out, making unusual metallic rattling noises. “No,” I replied, revving the engine while in neutral. As the engine RPMs ramped up, I almost didn't hear the man who suddenly appeared beside me yell, “TOO FAST!” He paired the scream with a haymaker to the side of my face. I was blind-sided and taken off guard by the sucker punch.
“What the hell was happening?” I thought as the punch sent my sunglasses flying from my face onto the road. My body lurched to the right, following the momentum of my head. (I want to point out that I have a martial arts background, and back then, I trained in various disciplines and was in great physical shape, which contributed to me not getting knocked out cold.) Despite being vulnerable and off balance, I managed to stay on my feet, with the moto still underneath me. Apparently, everyone knows Muy Thai in Thailand, and the assailant, seeing that I was still standing, launched a fresh attack, throwing a waist-high roundhouse kick. I caught his leg through a stroke of luck (and a bit of martial skill). He forcefully pulled it back, but I managed to keep hold of his ankle as his calf slipped from my grip. I found myself in an awkward position: scooter between my legs, leaning hard to the right with my right hand on the handlebars and the ankle of a crazed aggressor in my left—no position for a counterattack.
In this hectic moment, I saw a sharp-tip, bone-handled slingshot in his right hand. However, I didn't have the time to process what that meant. It's incredible how fast and slow life can move simultaneously.
Luckily, being on one leg put him off balance enough that it kept his wild, swinging fist and pointed weapon out of range and provided me enough time to move with the rightward momentum. With a slight push of his ankle up and into him, I one-leg-hopped to my right—my left leg was suspended off the ground, propped up by the moped’s seat—dropping the scooter between him and me to create space and add an obstacle, just in case he continued with his attack.
He stumbled backward, dropping the slingshot. Seeing the bike on the ground and the additional few feet I put between us, he turned his sights onto Jamie, who, in the chaos of the moment, propped his scooter onto its kickstand and dismounted. The tall, wiry attacker was pissed and screamed in Thai what I only imagine was vitriol. He pointed a trembling hand at me before quickly closing the distance on Jamie, who got his hands up in a boxing-style ready position before receiving the man's wild hands. There was a flurry of fists; the dude was like a windmill in a hurricane and had a significant reach advantage. Jamie made a valiant and skillful effort to defend himself, but a wild punch snuck through and tagged him on the chin. His head lashed backward, but he stayed on his feet.
At this point, both Al and I had come to Jamie's aid. Al is a big guy, and his presence, combined with the fact that we survived the surprise attack relatively unscathed, made the attacker realize we outnumbered him considerably and slowed his advance. There was a brief pause in his action, but he was frantic, duking up and shuffling his feet, confused about his next target.
We kept our distance and, with arms and hands extended, tried to talk him down. He ceased his attack on us but didn't go away. Some local women, hearing the commotion streetside, emerged from a modest structure next to the obstructions in the road. Anger on their faces, they waived arms with displeasure, gesturing him to leave. I didn't understand what they said, but I sensed they knew him and didn't like him. There was a strong impression that this wasn't the first incident of its kind, and the women had had enough.
The man paced widely, yelling at the woman in a shrill voice. Bending down, he grabbed a large stone from the roadside and launched it at the two women. Thankfully, it fell short of them, but it had the right trajectory and was enough to deter the women from their attempts to help. The fear of being bludgeoned by stones forced them to seek refuge in the doorway of their home. He picked up another, holding it above his head, ready to hurl it at the women. We deplorred his actions, motioning for him to put down the large rock through futile pantomime. He threw the stone our way instead, but the sheer weight ensured he didn’t get it too far. It shattered onto the asphalt, sending pieces skidding into the road at our feet.
The madman retreated to his motorbike, which he had left on its kickstand in the middle of the road, as impulsively as he launched his attack. He mounted it. Before peeling away, he screamed at us in Thai, followed by an enthusiastic middle finger.
Dazed and Confused in “The Land of Smiles”
Those who witnessed the encounter looked blankly at one another, unsure of what had happened or what to do next. We thanked the women as they reemerged from hiding. They nodded to us and urged us to be on our way with a low, open hand motioning to the intersection. Jeff collected my sunglasses from the ground as I picked up my bike from its side. Righting it, I pushed it across the street—it had stalled out for real after I purposely toppled it. Our group communed out front of the tiki bar directly across from the intersection, taking stock of everyone and my bike. Everyone was ok, and luckily, there wasn't any noticeable damage to my scooter—like I said, the rental bikes weren't exactly in tip-top shape.
