The End of Asia, the Beginning of Something Else

Australia was the plan from the beginning, the place where the Asia leg ends and the working phase begins, where you earn enough to fund the South America section and adjust to something that is not a hostel bunk and a different city every week. I have a year’s working visa and a tax number and the address of someone who said I could sleep on their floor until I find my feet. Australia as a concept has been sitting at the end of the Asia itinerary for six months, a fixed point in a journey that has been defined by the absence of fixed points, and arriving at it produced a feeling I did not expect, which was something close to disorientation.

The Asia I have spent six months moving through is not, of course, a single thing. It is Japan’s particular quality of composed precision and Myanmar’s gold temples on a barely accessible plain and the Killing Fields of Cambodia and the 2004 tsunami guide in Phuket who told us his wife died while he was in a sea cave with a group of American tourists. It is Misa picking up Burmese words in an afternoon and Drujal on the Tibetan plateau explaining the political situation in careful language that acknowledged without stating too much. It is the boy selling cigarettes outside a bar in Manila at one in the morning who said people told him it would make him friends.

What six months in Asia gives you, if you are paying attention, is a recalibration of what normal means. Not a romantic version of recalibration, not the travel memoir version where the traveller returns transformed and enlightened. More a practical one. The understanding that the systems and assumptions you grew up inside are specific to a particular place and time and are not universal laws, that other countries have found other ways of arranging things and some of those ways are better and some are worse and most are simply different. That poverty in the Philippines and poverty in the UK occupy the same word but describe realities that are not comparable. That the British tendency to assume that our problems are uniquely significant is not supported by evidence from the places where those same problems, in different forms, are simply the weather.

Over the next week I will write about the parts of the trip I have not yet covered: more of Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Bali. Then we are in Australia, which is its own kind of story. Thank you for still reading. I will try to make it worth your time.