Still feeling the adrenaline buzz, we ordered a round of beer to cool our nerves. But the middle-aged Caucasian bartender advised against it, suggesting, in his Australian drawl, that we should put a move on. “That bloke ain’t right,” he said. “He's the one putting things in the road. He's obsessed with the traffic on the street.” He continued, “He’s probably gone home to grab a gun to finish you off.” The bar owner had watched the brawl with his patrons and appeared familiar with the fellow we had just altercated with. Heeding his advice, we decided to forego the much-needed suds.
I looked urgently at Jamie, but my wide-eyed glare didn’t reach him—he took no convincing and was already heading back to his bike before he could notice my expression. Before kick-starting the engine, he rubbed his jaw to soothe the sting from the haymaker he took moments earlier. I felt myself luckier than he—a bit of a shiner was forming, but my sunglasses absorbed the brunt of the sucker punch.
As his bike revved up, I urgently moved to mine, and Jeff, Dave, and Al got on theirs. Kick-starting like pros, we sped off pell-mell onto the windy, palm tree-dotted coastal road, kicking up dust from the shoulder in our wake. Dave and Jeff parted, tasked with dropping off the jailed Brazilian's belongings.
The expanse of the Pacific Ocean to my left struck me with its beauty and vastness. Mid-morning light shimmered off the rippling waves, its omnipresence a reminder of our world's unknown nature. Each reflection on the crests branded images of the novel spirit of travel and a life abroad onto my mind. How many unknown creatures live just beyond the waves? How many different forms of life? Endless diversity, untold ways of existing; unfathomable lived realities; the possibilities for discovery and reflection were (and still are) endless.
Before I continue, I don’t want to lose sight of a thread I pulled at earlier: the “ping” I heard on the bike. I mentioned a slingshot but didn't elaborate. It turned out that the nut job shot at me while I stopped at the intersection to turn left. Why he aimed at me, I’ll never know. Regardless, I am thankful he missed me and hit the bike. I also don't know what he slung at me, but it came in hard enough for Jamie and I to hear it over the traffic and motor noise and to feel it reverberate through the bike. The thought of what damage it could have done to my head, face, neck, or even a fleshy calf or thigh makes me shutter. It would have been a very different trip if that had happened.
Thrashed and Road Rashed
I drove full throttle down the road, reflecting on the unfolding events. There was no way to have anticipated them; a change in our morning timing may have avoided the interaction, but that’s not certain. Lost in thought, I failed to notice that the others were no longer behind me. Glancing backward with a quick turn of my head after some time, I realized I was alone. I slowed down and timed a break in traffic to U-turn to go back to search for the others. Where are they? I wondered. Has something happened to them? Did the madman catch up to them and dispense more violence as the Aussie bartender had suggested? I cranked the throttle and rewound my way along the road. Rounding the first corner of an S-shaped curve, I saw the others. They had pulled over to the side of the road: three bikes propped up on their kickstands, and a fourth tipped on its side, sputtering smoke from the tailpipe, five feet from a large rock face. As I approached, I saw Al grimacing on the ground. Seeking respite on the remnants of a former majestic cliff face terraformed to make way for the road, He rested his back on a small sloped piece of rock at the foot of the machine-carved stone. Al, in his hast, had drifted onto the soft shoulder of the s-turn, lost control, and bailed. According to the others, Al slid across the gravel road before stopping at the base of the rock face. And there he lay, road-rashed arms, legs, and waist, dazed from a bump on his unhelmeted head. He was lucky to be in that state; it could have been much worse.
We helped Al to his feet and then onto his moto. Slowing our roll considerably, we found our way into town to get Al some medical care. Al and Jamie went into a pharmacy to get some first aid supplies. I procured a table at a patio bar, ordered a couple of rounds of highly anticipated beer, and waited for the others. We spent the remainder of the day patching up Al and drinking our nerves away before heading back to our guesthouse on the beach.
He Found Us!
Jeff stopped me the next morning while going from my room to the communal area where the guesthouse owner served food. He was visibly rattled. “Dude, is that him?” he said to me as he pointed a shaky finger down to the open atrium—the guest rooms were on a second floor that surrounded the atrium and accessed by a narrow balcony walkway lined with a railing. I followed the imaginary line from his pointing hand and landed on a man below. A sense of fear struck me. Momentarily rendered motionless, I felt like a rat in a glue trap. I held my breath while I looked him over: shoulder-length dark brown hair, a plethora of upper body tattoos, aviator sunglasses, cutoff jean shorts, a tank top, and a silver Buddhist idol dangling from a chain around his neck—the spitting image of the marauder we fought with the day before. As I looked down at the man from my perch, the thought, “He found us!” echoed in my head, followed by, “And he's here to finish us off. The Aussie bartender's warning has come true!”
A Ragtag Band Ready for an Ambush
We quietly rushed back to our rooms and gathered the others to warn them of the potential danger awaiting us. Al and Jamie crept along the balcony to catch a glimpse for themselves. They agreed: it had to be him. We were unaware of anyone else staying at the guest house except for a quiet Chinese couple on vacation. Had he tracked us down? I looked over the balcony again: the man sat motionless, not engaging with anything. No music, no book, nothing to occupy him (now, this was before everyone had cellphones, tablets, or laptop computers, mind you). He just sat staring out to sea as if waiting for someone or something to happen. Was it us? Was he waiting for us?
We corralled back in one of the two rooms our group occupied. We began to devise a plan. The madman didn't know that we knew he was there, which gave us a tactical advantage. He may have been planning to get the jump on us, but we could now counterambush. We decided that we would confront him head-on, closing in quickly before he would have time to pull a weapon, which, after the slingshot and the down-under bartender’s warning, he indeed had. We prepared ourselves to engage in a potentially violent altercation. We needed protection and began stuffing our daypacks with towels and clothes and dawning them on our chests as body armor. We grabbed all potential weapons we could find. I had been toting around a long-bladed machete in a bamboo sheath I purchased in a Laotian market and naturally armed myself with it. The others pulled out their pocket knives—we all concealed carried one while traveling. Al grabbed the lid of a garbage can to use as a shield. Dave, who had only come to hang out on the beach and was wholly unprepared to do battle, grabbed a broom and began thrusting into the air in practice. No doubt we looked like a ragtag band of ronin from an old Japanese samurai film, dawning a smattering of impromptu weapons and armor. Desperate in the face of an impending battle, we began to get into a formation. Al and I were in the front, as I had the longest-range weapon, and he had “the shield.” We decided the others would stay close behind us like a miniature Roman Phalanx prepared to steamroll our enemy if we had to. We would descend the stairs as quickly and quietly as possible, then rush to surround the man in the chair who had so savagely attacked us the day before.
As we psyched ourselves up in our room for the impending action, I peeked out the door to see if our target was still waiting. The man hadn’t moved. As I looked at him, wondering how the next moments would unfold, a wave of doubt washed over me. What if we were wrong? What if he wasn’t the man from yesterday? As the thoughts circled my mind, the female owner of the guest house walked by on her housekeeping rounds, and it dawned on me that we should ask her if the man in the chair was a guest there—this way, we could confirm our suspicion: if he had just arrived or wasn’t staying here, we could be more confident that he was who we thought he was. I returned my blade to the sheath and removed the makeshift body armor backpack. I told the others I wanted to confirm his identity before we acted. The others, jittery from the ramp-up of adrenaline, agreed. When the woman returned on her rounds, Jeff and I exited the room and quietly hailed her. With broken English and descriptive hands, we asked if the man in the chair below had been here long.
“No,” she said but added that he had arrived two days before and was staying in one of the cabins that flanked the main building where our rooms were. We reiterated that it was indeed the day before last he had arrived, and she confirmed. Although we hadn’t seen him, he had been there before the altercation the day prior, which meant he wasn’t our attacker; our attacker was a local man and most likely wouldn’t stay at a guesthouse. Breathing a sigh of relief, we returned to the room to tell the others. We all laughed hard from the belly at how ridiculous we looked in our hodge-podge combat gear. We joked about how the man would have reacted after we swarmed him while he sat quietly, taking in the peaceful morning view. The humor calmed our mood and helped to flush the epinephrine from our systems. We descended the stairs, not with fear or aggression, but with levity and peace. We glanced at the man in the chair, who, upon closer look, only resembled the man from the day before in attire. We nodded at him, chucking to ourselves, knowing he had no idea what we had planned for him.
Looking Back
That guesthouse on the beach in Koh Phangan was the final place where my friends and I were together while traveling in Southeast Asia. Shortly after the events described in this story, Jamie and I headed home—beginning a long chain of events that has led me to Belize, where I now type these words—Dave returned to England, and Jeff and Al parted ways, opting for solo travel in other countries in the region.
When I reflect on this story and others I have written about in A Foreign Perspective, I like to parse out some meaning from them. Every life experience can teach us something if we are open to receiving and willing to incorporate the lesson. When I think back, this event was a valuable lesson in taking informed action (or inaction in this case, a type of action nonetheless), which is particularly essential for young men—like we were in this story—who are biologically prone to follow impulses and whims. Even as (supposedly mature) adults, we must detach ourselves from the moment when experiencing stressful situations. By taking some time to breathe deeply and clear our minds to think differently, we can ensure the facts are straight and our understanding of the current moment is as we perceive it to be or, more importantly, is not. By doing so, we make better decisions and prevent ourselves from jumping into any sort of effort or conclusion that could negatively affect our lives.
Taking the opportunity to clarify the situation by briefly removing the filter of self-defense and the intensity of adrenaline ensured that we didn't end up ignorant assholes—after all, we were essentially acting on the bias that all Thai men in beach communities looked alike. It also ensured that we didn’t resort to intimidation, aggression, and violence, and potentially inflicting injury on an innocent man enjoying a staycation.
Stories like this, which ultimately end with everyone in good health and sound mind, make traveling and life abroad exciting. Now I realize that not all stories end well, and perhaps I would have a different opinion if someone got seriously injured. I am not ignorant of the fact that travel and living somewhere foreign to you has its dangers (my heart goes out to the families of the victims of methanol poisoning in Vang Vieng, Laos, in November 2024—I visited there on the same trip to SEA that this story took place).
Despite the fear and stress of events described above, they build character, independence, and confidence—all great things for life. Forced into challenging situations, my travel companions and I had to rely on our intuition and each other to remain calm and pull through. No formal schooling can ever educate you on what to do in that kind of situation—except for, maybe, martial arts, law enforcement, or military training—it's a trial by fire. As scary as some travel experiences are, they are highly valuable because they provide helpful, real-world knowledge. Even though we were scared shitless at times and Jamie, Al and I sustained minor injuries, I wouldn't change a thing.
Looking Forward
I am now a father of two young boys. While I don't anticipate they will be traveling on their own any time soon, retelling my travel stories from my younger years allows me to consider a new perspective: what will it be like when my kids head off to travel alone? Any sane parent would undoubtedly want to protect their child from some of the travel experiences I’ve had, just for the sheer unknown nature they arise from. My boys are toddlers, and keeping them safe is my priority. I don’t expect this to change, even when they are in their 40s, as I am now. However, I can’t help but feel that, when the time comes, I will be doing them a disservice by attempting to shield them from the unknown. After all, that is a key characteristic that makes travel and living abroad exciting.
As I write these travel tales, I discover that many of my most memorable stories feature the unknown as a prominent theme. It's peculiar how, with time, fear-ridden and adrenaline-filled moments morph into fond memories and enticing stories that provide an inner rush that sparks a desire to experience something like them again. If I deny my boys the opportunity to have similar adventures, will I hinder their life experience? While I would never want anything bad to ever happen to them, at home or abroad, I anticipate I will need to suspend my inherent desire to keep them safe so that they will have the chance to learn and grow as autonomous and sovereign individuals.
The beauty and allure of traveling and experiencing foreign places lies in its unknown nature. It's a void we cannot see through; you can only step into it to discover what it has in store. The act of entering this void sparks simultaneous fear and excitement. Being adventurous takes bravery. When it comes to our kids, the ones we love and care for, we must encourage an intrepid spirit and nurture courage. We, too, must release our fear of the unknown and trust in them, just as we trust in ourselves when we inevitably face the void.
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Safe and Happy Travels Y’all!
Imagining everyone ambushing the innocent look-alike had me laughing hard. Great article.
Thanks, G! I'm glad you enjoyed it! We should do it again sometime! Lol